Policy paper

Government Transformation Strategy: vision and scope

Published 9 February 2017

This was published under the 2016 to 2019 May Conservative government

Vision

To serve the people of the United Kingdom better we want to create a responsive state that can change at pace and at scale.

To do this, we need to transform the relationship between citizens and the state - putting more power in the hands of citizens and being more responsive to their needs.

The tools, techniques, technology and approaches of the internet age give us greater opportunities than ever before to help government so that:

• citizens, businesses and other users have a better, more coherent experience when interacting with government services - one that meets the raised expectations set by the many other (non-government) services and tools they use every day
• elected governments can make a more immediate impact, delivering on policy goals by providing services and information more quickly, with the intended outcomes for their users - and the ability to change delivery quickly if the policy changes
• the cost and time to build, change and run government is reduced, saving public money and allowing government to respond faster to socio-economic and political change
• we improve trust between citizens and state, giving citizens confidence that their personal data is secure and being used in ways they expect, while making government activity more transparent and making publicly-owned, non-personal data available for reuse where appropriate
• we build secure systems by default, ensuring that we create protection against cyber crime through every stage of our digital transformation

Scope

Transformation generally refers to making step-change improvements to whole services and whole organisations, as distinct from incremental improvements. Over the last 5 years, many departments have become comfortable talking about user-centred design, test-and-learn and channel shift to digital services. They have started to transform the culture of how they deliver services. While this has been a great success, in many cases they have not yet been able to transform the ‘back end’ of their organisations: those behind-the-scenes parts of their operations which deliver the services.

This strategy uses the term ‘department’ to cover the organisations of central government, such as ministerial and non-ministerial departments and associated arm’s length agencies. To be successful, departments and their delivery bodies need to have a productive relationship and a clear understanding of their respective responsibilities.

While the digital exemplars from the previous parliament delivered excellent web interfaces that better meet user needs, the back-office processes and systems were often left unchanged. In some cases, the online service passes the contents of a web-form to back-office staff, who must then rekey the data into an existing system. In others, the online process has been grafted onto legacy technology which does not fully realise the value from digital. These services brought back-office benefits (such as allowing some eligibility checking or removing some of the issues with reading people’s handwriting) and demonstrated that government is capable of delivering better online services, but have not fully delivered fundamental back-end transformation.

The world is also not standing still. Following the vote to leave the European Union, the need for government and the wider public sector to be agile and responsive to a changed environment across (or sometimes redefining) existing departmental boundaries has become even more important.

This has brought clearly into focus that the digital challenge is not simply about online interactions - but fundamentally about how departments operate on the inside.

Our work since 2010 means that there is now much more digital capability across government - particularly in the bigger operational departments. However, each department is different and there are still a significant number of smaller agencies and other public bodies which either do not have citizen-facing online transactions or are too small (either in terms of organisational size or in transaction volume) to have been able to invest heavily in digital tools and techniques. Many such smaller organisations have begun the journey of putting transactions online, but this is still a work in progress.

These smaller services have the opportunity to significantly reduce the burden on their users. However, recognising that they have smaller returns from the perspective of a departmental investment case, the Government Digital Service (GDS) started the Government as a Platform initiative. This plan was to provide a consistent user experience and dramatically reduce the costs of digital services by creating common capabilities for government, thus making the long tail of smaller volume transactions viable economically for transformation. We need to continue down this path and ensure that government services are available to all users in the right channel at the right time.

We must all remain mindful that government is not here just to make transactions go more smoothly. It is the role of government to provide thoughtful, well-designed, straightforward services that make it easy for citizens to interact with government. Government must also be financially responsible by using up-to-date approaches to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of how services are delivered. But ultimately, it is the role of government to improve the way the economy and society functions. So when we talk about transformation, it is critical that it is linked back to its role in implementing the policy agenda and, in particular for this strategy, in making full use of the huge opportunities afforded by technological progress.

In that context, the next stage of government transformation has 3 broad components, which together form the scope of this strategy.

Component of the strategy	Outcome	Explanation
Transforming citizen-facing digital services	Departments improve the digital citizen experience	We will continue to deliver a steady stream of high-quality digital services, which must be both available to citizens and used wherever possible.
Transforming the way departments deliver their services inside, enabled by digital	Departments deliver policy objectives in a flexible way, with improved citizen service across channels and improved efficiency	We must safely achieve the commitments departments have made to deliver major business change programmes to the way they operate internally. These are complex and take much longer than delivering just online services.
Transforming the way government delivers change	All of government is able to deliver transformation more effectively	To enable both of the above, we must transform the way government governs itself. Critically, this will rely on even greater collaboration between professions and departments. We will identify and address challenges which are common to transformations in all departments, with the aim of making it easier to successfully deliver transformation and change across government.

Devolved administrations and the wider public sector

This transformation strategy is focused on UK central government. Other parts of the public sector like local government, health, police, parliament and devolved administrations have their own governance, are responsible for shaping their own approaches and have their own digital action plans and priorities.

There remains, however, much we can do to collaborate across sectors to meet common needs in the interest of delivering better services to users - for example, ensuring seamless end-to-end citizen journeys, sharing data and using common platforms. This strategy indicates several potential areas of collaboration.

The increasing devolution of powers has created a different service delivery landscape for people living and working in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Devolved services are subject to separate governance arrangements from those described in this strategy. Nevertheless there is close cooperation between our respective administrations in order to learn from each other’s experiences, share ideas and ensure that the experience provided for service users is as seamless as possible.

Spending Review 2015

The 2015 Spending Review settlement established the parameters for continued delivery of transformation across government during this parliament. Departments have developed their plans through to 2020 to deliver within these parameters, many of which depend upon a strong digitally-enabled element. These programmes are large, complex changes, affecting millions of citizens, tens of thousands of public sector workers and hundreds of suppliers. Transformation on this scale, whether in the private or public sector, is always a major challenge and requires coordination of significant changes to the business operating models on multiple levels across multiple departments, while maintaining services to those who depend upon them. A government priority is therefore to complete the delivery of these existing programmes safely, while at the same time beginning the process of planning out and making decisions on the next phases of work.

The transformation of public services in this parliament will be delivered by government departments, who are responsible for service delivery, with GDS providing leadership, support and expertise from the centre. Read more about GDS’s role in supporting this strategy.

Expanding the focus on transformation

Government has evolved over hundreds of years and over this time has developed the organisational structures, processes and technologies which deliver today’s services. Our vision builds on that of previous governments, which have laid the groundwork for transformation and made important steps on the journey.

Changing any complex organisation takes time. The services government delivers are vital to citizens and the risks inherent in change need to be carefully managed. These challenges are not unique to government. For example, much of the banking system relies on critical infrastructure which is now decades old. This highlights the generational nature of transformation, which is a continuous process and therefore much longer-running than a parliamentary cycle.

However now that digital is increasingly mainstream in society, we must seize the opportunity to transform the services government offers to all of the UK. We recognise that the public sector is not a single entity and that different parts have evolved at different rates. A one-size-fits-all solution will not work or be appropriate. This means that while we have set out our vision for where we want to get to, the journey to get there will depend on the maturity of each organisation.

Objectives

In order to transform the relationship between the citizen and the state, in the period to 2020 across the whole of government we will:

• continue to deliver world-class digital services and transform the way government operates, from front-end to back-office, in a modern and efficient way
• develop the right skills and culture among our people and leaders, and bring together policy and delivery to enable services to be delivered in a learning and iterative environment, focused on outcomes for citizens
• build better workplace tools and processes to make it easier for public servants to work effectively, including sourcing, governance, workplace IT, businesses cases, human resources processes, common technology across the public sector and better digital tools for civil servants
• make better use of data - not just for transparency, but to enable transformation across government and the private sector
• create, operate, iterate and embed good use of shared platforms and reusable business capabilities to speed up transformation - including shared patterns, components and establishing open standards

We will work on the basis that:

• following the Design Principles, the Digital Service Standard and Technology Code of Practice, we will continue to start with user needs
• users need a consistent experience of government services, unaffected by government decisions to structure itself differently to deliver the priorities of the day
• public servants, intermediaries and businesses are users too - to succeed, we must understand their needs
• everything will be designed and maintained with the right level of security - in particular for sensitive or personal data
• departments retain responsibility for risk around delivery regardless of the sourcing arrangements
• we design for security, building the appropriate cyber and privacy safeguards into our digital transformation