How Service Design is helping us figure out what’s next for digital devolution
By Katie Mayes and Snezh Halacheva (Cancer Research UK Service Design team)
Back in September, we started a discovery piece of work aimed at informing the next phase for digital devolution at Cancer Research UK. In this blog post, Katie Mayes and I will outline how we have approached this work, what we have found out so far and what could be next. We hope this might be useful for others working on similar challenges.
Throughout this post, we use the term digital devolution. However, we are not convinced this is the right language as it can be jargonistic and have negative connotations. We hope the next phase of our work will help us find more suitable language which resonates with our colleagues. In the meantime, we’re open to suggestions!
Why this? Why now?
In 2016, Cancer Research UK launched an ambitious new strategy for digital transformation. The devolution of digital tools, skills and ways of working was one of the key principles at the heart of that strategy. We began delivering digital devolution through a hub and spoke model. This model has led to many successes in the organisation and we wouldn’t be where we are in our transformation journey without it. However, we are also aware of its limitations and have spent a lot of time reflecting on them.
As part of this reflection, our Service Design Lead Giulia Merlo has recently written about why we need to evolve our transformation strategy as the organisation has grown in digital maturity over the last 4 years. One of our design principles is not to rest on our laurels and earlier this year we ran two unconference events to help us co-design the next stage of our digital transformation strategy.
Organisationally, digital transformation and cultural agility have been identified as key trends shaping Cancer Research UK’s future landscape. A number of big initiatives are taking place in the charity at the moment, focusing on our future technology and data estate, as well as how we work together to deliver maximum value to our multiple audiences.
We thought we should also make it clear what we mean when we say digital transformation.
Digital transformation is not:
- [only] about technology
- [only] about learning tech skills
- [only] about questioning our expertise
Our vision for digital transformation is:
- Re-designing our services
- Re-designing our user experiences
- Re-designing the way we work
- Re-designing our business models
Discovery aims
Our initial brief for this discovery piece of work was to explore the dandelion model. Dandelion is a multiple hub and spoke model which seems like a natural progressions for devolving digital tools, skills and ways of working for an organisation of our size after four years of using hub and spoke.
Our assumption was that a dandelion model can help us achieve the kind of tightly aligned, loosely coupled devolution we need for successful digital transformation. But first, we had to make sure that a dandelion model was the right solution to meet the needs of internal users of digital and technology, as well as help the Technology Directorate and the organisation achieve their intended outcomes.
Discovery was aimed at helping us understand:
- What are the needs and problems faced by different ‘types’ of internal users in the context of their roles and their teams when it comes to working with the digital and Technology teams?
- How might we solve these problems by devolving digital tools, skills and ways of working?
- What is the right way to talk about ‘digital devolution’?
- How can we work in partnership with teams across the organisation when devolving digital, valuing the skills and assets each different team and colleague has to contribute? How do we make sure we are doing together, rather than Technology doing to other teams?
Our approach and the research insights
We started by speaking to various colleagues who had some experience with the hub and spoke model or a stake in digital transformation. We ended up interviewing over 30 people across the charity. We also spoke to other organisations who are working to tackle similar problems or are further along their digital transformation journey.
This provided us with a lot of insight which we worked with our project team to synthesise. As themes started to emerge and become clearer, we also held drop-in sessions open to anyone who had participated in the research or was interested in reviewing and feeding back on our insights. After this, we refined our research findings into 5 high level insight statements:
- People across Cancer Research UK don’t know what the Technology Directorate can do — what our capabilities are and what we can support them with.
- There is a gap in how we support colleagues who are working on things other than big (i.e. projects) or small (i.e. web page changes) pieces of work.
- The Technology Directorate doesn’t yet have a clear understanding or agreement of what can and cannot be devolved, and to what extent things should be devolved.
- Digital devolution needs to be and feel like a partnership between Technology and other teams.
- Successful and sustainable digital devolution is not possible without senior level and organisational buy-in.
We learnt from our research what the key ingredients are for a dandelion model to be successful (as summarised in the inner circle of the ecomap below). However, we believe that without the wider environment fostering the right conditions, a dandelion model alone would not deliver sustainable digital devolution or help us achieve our vision for digital transformation.
We borrowed the diagram created by Matthew Cain (Head of Digital and Data, Hackney) when communicating to colleagues the conditions which need to exist for digital devolution to succeed.
What’s next?
Sharing what we have learnt more widely across the organisation has highlighted how closely linked our work is to the other big strategic initiatives which focus on the ‘to be’ state of our technology, data and ways of working.
Initially, we had planned to spend the beginning of 2020 prototyping what a dandelion devolution model might look like with a few teams at Cancer Research UK, in the process testing key assumptions around language, what skills and capabilities are needed, how they are distributed and managed, and the feasibility of supporting this model.
However, the pace and momentum behind these strategic projects means that there is a small window of opportunity to influence the design of the future state of the organisation using the insights we have generated. This is why we have decided to spend the first few months of 2020 focusing on how to bring these different pieces of work together.
We believe aligning ourselves with these initiatives will help us create the wider system and environment conditions needed for sustainable and scalable digital devolution, which meets the needs of internal users and achieves Cancer Research UK’s vision of becoming digital masters.
We are keen to share what we learn and hope to publish more posts in the new year. If you want to know more about our work or have any questions, feel free to reach out to us in the comments below or on twitter.
Katie and I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who took the time to speak to us both at Cancer Research UK and in the wider charity network.
