Following the partial success of a programme to deliver great services, government’s digital hub better recognises the importance of working with other disciplines, as well as political and executive leaders
Government’s digital centre is playing a key role in “holding departments to account” and make sure Whitehall agencies deliver improvements to service and reductions in delivery costs.
Earlier this year, marked the end of the three-year Top 75 project – led by the Government Digital Service – which aimed to ensure government’s most critical and widely used services achieved a ‘great’ standard, as measured against a standard set of metrics. A recent report from the National Audit Office found that “a lack of sponsorship to improve data in departments and other public bodies limited [the] progress” of the initiative.
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee is now exploring the findings of the report and, in a recent evidence session, GDS director for strategy and assurance Bonnie Wang told MPs that, working alongside other stakeholders, the digital unit – was last year moved from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – aimed to build on the work of the Top 75 programme in its future efforts to help improve services across government, and decrease their cost to taxpayers.
“We are… supporting Cabinet Office and Treasury in holding departments to account on costs and making sure that costs follow the right trajectory over time,” she said. “Working with Treasury, we have identified all the major digital programmes that are being stood up or run over the spending review period, and we are working to identify the right outcome metrics for those, including the financial ones and the wider impact measures. We are working with Treasury on a reporting mechanism that will mean that departments will report back to us and Treasury every six months on those metrics.”
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Asked to provide insights on what GDS could learn from the Top 75 project to take forward into ongoing work, Wang told the committee that the recently concluded programme had highlighted departmental siloes that mean key information – including details of costs – is held in piecemeal chunks.
“Without [a] single service owner with the right visibility and mandate, it does not necessarily come together,” she said. “Often within organisations you have the functional siloes and then you have where policy is done, and where delivery is done. To take a really basic example, the people who work on the legislation might be different from the people who then write the policy, which is different from the guidance that comes down. They are certainly different from the people who run the contact centres that deal with all the inquiries that are about the whole chain. Having a view of cost across that whole journey requires, first of all, that data to be joined up and that service to be defined, because that contact centre might serve a number of different services, for example.”
Working together
Committee members also asked whether the Top 75 rollout – which aimed to drive 50 services to the ‘great’ standard, but closed with only 29 having achieved top marks – had been hampered by a “lack of senior-level sponsorship”.
In response, Cat Little, civil service chief operating office and permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office, pointed to the need “situate what we are doing on service transformation… within the broader objectives of government” – thereby encouraging support from both top officials and ministers.
“At the end of the day, we deliver for the priorities of the government,” Little said. “Ultimately, there are things that we do because they are important things for the stewardship of public services and there are things that matter to delivering Government priorities. When the two come together, that is when you have huge impact in driving things forward. It is even better when you have continuity and longevity—that is not always the case, as you know—but it really does help both to have that political weight and for it to be the right thing.”
Wang added that, “having been in different versions of GDS for the last three years, sponsorship now exists more strongly than I have seen it in the past”.
“It is not just about rhetoric,” she said. “In the spending review there has been a significant investment in digital and in digital transformation. How high up it is coming on the agenda, both politically and across senior leaders across Government, is testament to how far we have come, even in a short space of time.”
Beyond political and civil service leaders, Wang also fielded questions about the need for digital professionals to work closely with colleagues in the fields of finance and operational delivery, in order to deliver transformation objectives.
She told PAC that such a “tripartite structure exists… in practice, but perhaps less in formality”.
“Yes, there is that collaboration, but there may not be a name that I can put on it,” she said. “The point of the monitoring, digital performance and looking at the metrics [we measure]… is not to say: ‘We have marked everyone’s homework and here is how everyone came up.’ The point is to say: ‘Here is the support that we can now offer – from GDS, the Cabinet Office and where the centres of expertise are.”
Wang added: “It is also about identifying pockets of [operational delivery] best practice that other departments are already doing, which we should be leveraging. It is not about the centre having all of the answers. Luckily, in government services we are in a digital ecosystem where brilliant digital services are being delivered—every department is delivering fantastic digital services—so it is not just for GDS to go out and say: ‘This is how we think you should be doing it’.”
