In October, my oldest daughter will turn 10. \u00a0I can’t believe how fast the time has flown. \u00a0The gangly pre-teen she is today bears no resemblance to the little baby I once held in my arms.<\/p>\n
Of course she’s not the only thing that’s changed over the last decade. \u00a0I used to fall asleep reading a paperback book, lit by a bedside lamp. \u00a0Today, I use a Kindle lit from within.\u00a0 I use my phone not just to call my friends and family, but to order my groceries, call a cab, manage my bank accounts, check in online, pay for parking, and control my heating at home.\u00a0 Who could have ever imagined such change?<\/p>\n
Well the fact is that someone did.\u00a0 And around the world, people continue to re-imagine the world through the digital lens.\u00a0 What does the customer really want?\u00a0 How can I use technology to design out friction points and make things easier, cheaper, better?<\/p>\n
Those are the questions we\u2019re starting to ask ourselves at Defra. \u00a0Unlike corporates, we\u2019re not driven by the need to innovate or lose market share to others. \u00a0But we have other drivers for change.\u00a0 Specifically: customer expectation and delivering better with less.<\/p>\n
Whether we like it or not, customer expectations are set by their experience with other service providers.\u00a0 And thanks to the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google and others, they expect to be able to \u2018do business\u2019 at a time and on a device of their choosing.\u00a0 They have no interest in our internal processes or organisational constructs. They expect (and frankly deserve) to find things simple, efficient, and seamless.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s fair to say that we have some way to go across the Defra group, which spans the Environment Agency, Natural England, the Rural Payments Agency, and a wide range of other public bodies.\u00a0 As we\u2019ve traditionally worked as separate organisations, our underlying technology is fragmented and our services are largely designed around our internal processes and structures, rather than with the user experience in mind.<\/p>\n
When I joined Defra two years ago, I asked a simple question: how much do we spend on IT across the group?\u00a0 Interestingly, this information wasn\u2019t readily available because the financial information we collected was based on policy areas (e.g. farming, environment, etc).\u00a0 Once we started to look at our spend through the functional lens, we identified new, actionable insights on our organisation.<\/p>\n
For example, we learned that about 50% of our IT spend is on applications and hosting.\u00a0 When we mapped our applications, we identified significant duplication across our estate.\u00a0 This complexity, of course, is reflected at the process level, which is what our customers experience when dealing with us. Removing duplication at the application layer will allow us to reduce unnecessary cost and complexity.\u00a0 But to do this, we also need to re-engineer the associated business processes \u2013 starting with the end-user in mind.<\/p>\n
Thus begins the story of how our \u2018apps rationalisation\u2019 plan has morphed into a wider programme of digital transformation.\u00a0 This will require agile teams of software developers and digital designers working hand in hand with their operational and policy colleagues to \u2018re-imagine\u2019 how Defra delivers.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s early days for us and, depending on your perspective, we face an overwhelming task (given legacy technology and organisational boundaries), or a truly exciting opportunity.\u00a0 To be fair, it\u2019s probably a bit of both, but that\u2019s part of what makes the job so fun.<\/p>\n
Unlike my daughters, I\u2019m not a digital native, nor would I consider myself a digital evangelist. But having benefited from digital disruption in other sectors, I\u2019m a big enthusiast about the potential of digital to positively disrupt how Defra does business.<\/p>\n
As part of our design principles for the target operating model, we\u2019ve asked people across Defra to \u2018Embrace Digital and Data. We\u2019re not simply talking about channel shift or publishing our data sets (though we\u2019re doing that, too!).\u00a0 For us, embracing digital and data is a much wider concept \u2013 requiring a cultural shift away from traditional hierarchies and process towards more dynamic and collaborative ways of working based on empowerment and trust.<\/p>\n
As a leader within Defra, I\u2019m very clear that I need to champion and role model this cultural shift.\u00a0 Yet I\u2019m also aware that my instincts may be more analogue than digital in nature.\u00a0 I\u2019m counting on my reverse mentors, digital natives and others in the organisation to give me \u2018start-continue-stop\u2019 feedback on engendering the right environment at Defra.\u00a0 The \u2018test and learn\u2019 approach to leadership in the digital age.<\/p>\n