This audio was created using Microsoft Azure Speech Services
In a relatively short period of time, digital innovations and models for delivering products and services has begun to massively change. Topics like digital disruption have had books, blog posts and dozens of articles written about them, so many of us are at least aware of how digital is beginning to transform the entire business landscape.
The question for many organisations though, is who is going to lead this transition in our business. For many larger businesses, moving fast, being agile and transformational is different for a variety of historically strong and compelling reasons – not least of all that old cliché about how long it takes to turn a super tanker around.
Yet despite this, we do see high profile examples of success and failure as large ventures go about making changes. Having a strong and informed leader brings new ways of working and transformational opportunities front and centre.
A good example of success is the UK Government’s appointment of Mike Bracken to lead innovation and transformation of Whitehall’s digital services. Bracken brought industry experience of developing a range of new digital services quickly, cheaply and iteratively which has already led to rapid and successful changes.
His success has been to put the customer’s needs first. Then, instead of outsourcing development, he bought together small teams of tech-savvy people. Together, they are rolling out the Government Digital Strategy (GDS), where departmental digital strategies commit to the redesigning and rebuilding of 25 significant ‘exemplar’ services, to make them “simpler, clearer and faster to use”. All these are to meet the Digital By Default Service Standard by April 2014 and be completed by March 2015. Progress can be seen on this Digital Transformation online dashboard.
Compare that if you will, with the beleaguered US Governments’ roll out of the Obamacare website which has been troubled to say the least. Whatever your standpoint on affordable healthcare, there has been criticism of the costs being racked up by the 47 organisations that so far have won contracts to manage, support or service the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
One of the reasons behind the escalation of costs is that unlike in the UK, “no one actually inside government really knows how to buy tech projects” (Forbes website, 17/10/2013). While in the UK the salary being paid to Bracken had drawn the attention of the media, as Forbes points out, the rewards for people managing servers in the private sector are high. Those skills are therefore unlikely to be lying around untapped in the public sector.
The UK government appears to be introducing new methods of working that digital provides, not least in getting services to market quickly whilst managing cost. Bracken had experience of both during his time at the Guardian newspaper, where he eliminated closed proprietary systems in favour of open standards, and got the world’s first chargeable news app launched.
It’s arguable that the US experience of outsourcing both knowledge and execution in a traditional outsourcing model shows to some extent a difference between old and new ways of working with IT. One outcome is that to date, the cost of changes under ACA are estimated to be four times the cost for Apple to develop the original iPhone.
In the UK example, perhaps the key differences were the focus on bringing someone into lead who put users’ needs at the core and who both understands and embraces technological changes to transform the way things get specified, built and delivered.
Who is going to drive this evolution in your organisation and what kind of things will they focus on, what tools will they have to harness the benefits of digital disruption. For businesses to evolve and prosper in the years to come, they will need people who can create radical new business models and transform the way we deliver for customers. We need new structures, leaders and management to embrace and prosper from the tremendous opportunities digital has yet to bring to our businesses and our customers.
