GovTech Summit 2025

Thursday, March 20, 2025

Great day at the GovTech Summit yesterday! Started off the day with delightful impromptu coffee with Rachel Murphy, James Findlay, and Emilia Hogarth — wonderful to reconnect after so long. Something very lovely (and valuable) about just being in town and bumping into people.

Early talks focussed on themes that have been pretty consistent/familiar over the years - leadership, skills, performance management, funding models, process, etc - but a good bit of disagreement around the acceptance of failure: should ministers openly own up to honourable failures, or is that just politically naïve / therefore never gonna happen? Still an open question, but an important one as I think it sits underneath and blocks progress on a lot of those other themes. 

Pat McFadden summed up the challenge well in his closing panel: it’s not so much a problem with the people, but with the accumulated risk-aversion and process complexity, and (implied) the difficulty in dismantling that. It’s a tough thing when the tools that used to keep you safe start to lock you into decline. But I think that’s where we are. And fixing that will need political leadership and a willingness to defend those honourable failures. Josh Simons – on a different panel – gave an optimistic point on this, saying that in his conversations with voters, the overwhelming trend is that people understand not everything will go perfectly, and that if you’re straight with them, they’re pretty understanding.

Great chat with Ian Makgill from Spend Network about the practical uses of AI, avoiding the hype curve, getting the value and the mindset shift that needs. There’s definitely a change in thinking required for getting the best out of AI technologies. So one must keep an open mind. But, as someone wise once said, not so open our brains fall out.

Great to meet Seb Barker (AI transcription for casework), Deven Ghelani (bridging the policy/delivery divide), Wyndham Plumptre (a modern procurement platform - good work in an area deeply in need of disruption), Maryam Torshizi (agentic deep research that sounds like it’ll give ChatGPT a run for its money) – all doing very interesting work

Panel with Georgia Gould, minister for procurement, was probably the highlight of the panels - talking about the procurement challenges faced by government. Some legislative, with general optimism about the Procurement Act on that front; others cultural, with perhaps slightly less optimism from the panel but lots of positive action – pilot/small scale experiements going on to try and move things forward.

There was some talk about it being great for SMEs to contract with government through large primes (No. It. Bloody. Isn’t.) and she jumped straight in to say that direct spend is what counts, and that’s what they’re measuring – fantastic stuff. Looking forward to more!