The importance of transforming government digital culture characterised roundtable discussions on Day Two of this year's Government Transformation Summit, focused on Data and AI.
These discussions are co-hosted by senior civil servants in the transformation space and sponsored by leading technology firms.
Building a strong digital culture
Many speakers raised the importance of creating a strong culture around data and AI with government organisations. Suggestions for building this new culture included:
- Ensuring senior leaders prepare clear governance
- Encouraging leaders in data and AI to partner and train others to reduce skills gaps
- Preventing silos by ensuring accountability for data lies across all teams and that shared missions are developed
- Increasing the risk appetite within the civil service more broadly being prepared to try and test new technologies at speed and scale
Interoperability is key
Data interoperability was a recurring theme of the roundtables. Some warned of the importance of recognising the challenge interoperability faces including context differences and a lack of shared goals.
Suggestions for addressing these challenges included:
- Ensuring information architecture is strong before developing new models such as AI tools
- Mandating the adoption of universal data standards
- Cleansing, securing and preparing data properly and producing data maturity assessments
This kind of optimisation is an ongoing project which will unlock the opportunities of mass data sharing if conducted effectively.
Putting the citizen at the centre
Conversations frequently highlighted the importance of focusing on outcomes for citizens, rather than outputs within government processes. Ensuring government focuses on solving a relevant problem before developing a solution is key.
Many of these discussions brought up the importance of developing trust. This could be trust at the back end with the vendor/supplier and employees, but also the trust of the citizen at the front end.
Developing this back end trust is all about setting shared goals and delivering with collective responsibility, according to these discussions, while developing front end comes from having a transparent adoption process, providing digital education and being cognisant of the ways different generations interact with technologies.
Lucy Baldwin
