The Rebuilding Needs To Happen Now … We Must Innovate and Transform Like Never Before

The only pieces of paper I get in the post these days is either from my council, my government or from the NHS. Our public sector has basically failed to take itself out of a 1970s world, and properly use digital technologies.

There’s no digital identity, there’s no smart contracts running things, there’s no digital signing, there’s no great vision in how systems will interconnect, and no sustainment of any form of digital engagement. We still see data breaches in the NHS where emails are sent out with others in the “To:” email list. That’s a 1980s type of data breach, and shows a system which is behind the rest of the world by a few decades.

In fact, I cannot think of one major digital innovation that has come from the public sector in the UK/Scotland and which has properly laid-down a future vision of the information age. Politicians are perhaps still stuck in the thinking that making the network faster is the way forward … the faster .. the better.

There’s nothing that citizens can point to and see a new evolving future. There’s no X-Road, no major digital signing roll-out, no smart contract integration at scale, no wide-scale tokenization of assets, no changes to the laws to accept digital signing, and really not much change in the same old ways. Where is the great vision of a future economy? Where is the engagement with our citizens in building it?