Lord Maude took part in last year's 53rd ICA Conference in Bucharest, Romania. From the 23rd to 26th of September, Keynote speakers from around the globe delivered their presentations on the topic area of “Seamless Government & Anticipating Citizens Needs”. Lord Maude’s session covered the topic of ‘Proactive Personalisation of Government Services’ - ‘Leaving No One Behind’
This comes at a time where the public sector is in a transitional phase towards the digitisation of services to its citizens. As citizens we have experienced a high level of our digital needs provided in the private sector. The private sector has vast amounts of data from us as customers. Our behaviour, tends, likes and dislikes are stored and as such they are able to predict services and products before we (the customer) have even made the request. Thus, we are more demanding and in our interaction with the government we desire a personalised, quick, transparent and seamless transaction. Government’s around the world are catching up with this fact and many have already put the digital infrastructure in place to cope with these demands. Between 2010-2015 Lord Maude was the key driver behind the Digital and IT reforms in UK government.
Lord Maude presented to the floor his work with Delivering Digital to the UK government during the years 2010-2015. Under Francis’ leadership, the British Government went from being infamous for expensive and unsuccessful government IT projects to being the world leader for digital government. He created the Government Digital Service, now replicated by governments in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Israel. Its relentless focus on citizen need drove radical process redesign that massively increased user satisfaction. The source code for the award-winning gov.uk single web domain is now used by governments across the world.
The panel’s presentations were followed by a 20 minute Q & A session. A common question raised to all members was ‘What were the challenges?’. In response Lord Maude targeted that ‘a fundamental challenge was the lack of capacity to try new things… innovation in the public sector is restricted and the culture needs changing… try something new, don’t be afraid of failure but learn quickly from it, try again and watch that breed innovation and successful reform’.
Francis Maude and Simone Finn set up FMA on leaving Government in 2016, to work with governments around the world and to help them with the implementation of challenging reform. FMA is a team of experienced practitioners who work with governments on how to implement efficiency reforms, save money and deliver good outcomes for their citizens.
They lead a team with deep experience in government, who understand that deciding what to do is only 10% of the challenge; 90% is in the execution. |
