Digital Government Won’t Appear Overnight
A corollary to Dan Sheldon’s Article
For your readers, the question they should be at the stage of asking is “so what?”
Whilst I absolutely agree that there is a huge, huge mess of stuff going on in some parts of UK Government, it took more than 35 years for some of that “mess” to get there and like moving into a new flat with your family, it was tidy when it started.
A key part of lean-agility is to make incremental changes happen, not least because you can’t go faster than the culture let’s you change (big programmes find that out the hard way time and time again). Changing that level of technical legacy, which has 35 years worth of knowledge about the domain baked into it, from people who have not only retired, but have since died (if the comments from the DWP tech talk in Manchester a year or two ago were anything to go by) is not an overnight flip. To do so is just another form of Big-Bang waterfall transformation that, like all Big Bang transformations, is subject to higher levels of failure than the equivalent smaller set of transforms. That statement is both empirically evident and one borne out in mathematical proof (it genuinely is a stochastic exercise). To quote an earlier point I read, you can’t ban maths.
Hence, you have to work with that knowledge and the richness it brings, to drive your programmes with a statistically higher chance of delivering value each time.
E
