The public sector’s digital lag: is the problem tech or mindset?

“How are you going to deliv­er dig­i­tal ser­vices in the pub­lic sec­tor when you can’t pick up my bins?” That was the ques­tion faced in ear­ly 2017 by Mar­tyn Wal­lace, the fresh­ly mint­ed chief dig­i­tal offi­cer for the Dig­i­tal Office for Scot­tish Local Gov­ern­ment. 

Ini­tial­ly a project set up for three years to help Scot­tish coun­cils dig­i­tal­ly trans­form, the project is in its sev­enth year and shows no sign of slow­ing down. “It’s nev­er-end­ing,” Wal­lace admits. “Always one more moun­tain to climb.”

But back to the bins. “Do you think that’s what local gov­ern­ment is? We just pick up your bins?” he answered. Wal­lace out­lines the real scope – 5.5 mil­lion cus­tomers, edu­cat­ing 700,000 chil­dren dai­ly, deal­ing with social exclu­sion, health­care deliv­ery, tele­care, births, deaths and mar­riages – and bins. He admits that, in the eyes of the pub­lic, it is some­times a thank­less task. “We’re an easy tar­get for the press,” he says. Not just the press, it seems. Jacob Rees-Mogg famous­ly toured civ­il ser­vice depart­ments, leav­ing a cheery ‘while you were out’ note on hybrid work­ers’ desks. 

Giv­en that one of the pos­i­tives of the pan­dem­ic has been a wide­spread shift to hybrid work­ing, this seems a ret­ro­grade step. “We’ve had much more inter­ac­tion with the High­lands and Islands and the Bor­ders because I can use Teams to talk to any­body across Scot­land,” Wal­lace insists. “Why would staff come into Edin­burgh when they’re as far afield as Stone­haven, Jed­burgh and Glas­gow?”

Wal­lace con­cedes that hybrid work­ing is an incen­tive to stay in the pub­lic sec­tor, as is the sense of pur­pose from the job. But he admits that there are aspects of the role that could be improved. “Being allowed to fail. In pri­vate sec­tor organ­i­sa­tions the cul­ture is to fail fast but learn from it,” he sug­gests. But trans­fer­ring pri­vate sec­tor mind­sets to the pub­lic sec­tor isn’t that sim­ple. “The chal­lenge is that we have less mon­ey and high­er expec­ta­tions and scruti­ny and we look after the whole pop­u­la­tion. Being able to fail and learn – rather than being cru­ci­fied – that cul­ture of risk has to move,” Wal­lace insists. 

Improving the digital experience

It’s a chal­lenge they must meet. In the lat­est 2022 Dig­i­tal Trends – Pub­lic Sec­tor in Focus report from Adobe, only 14% of respon­dents said their dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence was ahead of cus­tomer expec­ta­tions with more than a third (37%) admit­ting they were falling behind.

Neil Bacon is a senior dig­i­tal strate­gist at Adobe. He says: “We see two chief bar­ri­ers to tech­nol­o­gy invest­ment in the pub­lic sec­tor. Data use and skills. There’s an uneven spread of dig­i­tal skills at lead­er­ship and prac­ti­tion­er lev­els. While great strides have been made in this area through the government’s GDS Acad­e­my, more needs to be done to ensure peo­ple leave edu­ca­tion and train­ing with the rel­e­vant and desired dig­i­tal skills to hit the ground run­ning when they join the pub­lic sec­tor work­force.”

But it isn’t all doom and gloom. Dan­ny Blue­stone is the founder and CEO of Cyber-Duck, a dig­i­tal agency that works exten­sive­ly with a range of pub­lic sec­tor depart­ments from local coun­cils to the NHS.

“The gov­ern­ment has large­ly adopt­ed lean and agile man­age­ment frame­works to gov­ern, sup­port and deliv­er large-scale enter­prise pro­grammes and projects mim­ic­k­ing the pri­vate sec­tor,” he explains. “Com­bined with knowl­edge shar­ing and con­tin­u­al improve­ment, the gov­ern­ment can cre­ate a cul­ture of inno­va­tion inter­nal­ly and with key sup­pli­ers.”

The Adobe research also found that 61% of staff felt their organ­i­sa­tion lacked crit­i­cal pub­lic sec­tor dig­i­tal skills such as design think­ing or jour­ney map­ping. Blue­stone points out that look­ing to the pri­vate sec­tor may help to avoid some of the unfor­tu­nate, high-pro­file fail­ures: “When gov­ern­ment func­tions have tried to rein­vent the wheel, spend sub­stan­tial sums and only then realise it’s bet­ter to use soft­ware devel­op­ment kits from big techs like Apple and Android,” he says.

The differences between public and private

Wal­lace is at pains to point out that the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors are dif­fer­ent beasts and notes that how tech­nol­o­gy and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion are posi­tioned in the pub­lic sec­tor is key. He relates how robot­ic process automa­tion (RPA) made it pos­si­ble to speed up and improve data shar­ing to deal with hous­ing and social prob­lems, lead­ing to improved cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and fun­da­men­tal­ly improv­ing com­mu­ni­ty well­be­ing. “We need to reap­por­tion staff to go out and be front­line. In the hous­ing depart­ment, they were try­ing to get too much done and morale was low. Now, [with RPA] they’re get­ting job sat­is­fac­tion.

“We have to focus on front­line dig­i­tal skills and aware­ness of what dig­i­tal is and what it isn’t. In the cur­rent cli­mate, there’s the fear fac­tor that what­ev­er you’re trans­form­ing will lead to los­ing your job,” he adds. 

Blue­stone has been par­ty to many trans­for­ma­tion projects. “Any organ­i­sa­tion can have a fan­tas­tic strat­e­gy, deliv­ery and tech­nol­o­gy. But with­out the right cul­ture any pro­gramme or project will either slow down or fail. This is where mod­els like ADKAR – aware­ness, desire, knowl­edge, abil­i­ty, rein­force­ment – are proven change man­age­ment frame­works.”

With pres­sures from the pub­lic, the press, inter­nal cul­ture and cost con­sid­er­a­tions, are pur­pose and a work/life bal­ance enough to keep lead­ers like Wal­lace at the pub­lic sec­tor coal­face? “I’ve had moments won­der­ing if I want to con­tin­ue with this,” he says, but adds: “We’re so risk averse in putting our heads above the para­pet and cel­e­brat­ing the wins because that’s not the cul­ture we have in the pub­lic sec­tor. We’re just doing our job. But I’m proud of my efforts, I’m proud of my team and what we do with part­ners across Scot­land. Why wouldn’t I want to cel­e­brate that?”