The State of Digital Government Review: It's the right ideas, again (and again)

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

I just read the State of Digital Government review published last week. If you’d rather not read the whole thing, here’s a quick GenAI summary.

It’s a good read. It says all the right things, and it’s clear, positive, and generally free of consultantese. It feels grounded in the right kind of culture and thinking.

That said, it’s also a bit frustrating, as the “right things” have been the same for many years. Jerry Fishenden’s archive of similar documents over time (decades!) makes for sobering reading.

So why doesn’t this stuff stick? What is trapping us in this cycle, where we make progress but then fall back? Or in the words of the review, why is it that “these successes are too often achieved despite the system rather than because of it.”

A lot of what the review advocates feels like a return to the early work of GDS, which would be great. But that effort, like each bit of progress before it, has been undone over time. Not entirely – there were some lasting and important wins – but those wins didn’t bring the sweeping changes many of us expected.

Unfortunately, in some important ways, digital government today is as challenging a delivery environment as it ever was. We still see underinvestment, muddled thinking around capital versus expenditure, an overfocus on cost-cutting without sufficiently considering value, flawed procurement processes, a lack of outcome-based thinking, silos/too few teams working openly, a terribly challenging legacy IT estate and so on.

It remains the case that digital teams are tasked with delivering world-class services that drive growth, but without the levers to fix the systemic issues that are the actual problem. Because it’s not the technology that’s hard: it’s the environment it’s built in. GDS’s great breakthrough happened because it did get some of those levers, and that’s why we saw some real change under its leadership, before some rather nasty interdepartmental politics robbed it of its influence.

More positively, it’s reassuring that strong leadership, ministerial support and good thinking from the centre feel like they’re on the rise. While much of the review isn’t new, it is right, and that’s a good step forward. Here’s hoping for more of the same, and for teams that are empowered enough to actually do it.