Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken

• Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781913019396
• eBook ISBN: 9781913019419
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

The book is a guide to building a digital institution. This updated and expanded second edition explains how a growing band of reformers in businesses and governments around the world have helped their organisations pivot to a new way of working, and what lessons others can learn from their experience.

Chapter 1

Testing times

We make sure technologies come to where people are, adapt to people’s needs, and empower people closest to the pain to be technologists. In other words, build competence not literacy.

— Audrey Tang, Digital Minister, Taiwan

Crises have a habit of exposing truths that we don’t want to see. Organisations can choose to confront those truths or ignore them. By accelerating trends that were already becoming clear, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced many to bring that confrontation forward.

Some of the truths that the pandemic has shone light upon have been heartening. They’ve reminded us of the kindness and endeavour that teams are capable of when tackling collective problems. Others have been chastening. The pandemic placed a mirror in front of governments and organisations around the world, and people were not always impressed with the reflection. When new apps have flattered to deceive, or public services have failed to deliver, there has been public anger: anger that was not simply a failure of expectation management.

Part of this is rooted in cynicism towards politics and political figures. Part of it is because responding to global crises is messy, complicated and difficult. As citizens we all have to make allowances for things going awry, however frustrating or tragic the consequences.

Perhaps the lack of surprise was because we were finally seeing cracks that have been snaking through walls for a long time. The pandemic created a one-shot, once-in-a-generation high-wire test for the institutions we have all come to depend on. Some thrived, and some failed.

Many of the biggest winners during the pandemic – those who mitigated disaster or made fortunes – were organisations that were born on the internet. Digital commerce’s share of global retail trade increased from 14% in 2019 to about 17% in 2020. The lion’s share of this was won by companies that are less than 20 years old. Latin America’s online marketplace Mercado Libre sold twice as many items per day in the second quarter of 2020 than it did during the previous year. African e-commerce platform Jumia reported a 50% jump in transactions during the first six months of 2020.5 Cities buzzed with the delivery bikes of on-demand services. Online deliveries dropped onto doormats the world over.

Organisations who predated the web often found themselves missing out. They suffered the consequences of behaviour that had long since been baked into the organisation’s design: the difficult conversations not had, the investments not made, the complacencies untouched. When the stakes were smaller, so was the damage. The stakes got much higher in 2020.

The pandemic has affected every kind of organisation, but governments most of all. Questions about whether our institutions are fit for the internet era have become topical. Public procurement, government websites, service design and open-source software – issues that had been the domain of a certain kind of technocrat and very few others – became headline news.

In milder times, bureaucracies tend to get treated as being a bit like the weather: something to complain about on occasion – a force beyond our control. But in times of need, people look to their public officials and elected representatives for more. Buffeted on all sides by the pressures of coronavirus, the human frailties of governments bubbled closer to the surface. As the Washington Post put it in May 2020: ‘The [US] government’s halting response to the coronavirus pandemic represents the culmination of chronic structural weaknesses, years of underinvestment and political rhetoric that has undermined the public trust.’ 6

This was not a conclusion unique to the US federal government. Having heralded the creation of a new Digitalization Promotion division, the Japanese government was mocked for posting a commemorative photo of the team’s first meeting showing more than two dozen people, lots of paper and not a single piece of digital equipment in sight.7 In Australia, a parliamentary committee found that the Victorian state government had made a ‘misguided and costly mistake’ in buying a $4.2 million IBM platform under the false impression that it included artificial intelligence capabilities when it had a ‘known lack of AI capacity’.8

These missteps could be said to be embarrassing, rather than completely unforgivable. Others, though, have been far more profound. Contact-tracing apps largely failed to deliver on their early promise. An Oxford University study that simulated the effect of a contact-tracing app on a city of a million people estimated that 80% of smartphone users would have to be using the app for it to suppress the virus. As of the summer of 2021 it appears that pretty much no country has achieved that level of take-up. In Singapore, only one person in three had downloaded the TraceTogether app by the end of June 2020, despite most workers being legally obliged to do so.9 The UK’s abandoned version of the app cost at least £35 million10 and Australia’s set the federal government back $400,000 for each of the 17 Covid-19 cases it had found as of January 2021.11 The inadequacies of public services that were unable to cope with the pressure have caused distress, hardship and avoidable deaths across the globe. Above and beyond these human losses, the waste of cash, credibility and opportunity cost that came from saying ‘technology will save us’ further eroded institutional trust just when it was needed most.

But there were also moments of surprise too. There were times at which things really worked. The Institute for Government praised the UK government’s ‘decades of investment in expertise, digital tools and practices … clear political direction, and partnerships with external suppliers [that] allowed HMRC [the UK’s tax department] to quickly build three new services to support furloughed workers and the self-employed, and also helped the DWP [the welfare and benefits department] to ensure Universal Credit could cope with unprecedented demand’.12 The NHS 111 Online service experienced a peak demand of 95 times its previous highest ever use, with over 818,000 people accessing the service in a single day. It stayed standing. Taiwan, which enjoyed a return to some form of normality quicker than most, released open government data and invited civic technologists to build answers to problems. And they did just that, developing an ecosystem of apps for everything from visualizations of how many masks had been distributed to contact tracing for nightclub goers.13 Taiwan was among a handful of countries that got contact tracing right, and did so quickly. South Korea and Vietnam also stood out as early exemplars.

Governments around the world proved they are capable of delivering a level of service to citizens that would be the envy of any internet-era business. They also proved that their chances of doing so are far slimmer if they haven’t already taken steps towards digitally transforming themselves. Success and failure did not come down to the actions of people working under intense pressure in the pandemic’s first frantic months. The heroic efforts of those teams were founded on decisions stretching back years before them. Some institutions chose paths that made delivery faster, safer and cheaper when it counted most. Some did not.

For governments, the foundations of a successful Covid response boiled down to four things.

They had the right people

Crisis response is a team sport. Jurisdictions with teams that combined the traditional competencies of public service with internet-era skills like service design, data science and user research had an immediate head start. With the idea of bringing together different disciples in one team well established, adding new voices like clinical skills did not represent a big leap. Those who moved fastest were also used to bringing together a mix of in-house and external staff without being able to see the joins. Places where people weren’t empowered to take off the badge of their ‘home organisation’ for a greater prize found delivery a struggle.

They had adopted ways of working that were focused on users, not on technology choices

Teams that followed and codified user-centred ways of working found they had a ready-made framework for scaling this approach during the pandemic. A few weeks after Covid-19 was recognised as a global problem, the Californian government published a ‘crisis standard’ to help maintain the quality of the state’s official coronavirus response website.14 Having clear principles to define the ways o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Foreword to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Prologue
• Extra half title
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors