Institutionalising the Digital State
Digital transformation is traditionally seen as something the political class do to the civil service.
If it is to be successful, it requires transformational change to political institutions, parliaments and the structure of legislation - and the impetus and insights to make this change work can only come from the practitioners in the civil service.
At this event, Gordon Guthrie will present the results of his independent report for Scottish Government, Foundations of the Digital State: foundationsofthedigitalstate.com
Functional requirements for state systems are expressed in legislation, but non-functional (or infrastructural) requirements are smeared across the state landscape in service standards, departmental standards, embedded in technology, what we did at my last job, what I think they do at Google, and so on.
The functional requirements represent the departmental objectives and the non-functionals express, at their core, joined-up government, so there can be no step change in quality until these two achieve some sort of parity of esteem and enforcement - which requires institutional change.
Given that functionals are tied to the legislative process, this means perforce that parliaments will be dragged into the transformation.
Iterative development is understood to be key to digital development - and yet the core focus of public sector reform avoids the obvious and measurable iterative cycle - the iteration over functionality expressed in secondary legislation. The Scottish Social Security programme involved 79 pieces of legislation over 8 years, Welfare Reform/Universal Credit a whopping 218.
And because digital transformation is seen as you-problem and not an us-problem by the political class, examination of this cycle is ruled out a priori.
Addressing these questions involves frankly squaring up to the two taboos. Civil servants, who alone have the operational understanding to make this case, cannot instruct Ministers, and Ministers cannot instruct the independent self-governing parliament to change it's processes.
This event is part of the National Conversations initiative.
https://nationalconversations.org/
Further discussion around these issues can be found at Digital Policy.