The public sector is being held back by “archaic” IT systems, with a £45 billion “jackpot” of productivity savings available if transformation can be achieved, the British government claimed – highlighting in a new report that some departments still manage 500+ paper-based services.
The “State of Digital Government” delivered for HMG by Bain & Co., is based on insights from over 500 leaders across 120 organisations.
Set to be published later today, it will claim that departments have been pushed towards bringing in contractors and consultants to complete “basic technological tasks… despite them costing three times more than civil servants and eating up £14.5 billion in taxpayer money a year.”
See also: Unwiring Whitehall? Why HMG is facing a CIO exodus
The report comes days after the National Audit Office reported [pdf] that there was “not yet a shared strategic approach across government to dealing with a few very large suppliers who now dominate technology markets.” The NAO also warned that there were just:
4 – people in the Central Digital and Data Office recently dedicated to digital commercial activity
15 – people in the Government Commercial Function focussed on government’s 19 strategic digital suppliers.
NAO said: “We have not seen evidence of government undertaking a formal assessment of its digital procurement skills needs or creating a plan to recruit and retain people with digital procurement skills..."
Can AI help? HMG unveils “Scout”
Alongside today’s report the government will unveil two new “AI” tools.
One, dubbed “Scout”, will, it claimed, help officials deliver infrastructure projects on time and on budget by analysing thousands of documents to check for pitfalls, and cut manual processing time “from hours in [sic] five minutes.” Whether this will magic away regulatory red tape and the fact that, per the NAO, “departments often enter into contracts for digital development work without sufficiently understanding the complexities posed by the existing environment” remains to be seen.
The technology secretary meanwhile will now “set out a wholesale reshaping of how services use technology, reaching across local government, the NHS, and more, in a bid to modernise the state” the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said late Friday.
There is no magic cure for entrenched issues
Ministerial press releases and third-party reports urging modernisation are, of course, transient and two-a-penny. Whether HMG is going to undertake the sustained hard work of resourcing the civil service properly, upskilling and retaining talent, and improving procurement practices as well as integrating “AI” into decision making remains to be seen.
As the NAO put it: “Government has been slow to adapt how it engages with and manages suppliers. It needs to define a comprehensive sourcing strategy for the digital age which takes into account how to deal with ‘big tech’ and global cloud providers that are bigger than governments themselves, while aligning with policies on…innovation.”
One former government CTO told The Stack last week: "The government talks a good game saying millions are available for AI or whatever but ultimately it very rarely is available, or before it can get approved it gets moved to do something else, as the funding isn't ringfenced for AI..."
“Nor does the Treasury have the mechanisms to deliver funding in an agile way. We have to have a massive business case for the whole outcome written up, rather than explain where we want to get to, get some seed funding, work on the problem before coming back for more funding if the MVP goes to plan. Digital is still seen as an operational thing not a force-multiplier. Policy is king still."
There are also peculiar disincentives to career progression baked in, one interviewee told The Stack: “The Deputy Director (DD) salary band is roughly £71k - £120k. If I am promoting internally in the civil service from G6 to DD I get the base of £71k, or 10% on top of my salary if my current one is above £71k. This is never the case. But if I am an external recruit I can apply for the DD role, and if I get an offer I can negotiate my salary up to whatever has been signed off, normally ~£100k but potentially more."
On the technical side, senior architects across HMG may be on a base salary of circa £65,000, but have the potential to be earning up to £30,000 more in additional role based pay. However, as one interviewee explained to us, if a G6-level architect wants to progress to DD, they will lose their additional role-based pay and their DD salary will be calculated on their base of £65k “so they will take a brutal pay cut to become a CTO.
“Policy people don't get this as they don't get the [additional] technical pay [anyway] so they can happily progress to DD. This is why there is limited technical people in the SCS [senior civil service] they concluded.
