Build not buy

Why the digitalisation of administration needs to happen in-house

By Adam Walther and Simone Carrier

For the last thirty years, most public sector it services have been outsourced. Software, hardware and support.

But turn to nearly every global public sector website, or sit in nearly any public sector building and it feels like Netflix, Amazon or even Ebay never happened.

That seamless, at first, magical experience of having a need met, quickly. Not there. This suits current vendors. Same stuff, different buttons, nice fat margins.

This is not changing. 2019 won’t be the year big vendors go all ‘Netflix’ on our services and make prescriptions, taxes and social care seamless, as important as this would be, especially to our most vulnerable citizens.

Nor in 2020. Or, at this rate, 2030. It’s just not the business model. Public sector organisations need to adopt the best of what global tech firms have done with their services. Hire researchers, designers, developers and get to work.

Now is the time to be bold and build in-house. Why?

1. Better services. The internet supports new creations continuously. Being locked into contracts encourages creative inertia.
2. Skills for staff. Big vendors often leave with the keys to the future. Consultants can be great at challenging and providing expertise. Get them to upskill staff.
3. You get to change organisations, not just services. In-house digital teams mean user-centred design, agile delivery, and inclusive mindsets seep into how Jane in the Computer Says No department thinks. Support Jane. Jane will be our hero one day

So, what needs to happen in-house?

1. Redefine the consultant relationship. From service providers to partners, extending the internal team. This public-private collaboration has formed the basis of much of the e-Estonian government, Europe’s most digital administration.
2. Public servants must be free to create and challenge, not just administer but design. In-source the most radical projects, or create hybrid teams with consultants and private partners.
3. Then share with the world. We need to open our data, build software to interact with other software (APIs), share code, run skills exchanges, blog, boast, share mistakes. We don’t have enough digital skills as it is, so let’s share and build from what is happening elsewhere.

Some crunchy tips which we have used to get there:

Tell stories
X number of people using a service is a great stat. The carer who has been supporting her husband’s illness for eight years, and now, because you made a small change, has home help, is a story which managers will find even harder to ignore.

The right questions, rather than the right answers
This is hard. You’ve been employed to be the expert and spent years becoming that. Now have to see the resident using your service as the master of your world. Embrace it and use your expertise for changing policy, services, relationships. Humble is sexy.

Testing over planning
Have a vision and roadmap but hold yourself to account in smaller chunks as you go. Agile over waterfall. Test the thing ahead of measuring the thing you said you’d do three months ago. Three months ago you had no idea.

To design and manage digital government, new competencies are needed. Other countries have demonstrated how it can be done. The British government has hired hundreds of designers and developers and trained civil servants in user research, agile delivery and service design for the Government Digital Service. The Estonian government have started from a blank slate and built. We now have the Tallinn Declaration. They publish lots of tips, blogs and videos online.

It would be naïve to think that every public servant has an interest and talent in thinking more like a designer–but we can make a start. At FutureGov, we support both the skills and cultures of organisations and teams, as well as do the actual design. It makes us proud when our partners in government recognise which capabilities they can cover and for which parts they need support from outside. Our most successful projects are ones where we have helped build a service, and then help make ourselves redundant.

The opportunity is not to commission this change, but to design it from within. We cannot sit here in another thirty years and wonder what could have happened if we’d only been brave enough. To build, not buy.

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Adam Walther is a project director at FutureGov, the design and tech firm for the public sector. Previously, Adam held positions in local governments in the UK.

Simone Carrier is a service design lead based in Berlin, working with FutureGov internationally. She is running projects in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.