Beyond Transformation

Change is inevitable. That's an obvious statement, but it's not until you start to think about the changes in the past ten years do you get an idea of the scale faced by local government.

Austerity, wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine, Grenfell, the cost of living crisis, and of course COVID, are just a few things that local government has had to react, adapt and respond to, and we mustn’t forget the ongoing climate emergency which will be with us for many years yet.

Most organisations will have, or have had some sort of transformation programme in place. I led a digital transformation programme which started in 2016 which found efficiencies and created better services across a range of functions meaning people can now report, as well as book and pay for things online, where before they couldn't.

Transformation implies change from one state to another though, from a caterpillar to a butterfly for example, but we know from my examples above that change is constant. To be resilient councils need to have the tools, skills, and most importantly the culture to react and deliver internet era services as a response to change.

Back in 2019 I wrote about creating new services being like baking a cake, and now it's more important than ever to have those ingredients for making an internet era service available.

Let's take the Household Support Fund as an example, something councils across the country are distributing and had to do initially at short notice.

To create an internet era service you'll ideally need online forms and workflow capabilities, a way of checking the validity of bank details before they're submitted, some sort of case or request management functionality linked to your forms and workflow, and ideally some way of programmatically accessing your finance system to make and record approved payments, and you'll have to bake them together to create a new internet era service.

More than that though, you'll need teams across the organisation to come together collaborate, not just Digital but service delivery teams, other professional services like Finance, IT, and Legal.

This is only possible if the organisation in question has evolved enough to be able to create an internet era service at pace, both culturally and technologically, and can do it again when the next change comes along, and again, and again.

There's still a place for transformation as a solution to legacy issues, but to be resilient to change, organisations need to think beyond transformation and embrace evolution.