Digital Transformation for Public Services

Digital Transformation for Public Services

Reported by Patrick McAlary, CSaP Policy Research Assistant

A discussion on the digitisation of services brought together a group of experts from Cambridge University with Dr Jolly Wong, a former CSaP Policy Fellow and Senior Advisor to HongKong Electric, and Dr Nina Jörden, Research Associate at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge to highlight some of the successes and failures in the implementation of digital transformation for public services.

The Square of Despair: Common challenges for digital transformation

Reflecting on the innovation journey of HongKong Electric, a public utilities company that has helped to power Hong Kong since 1890, Dr Jolly Wong outlined four common challenges for digitisation that he termed the ‘square of despair’: organisational silos; insufficient resources; insufficient digital skills; and resistance to change.

Dr Wong outlined some of the solutions pursued by HongKong Electric to neutralise these obstacles. Given that demand for digital transformation outstripped available resources and skills, HongHong Electric revised its decision framework to become more objective driven and to prioritise projects. Digital transformation was further supported by relying on external partners to augment existing capabilities and to enforce a strategy of standardisation of technology, which limits unnecessary technical divergence so that the technology requires less specialised skills to use.

HongKong Electric developed an agile workforce or the ‘T-shaped employee’. Such employees have deep vertical knowledge and skills in their specialisation alongside a willingness to collaborate with colleagues in areas outside of their expertise. To support the development of T-shaped employees, Dr Wong emphasised the role of ‘Learning Communities’, which consist of a group of people who share common concerns and have collective responsibility for managing the knowledge they need and create a direct link between learning and performance. One way through which HongKong Electric dealt with the four common challenges was through the development of a self-directed e-learning platform which, in providing employees with opportunities to develop their skills, addresses all of the common challenges outlined above.

Technology and trust

Dr Nina Jörden discussed ResilienceDirect, an online platform supported by the Cabinet Office that provides a private information sharing network for emergency services to support emergency response. ResilienceDirect boasted 80,000 users during the COVID-19 pandemic and it provided a space for Local Resilience Forums (multi-agency partnerships made up of representatives from local public services) to share information within their forum and across different forums.

The purpose of the platform was to engender collaboration, however, the utility of the platform during the COVID-19 pandemic was hampered due to governmental structure. The Local Resilience Forums created vertical silos that restricted information sharing which, despite the existence of the platform, was sometimes mediated by personal relations. In some cases, those working at a local level did not have access to worst case scenarios due to fears of leaks from central government. The result of this was that, despite the stated purpose of the platform, barriers to data-sharing were erected which prompted the emergence of informal information sharing communities at a local level as users lost faith in the centrally promoted technology solution—the platform came to contribute to the problem it was designed to mitigate.

Dr Jörden pointed out that ResilienceDirect showed the limits of a technology solution and the existence of such technology was used to justify a high level of collaboration, despite the problems that had arisen.

Discussion and Reflections on Digital Transformation

These case studies highlight that increasingly, the barriers for digital transformation do not rest in the technologies themselves, although design and functionality remain key. For instance, a lack of resources and/or skills creates difficulties for the implementation of digital transformation while other factors, such as mistrust between users, can erode the value of platforms even when the technology itself is fit for purpose.

The participants discussed some of the tensions that new technologies pose to complex organisations. The emergence of new technologies in itself does not bring about a wholesale transformation of an organisational structure; instead different parts of an organisation use technology in a piecemeal way— rather than a replacement of the wheel, often what we see is the slow replacement of individual spokes. The burden of government-customer interactions is invariably on the latter and customers will often have to interact with multiple agencies or departments, as is especially the case with more vulnerable users. If different agencies do not collaborate and instead pursue their own approaches to digital transformation, then this can make the customer experience more difficult.

The UK lacks hard instruments to force the necessary level of collaboration and it can sometimes take a galvanising event, like the Covid-19 pandemic, to create the conditions for a technology shift—where constituent parts of an organisation are forced to set aside their own goals and to collaborate. Participants pointed out that issues around collaboration and standardisation of technology required further discussion in understanding the digitisation of public services.

Image by Bartosz Kwitkowski on Unsplash.