Following an extensive career in digital transformation across multiple local and national government projects, Chris Page shares his wisdom on how to create meaningful change which supports the most vulnerable in society.
Recently pivoting, Page now works as an AI research Engineer for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. He shares his fascination with this area and his expectations for where it will lead government in the future.
What motivates you to lead on digital transformation?
Still slightly annoyed at having "completely missed” the invention of the Web before its release, Page says his strategy has been to “walk the horizon” rather than scanning it. Imagining new technologies are already working, Chris asks from this viewpoint “what could we construct?”
Following a formative spiritual experience, Page has also been guided by his “teacher’s heart” and willingness to try to facilitate the creation of environments and tools to help those who might be struggling to flourish.
A lifelong learner, Page found the WISARD neural network in AI at Brunel University early in his career, an area he has returned to now with much excitement. He explains his “need to get to the level where I can see how (something) is working.” Continuing to research and understand new technologies throughout his career, Page has developed an extensive understanding of the digital world across the last five decades,
What is your strategy for developing teams that deliver digital transformation?
Before building a successful team, Page ensures he understands the role he plays within the group environment. He prefers to work on the “sharp end” of delivering, observing “where I function is as a catalyst, working with people to understand the issues and then deploying resources to solve them.”
Page suggests the key to creating a transformative team is collaborative training. He appoints motivated people in lower level roles who are given an exciting project to train on. Once they have mastered this, their role is to train the next low-level recruit on this project, before moving onto something new. This allows recruits to gain a variety of experiences in their early careers, setting them up for a range of future opportunities.
To ensure processes are valuable, Page ideally suggests team members are allocated time in the working week to review their workflows and see if they could be doing anything more effectively.
Page’s new proposal for teams is to create what he calls a skimmers team, who spend up to one day working on understanding a use case and finding possible solutions, like a mini hackathon. They produce enough possibilities to then test the options with an AI model and have it evaluate success on a task. Leaderboards could be made to keep track of which individuals and teams are saving the most time and resources through working on solutions in this manner.
Can you talk through the digital transformation projects you’ve been involved in across your career? What made these projects successful?
Project 1
Back in the 1980s Page worked at Ealing Education Authority, training teachers on the new computers being introduced into classrooms across the region. He pioneered the development of innovative, accessible solutions to help disabled children at a special needs school in the area.
One example of success was introducing foot pedals to allow a physically disabled child to type on a computer. This child went on to sit and achieve A-Levels with ease, opening up further education opportunities.
According to Page, part of what made this project impactful was the strong leadership of an inspirational headteacher he describes as “very focused on what she could achieve with children who have had a poor start in life.” This demonstrates the value of being focused on citizen outcomes as a digital transformation leader to create effective change.
Project 2
Following his success working in a local authority, Page founded a company which designed a word processing software called Folio. This was designed with educator’s needs in mind, so when a child pressed a key the letter would be slowly drawn according to the curriculum’s specific writing scheme.
The software gradually enabled some children to learn to write and “took off” in Page’s words, due to the value it provided for all children learning to write. The visual database package, Seelinks, introduced innovative ways to handle data. A different package delivering the same idea was eventually picked up by Microsoft and known as PivotViewer.
Project 3
From here, Page moved on to working for Hereward College, which during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was the national provider of additional education for physically disabled people. Once again it was a “visionary” principal who saw the possibilities of digital transformation in helping students become more independent.
Here he designed the Nuffield Interactive Books System (NIBS), a learning platform which allowed physically disabled children to access course materials and record and analyse their own notes. He wrote a paper on the system, revealingly titled “I can read, but I can’t turn the pages.”
Project 4
Page’s next government projects began when he moved to Warwickshire County Council, where he has worked on various transformation projects since 1994. Having noticed that different legacy systems were being employed across schools, Page proposed a project to unify the IT provision across the schools in the county.
Through collaboration with exceptional teachers in the region he designed a unified learning platform with software that covered the entire curriculum to empower good practice. It featured a shared area for documents which could be valuable for multiple staff members and integrated with the SIMS administrative system - back in 2002!
Having a unified platform saved the time and resources of both user-teachers and provider-technicians, both of whom only needed to be trained on one system. Schools chose to be involved in the project over private systems and ultimately over 40,000 students were supported by the platform.
Project 5
Following his work in education, Page turned to supporting another vulnerable group, those who live in remote areas. Having taken on some work connecting schools to the broadband network, Page became involved in a government scheme providing connectivity to the wider consumer market.
Page built a smart mapping system which demonstrated which areas had connectivity and which were being missed by providers, back in 2011. Using this data, superfast broadband was able to be delivered to 98% of the region, using an “excellent,” innovative gap finance model in collaboration with commercial partners and central government. Page then scaled up to providing better broadband nationally as part of Building Digital UK's Project Gigabit.
Overall though, Page sees the microelectronics revolution in the 1970s as the greatest technological transformation in recent decades. He says “the impact of that was phenomenal and it all stemmed from somebody having an idea and managing to present it to the right people at the right time.”
Page remembers meeting a child who used the Sinclair personal computer, which developed following these advancements, to learn to read by following programming instructions at the age of fourteen. The microelectronics advancement saw the BBC set up the BBC Micro project for increasing computer literacy, rocketing microelectronics into public view. This phenomenon even gave rise to the UK’s games industry.
Page observes “that’s what we need now - we need the same sort of (revolutionary) idea.” The current advancement of AI has exactly this kind of potential, according to Page and motivated a career pivot for him.
Why have you shifted to focusing on AI these days?
“I tend to listen to all the people who are at the sharp end… and I could see the kind of direction we were going in” towards greater AI adoption across many sectors. For Page, this is a new development opportunity in an exciting, expanding area.
He says “for me, it’s always been obvious that the answer is the neural network” as the systems which allow AI to “think” and learn over time fascinate him. However, this kind of intelligence does not need to be viewed as a form of artificial human intelligence, instead it is an intelligence of its own to Page, a unique machine intelligence.
While Page acknowledges that the “pessimists are right” to recognise the shortcomings of AI, “optimists build the future.” This is a version of the Thomas L. Friedman quote: “pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong, but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists,” from The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalisation. With this mindset, he champions recent AI advances and says “I have taken it as my responsibility to evangelise some examples of things that it can do.”
By using additional tools following the Model Context Protocol, AI can overcome simple challenges it faced before, such as failing to identify the number of letters As in banana. For example, Page has now used Open AI's O3 model to write research papers like this - and this - and this from simple prompts.
Where do you think the UK government is at in terms of AI adoption and what needs to be done next?
Page is a big fan of the Incubator for AI model which rapidly scans for areas that government could be using AI, tests tools to aid them, scales these models and then advises departments on deployment. Having a “start-up mentality inside of government”is really valuable according to Page, who highlights that cultural change will be needed to see greater AI adoption across government.
Additionally, Page highlights how economists have observed that it took many years for technological advancements like electricity and the computer to create productivity gains. Organisational transformation was also necessary to see increased output, as processes needed to be modified - a paradigm shift needs to occur. Ultimately Page suspects AI will follow a similar trajectory. While the gains may be huge, we will have to be patient before we see them in the productivity figures.
Therefore creating structural changes and reviewing government processes will be key for future AI adoption. Page recommends capitalising on the expertise of the “grassroots: staff who have been working in government transformation for years and understand how the organisation currently works, so they can recognise where AI will be most valuable.
Taking an optimistic approach - even in the face of the unlikely - has proven successful in digital transformation before. As explained in this conversation Page had with ChatGPT transistors only became valuable when people realised they could be connected, and they now form the basis of modern electronics.
Succinctly, Page concludes: ”If we treat LLMs as transistors—cheap, fast, probabilistic language switches - and we invest in the circuitry around them—structured memory, symbolic constraints, verification layers - then tomorrow’s composite agents may do for reasoning what integrated circuits did for computation.”
Perhaps this is a wake up call for more of us to join Page in walking the horizon, rather than simply scanning it.