It’s no secret that the UK is suffering from a serious digital skills gap. According to The Lloyds Essential Digital Skills Report 2021, only 58% of public sector employees have the essential skills they need. This makes it harder for public sector organisations to deliver digital services and impedes wider transformation efforts. But the effects of this skills gap are felt more in some areas than others.

“As the UK’s largest public sector employer, the NHS is particularly challenged in its ability to deliver high-quality digital services by the digital skills gap,” says Bob Vickers, head of UK & Ireland at Ordr, an IT security firm for connected devices. “Cybersecurity is one particular [area] of challenge for the NHS as a direct result of individual trusts being understaffed and unable to hire the trained staff they need to meet [an] ever-changing threat landscape.”

That’s partly because regional locations with good job opportunities are no longer as attractive to employees as they were pre-pandemic. “Remote work is set to continue, and skilled technology staff are seeking more lucrative roles, regardless of their location,” Vickers explains.

Brexit has also reduced the recruitment pool for all public sector organisations. “People from all over Europe now need sponsorship for employment, which few departments want to consider,” says Trevor Hutchings, director of strategy, communications and public sector at professional services provider Gemserv. “Candidates from outside the UK require additional security clearance, too, which can restrict them from some roles.”

In addition, the Civil Service isn’t typically seen as the most exciting place to work if you have strong digital skills. “There is a perception issue that the Civil Service is somewhat dated, and even the Government Digital Service (GDS) experiences high turnover,” says Hutchings. And even when the Civil Service does attract the right digital talent initially, “there’s intense competition between departments, so the Civil Service risks losing talent to other internal departments as well as external organisations.”

Private competition

All this comes at a time when the public sector is under immense pressure to deliver the digital services that citizens increasingly expect. “The challenge is that they simply can’t recruit the skills they need quickly enough to keep up with demand, so they’re unable to deliver on their digital ambitions, leading to dissatisfaction amongst UK citizens,” says Paul Crerand, field CTO for EMEA at MuleSoft, an integration and API platform.

The fact that the digital skills gap extends across all sectors of the economy also means that both public and private sector organisations are vying for the same small pool of talent. However, even in this highly competitive market, where ‘cool’ brands offering big salaries tend to have the most clout, the public sector can still attract talent – not least because the pandemic has given people a renewed appreciation for public services. 

“By focusing on the fact that digital public services can make such a difference to people’s lives, the public sector may be able to define its recruitment USP,” says Chris Gray, chief for public sector at AND Digital, a digital consulting agency.

While acknowledging that the public sector can’t compete with the private on salary, James Petter, general manager, international, at enterprise storage company Pure Storage, says that it can offer an incredibly rewarding career path, “with more flexibility than the private sector in terms of employees moving between different departments, where they will amass a wealth of experience in several areas. Something that is particularly beneficial for the younger generation, early on in their careers.”

 However, the public sector digital skills gap is also prevalent at the senior management level. Recent research from Citrix found that only 49% of UK local authorities currently employ a chief digital officer, digital director or equivalent responsible for overseeing the organisation’s digital transformation. To solve this issue, the public sector could adopt a greater internal focus, says Gray, “to see where it can upskill and reskill existing members of the civil service to manage digital delivery.”

Partnerships and platforms

As things stand, many public sector organisations are reliant on external consultants to plug the digital skills gap – often at considerable expense. However, tapping into third party talent does have its benefits, as it “gives the advantage of being able to take on skills only when needed and release them when no longer required,” says Vickers.

Hutchings believes the public sector should ultimately look to partner with organisations that have a track record of attracting and maintaining strong digital talent. “If people can be jointly recruited by a government department and supplier they are more likely to be attracted by the supplier’s publicity engine and attractive brand,” he says. “An ongoing process of onboarding, training and equipping the recruit to move over to the government department gives them a great foundation and support structure and, if done at scale, can create an attractive culture that will then enable the department to continue on their own.”

Another way that the public sector could tackle the lack of digital skills in government is more widespread adoption of low-code platforms. “Since there’s no need to write any code, or build services from scratch, it’s possible for business technologists to create new digital services without specific expertise in development,” says Crerand.

 “It’s this ‘clicks, not code’ approach that will help to alleviate the digital skills shortage in the public sector, by promoting a better working environment and accelerating the delivery of digital services,” he adds. “In this way, public sector organisations can help their developers to feel empowered and valued, and better equipped to address rising demand for digital experiences.”

The digital revolution has swept up every aspect of our lives – including how we interact with key public services. Everything from reporting missed bin collections to paying council tax bills and filing tax returns takes place on the internet now, with service users pushed first to web browsers, rather than physical offices or phone lines.

But while the touchpoints with digital public services have increased, the standard of service citizens receive often hasn’t. When it comes to user experience, public services lag behind their private counterparts. And when dealing with vital life moments and requirements like bills and taxes, that can cause problems.

The temptation to launch a buzzy, bright-looking new website can be high, especially in the public service, where organisations and their leaders are judged on what their constituents see. But that time, effort and money can be better spent improving user experience by looking at the less glitzy infrastructure underpinning those key services.

Truly transforming this infrastructure requires working towards an end goal of people-centric application design and development. This means that processes and architecture should be focused on making the citizen experience seamless and personalised, rather than simply following a system-centric or process-centric approach that concentrates on solving internal efficiencies.

Building up expertise

One of the key issues holding back the public sector is simply a lack of experience, says David Mann, who worked in government digital for 20 years before becoming managing director at dxw. Mann was part of the team that built the alpha version of GOV.UK at Government Digital Service. “There is a lack of digital policy making expertise at the top of organisations that is holding digital transformation back,” he says.

While plenty of governmental organisations at national and local levels have begun rebranding their IT teams as digital transformation teams, without a strong leader willing to steer changes, true transformational innovation can fall foul of the stultifying nature of government.

“Over the last 20-something years I’ve been doing this, the only time I’ve seen really lasting and sustainable transformation initiatives has been when there’s been the presence of an individual or an empowered group of individuals within a service,” says Mann. Without a committed group of people or a single focus point with which to drive through a project, changes can quickly devolve into a Groundhog Day-like situation where iterations are minuscule and get held up over the slightest problem. That siloed thinking can be the end of even the best-meaning digital transformation project.

 Looking at the back end

“Often there is no substance and integration to public sector systems,” says Chris Hornung, managing director of public services business at Totalmobile, who has worked with NHS trusts and councils across the country. “What’s needed to improve the citizen experience is a set of integrated systems with free data flow.” Where many public sector organisations go wrong, reckons Hornung, is they buy multiple technology systems to tackle individual issues that don’t talk to each other. “For competitive reasons, they operate as ‘closed gardens’ and refuse communication,” he says. That can be a problem, says Helena Nimmo, chief information officer of software company Endava. “It’s important to evaluate end-user computing to identify exactly how all the technology fits together holistically beyond just hardware,” she says.

Instead, it’s vital to have a more holistic, top-down view of digital public services and to see the way that each touchpoint a member of the public has interacts – or doesn’t – with the other. “Public sector procurement teams should be insisting that the technologies they invest in have Open APIs allowing data to flow, and think about the underlying platform technology they use,” says Hornung. “Open data sharing opens up a whole new world of possibilities for citizen experience.”

Doing that requires a more fundamental rethink of processes that can often be overlooked in favour of quicker, tech-centric fixes – such as automation. “Automation is a double-edged thing, because what tends to happen is people pay an unnamed vendor to come in and do robotic process automation,” says Mann. “But what if the processes themselves are wrong?”

Where automation works

Instead, automation should be carefully deployed, rather than used willy-nilly. Automation can build on existing capability, as has been done through the NHS during the coronavirus pandemic. But thinking of a quick-fix solution, or of the concept of single projects to improve digital transformation, is not conducive to meaningful change.

Just as you wouldn’t put a lick of paint over a broken wall and declare it done, so you shouldn’t for digital change. “It’s better to think of this process of updating and fine-tuning as a digital acceleration rather than a transformation,” says Nimmo. “Transformation suggests a clear and finite ending whereas, in truth, there will always be further work to be done to make sure that the entire technology stack can support changing demands and requirements coming from evolutions in how people work and live.”

By embracing that approach, it’s possible to build for the future in a meaningful, sustainable way. It’s an idea that Mann called “boring magic” in his time at GDS. “You just want this stuff to work,” he explains. “Part of the real innovation is taking that complexity away from users, making it so these things just work.”

Protecting the public from Covid-19 is a necessity for the UK government, and as history shows, necessity is the mother of invention. Keeping people safe has required fresh thinking, greater collaboration and increased funding for government agencies. In short, the Covid crisis has proved that the public sector can innovate and deliver just as quickly and successfully as the private sector. But can it still do so once the urgency of the pandemic period fades away?

It’s a big question that can only be fully answered in time. However, there are clear lessons from the pandemic that could help to drive further change. For instance, the need to act quickly helped to override the risk aversion that sometimes constrains public sector innovation. Existing resources were rapidly ramped up and decisions were made faster. This meant projects were delivered in timeframes that would have seemed impossible pre-pandemic.

One example is Spotlight, a Cabinet Office due diligence tool built on the Salesforce platform that checks grant applications and accelerates approval processes. It helped to unlock massive efficiency gains at a time when grants were key to the survival of countless companies and charities across the UK. “We’d [already] put the base technology in place, but very quickly it had to go from being a good idea with proven high-level concepts to distributing billions of pounds worth of grants,” says Simon Collinson, head of UK public sector at Salesforce.

While digital transformation in the public sector undoubtedly accelerated during the pandemic, “a lot of this was around enabling existing tools and ways of working to become remote, so setting up VPNs, distributed call centres, etc.,” says Paul Pick-Aluas, who leads digital transformation for EMEA public sector at Salesforce. His concern now is whether many of the changes will stick, as: “Once people get through a crisis, they tend to largely revert to the old way [of doing things].

One barrier to change is a mass of legacy IT. This is a serious problem for a government that was once considered among the most technologically innovative in the world. Initiatives such as G-Cloud, the Digital Marketplace, and the Government Digital Service’s service design standards and principles were ahead of the curve. But the UN e-government ranking for the UK fell from 1st in 2016 to 7th in 2020, which shows that some of the momentum around digital transformation has been lost.

In particular, the government has struggled to deliver citizen-centric digital innovation that is efficient, trusted and focused on users’ needs and preferences. To truly improve service delivery, better experiences during the intake of a request and a clean, easy-to-use site must also be matched by the right business processes, technology and architecture in the middle layer. Pick-Aluas says this is a “critical gap” in the UK’s overall strategy, and one of the reasons for the country’s drop in the UN rankings.

Historically, a lack of relevant data and concerns around data privacy and security have also been a barrier to implementing truly user-centric services. However, “examples such as the NHS Test and Trace app show that people are prepared to let the government track their actions…in return for something that is going to be of benefit to them,” says Collinson.

Examples such as the NHS Test and Trace app show that people are prepared to let the government track their actions…in return for something that is going to be of benefit to them

In fact, he believes that “a rubicon has been crossed” when it comes to the government’s approach to citizen data and engagement. “I think that’s one of the effects of Covid-19 which will, to coin the government phrase, allow people to ‘build back better’.”

Funding for digital transformation is a perennial issue for government departments and public sector agencies. During the pandemic, this ‘money problem’ was swept away, but will funding now slow down?

“What we’re witnessing now is actually that funding is continuing,” says Collinson. “The government hasn’t just reverted to austerity, and that provides a genuine opportunity to build a different set of outcomes going forward.”

But if budget cuts come, this will undoubtedly impact IT, with the funding “haircut” likely coming from the modernisation budget. To continue transforming and innovating, organisation’s will need to adopt cyclical processes that allow them to invest in modernisation, capitalise on the resulting savings in operational expenditure, and thereby free up further funds for additional investment.

Much of the spending during the pandemic centred on finding solutions to plug the digital skills gap that has long plagued the public sector. Salesforce’s low-code development tools, for example, can reduce the need for expensive hard-to-find skills. This ultimately “puts more control in the hands of service teams, which allows technical teams to focus on innovation,” says Collinson.

One of the real legacies of the pandemic is that government departments have needed to adopt low-code platforms

Pick-Aluas adds that: “One of the real legacies of the pandemic is that government departments have needed to adopt low-code platforms, and so what you’re left with is this scattering across government of lots of new technologies, and the ability to deliver and develop more quickly on those platforms.”

Looking ahead, greater technical knowledge at the chief executive level is needed to keep driving the shift toward citizen-centric digital services, as well as more collaboration with partner ecosystems. Retaining the ‘can-do’ mindset created by the pandemic will also be a challenge as the crisis recedes into memory. But with the right funding, skills and partners, the public sector can successfully deliver the right digital services and engagements.

To learn more about Salesforce’s approach to UK public sector, visit salesforce.com/uk/public sector

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – the largest public service department in the UK – has deployed a range of interventions to combat unemployment during the Covid crisis, including the JETS in Scotland Programme.

Job Entry: Targeted Support, or JETS, provides support to unemployed people across Scotland that have received benefits for at least 13 weeks. The programme analyses transferable skills and supports CV writing, job searches, interview skills and confidence-building. Capita, the DWP’s service provider, selected Salesforce and Venerate to create the platform, which was designed, built and mobilised in just 10 weeks.

Capita knew the platform would need to provide support within an increasingly dynamic job search environment and changing employment sector. It also had to be user-friendly enough to work seamlessly across desktop or mobile devices, as well as capable of integrating with job posting systems and scaling up or down with demand.

The Salesforce Customer 360 Platform for Government collates information on a job-seeker in a personalised record and recommends opportunities based on their profile – all while meeting GDPR requirements. Job seekers who have been out of work for at least three months are referred to JETS by the DWP and asked to sign up via a community portal built on Experience Cloud. Within the first three months of going live on Salesforce, JETS handled an estimated 8,000 referrals.

The COP26 summit, held earlier this year in Glasgow, highlighted the climate emergency that the world’s leaders are facing. Steering away from climate disaster is a tough task – made all the more difficult by the increasingly rapid evolution of how we interact with governments.

On the face of it, the replacement of in-person services with digital delivery could be seen to bring down the climate-harming emissions of how government operates. But digital services can often be as harmful to the environment as continuing business as normal. “Most people go along the lines of: ‘Let’s move to the cloud because it’s more sustainable,’” says Joe Baguley, chief technology officer at VMware EMEA. “Yet that’s debatable depending on where those services are and who’s running them, and how efficient the data centres are.” One thing is certain: “IT estates make up an increasingly large part of organisations’ carbon footprint, as systems and ways of working are digitised due to power use and information storage,” says Luke Morton, chief technology officer of Made Tech.

There are silver linings, however. Legacy software systems are often less efficient than their modern equivalents, so an upgrade to a cloud computing tool can actually cut down emissions, rather than add to them. “It's not an understatement to say that environmental impact will be one of the biggest drivers for legacy modernisation in the coming years,” says Morton. “Replacing older platforms with greener solutions will not just help create more sustainable public departments, but also save money in the long term and create better services.”

Why government must lead by example

“Government has to lead the way in showing the private sector how to achieve sustainability goals,” says Dr Andrew White of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. White points to two examples of the digital revolution in government enabling more sustainable practices to take place: the planning portal, which allows planning applications to be submitted online rather than in-person; and the building passport system, which provides a tool for public and private sector bodies to access and share detailed information on any given building – including the emergency services.

Government has to lead the way in showing the private sector how to achieve sustainability goals

In a world where the public sector is often accused of lagging behind the private sector, White believes that governments big and small can lead the way. “The more of these platforms come into everyday use the more the private sector will follow,” he says.

It’s important because of the environmental impact digital government can have. Take the UK’s defence branch, which accounts for 36% of total ICT energy use across government. Every employee in that branch of government has an average of five devices, with the defence arm’s individual ICT energy consumption nearing that of a small mid-terraced house – 2,300kWh.

To meet ambitious sustainability goals, another key part of the solution is for all influential and powerful organisations to shift priorities from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism. This means striving to serve everyone the organisation impacts, including the individual customer, the communities they live in and the planet as a whole, rather than focusing just on profit-making. If private companies are to become less shareholder-focused and more public- and society- serving, then there is a real opportunity for the public sector to set an example with sustainable practices, meaningful action and transparency. 

Reuse and recycle, not rubbish

One major contributor to environmental damage is the sending of discarded devices and other electrical equipment to landfill. The UK government is pursuing a circular economy model embedded into its digital operations, with the end goal of reducing e-waste to a negligible amount, including through procuring remanufactured items rather than as new. “Longer-term, you’re looking at a consolidation of devices,” says Baguley, who suggests that digital government services could give their employees lightweight, low-processing power devices such as Chromebooks which don’t date as readily as standard hardware, but instead can run cloud services efficiently.

However, it’s also vital to keep track of emissions, wherever they occur. Here, big data can be a boon. Analytics platforms such as Salesforce’s Net Zero Cloud efficiently quantify an organisation’s carbon footprint, enabling them to formulate a meaningful climate action plan on which they can deliver. Such energy monitoring, often with the use of artificial intelligence to decide on best actions, is a pathway that organisations like the NHS are following. NHS Digital, as part of its attempt to become a net-zero organisation, plans on using energy monitoring that could recoup its £260m investment within two years by contributing 2.3% of the total necessary reduction in carbon emissions across the NHS.

Some IT decision makers may worry that there’s a trade-off between sustainability and reliability, and could look at recent outages of Amazon Web Services cloud servers and fear that governmental services are too vital to leave to the whims of cloud servers. Not so, says Baguley. The old idea of N+2 plus one (doubling any physical resources you need, plus another backup in case of failure) is no longer needed. Instead, spreading your data over different cloud servers – acknowledging that there’ll be redundancy and outages – is the way forward. “You don't need to have huge, great multi-redundant things to have resilience nowadays,” he says. “Everything's moved on in that way.”

As with any significant change, shifting to a more sustainable delivery of digital services in government requires strong will, a clear goal, and internal advocates. “If you're a decision maker or a policy maker, you should be pushing people to more sustainable solutions,” says Baguley.