National Audit Office Auditor General Keynote: A review and recommendations - Part 4
Digital Transformation - a paradigm shift in thinking
In the previous blog post (part 3) in our series we focused on public procurement being much more than just buying.
However, as one of the most critical yet underleveraged areas of public policy - governance, transparency, and accountability - more innovation-friendly public procurement is almost entirely indivisible from digital transformation when collectively optimising for:
Delivering better public services;
Maximising value for taxpayers’ money; and
Achieving improved social, cultural, environmental and economic well-being for our communities.
For us, this represents a much-needed paradigm shift away from a typically far too narrow focus on procurement towards thinking holistically about the entire commercial lifecycle.
We call this paradigm shift digital commercial, which builds on Tom Loosemore’s definition of digital and maintains this as a ‘golden thread’ of principles, practices and ways of working at every stage where funding decisions are made, which should positively impact how public money is invested towards achieving these 3 goals above.
We’re not alone in our thinking along these lines. The World Economic Forum G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance recently updated their global policy roadmap to include several new model policies, such as:
Innovation-friendly procurement - among other useful resources this model policy refers extensively to the United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU) ‘United for Smart Sustainable Cities’ (U4SSC) global initiative’s Procurement Guidelines for Smart Sustainable Cities; and
Public sector asset use - among other useful resources this model policy refers to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) People-first Public-Private Partnerships Evaluation Methodology for the Sustainable Development Goals.
Curshaw Commercial were delighted to contribute to the development of both of these model policies, and we continue to co-lead the ITU U4SSC Thematic Group that delivered the Procurement Guidelines for Smart Sustainable Cities.
Through multilateral fora such as these and discussions with our clients, we see countless times over both the barriers and opportunities presented by procurement in support of digital transformation of public services.
Our communities must be the main beneficiaries of digitally transformed public services, and central to new integrated policies and strategies that are framed by sustainable development principles and goals.
However, among several seemingly persistent and interwoven barriers, fixing the plumbing of public sector digital, data and technology has long been cited as one of the major challenges of achieving this.
For example, the Local Digital Declaration includes this as one of the 5 principles to help achieve the shared ambitions of the 45 co-publishers and over 300 signatories since its launch in July 2018:
“We will ‘fix our plumbing’ to break our dependence on inflexible and expensive technology that doesn’t join up effectively. This means insisting on modular building blocks for the IT we rely on, and open standards to give a common structure to the data we create.”
In his annual keynote speech Davies highlights the vast challenge of:
Replacing antiquated IT systems;
Improving the quality and shareability of data; and
Recruiting and retaining scarce skills in high demand across the economy.
Again, this requires a paradigm shift in both culture and technology, and has to be underpinned by fundamentally different approaches to commercial delivery across digital public infrastructure.