Government steps up governance as austeri
‘Digital by default’ has become the mantra of a government that has lost patience with the cost of IT says David Bicknell.
G
overnment is stepping up its oversight and governance as austerity continues to bite and digital delivery starts to
become a reality. In the UK, largely as a result of the amount of money spurned on them, IT projects have become a discredited currency. Recently, the Cabinet Offi ce, the guardian of government thrift, has published details of how it plans to save billions of pounds through greater digitisation of transactions that further the government’s agenda of making services ‘digital by default.’ Through the publication of the Government Digital Strategy and Digital Effi ciency report, the government recently laid out how it can make up to £1.2 billion worth of savings by 2015 simply by making everyday transactions digital. By making it easier for people to do things like pay their car tax, book driving tests, complete tax returns, or apply for their state pension online, the Cabinet Offi ce estimates that it could deliver £1.7 billion a year in savings beyond 2015. Currently the government handles over a billion different transactions every year through 650 different services. However, many of these transactions do not yet have digital options, and they will need to be created. Those digital options that do exist are often underutilised and so will need redesigning. The strategy sets out how government will make digital services so good that they will become the preferred option. Seven Whitehall departments that handle the majority of central government service transactions will be the fi rst to start redesigning their services. By the end of 2012, each of these departments will identify three signifi cant services, with over 100,000 transactions a year, for digital transformation. Additionally, all new or redesigned transactional services going live after April 2014 from any department will also have to meet a new ‘digital-by-default’ service standard. The publication of the strategy follows the launch last month of a single domain for
18 December 2012 | Volume 22 – Issue 4
government,
GOV.UK, which makes accessing government information simpler, clearer and faster for citizens and business.
In the UK notably, Government Digital Service leader Mike Bracken has highlighted the key role of government departments’ digital leaders in stepping up the ambition of their departments’ digital strategies.
But, he insists, CIOs will continue to have a key role in leading data and business change in government.
“The thing I’d like to major on in the next few months is helping departments helping government up the ambition level, because we’ve now shown that it can be done. We’ve now got to go and execute that. We can only go and do that if we recognise that that’s a profound change from the processes and norms that we currently have in government. The process of getting to what’s better starts with the departmental digital strategies.”
Speaking at a recent roundtable event alongside the government’s chief operating offi cer Stephen Kelly, deputy government CIO Liam Maxwell, the Prime Minister’s senior policy offi cer Rohan Silva, and US attendees Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Media and Jennifer Pahlka from Code for America, Bracken insisted that meeting user needs is top of his agenda. “The great news is that as we travel around and see our service centres, you meet really great civil servants who have a fundamental driver to servicing user needs because user needs have to be foremost. The fi rst and only question that someone has to answer to any requirement for IT spending or policy is ‘how does this make the user service better?’ ‘How does it improve the user’s life?’”
He warned, however, that government will need to redefi ne its thinking around IT. “Frankly, we’ve got to move away from the whole framework of IT thinking and redefi ne it. IT has its place in the world, but fi rst and foremost,
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