This series from Amazon Web Services (AWS) focuses on guiding public sector organisations through successful digital transformation processes, and is based on key findings from the AWS Institute. This third instalment explains how public sector organisations can introduce new technologies while managing legacy systems and streamlining procurement processes.
Digitalisation is not just about making public services digital, it’s also about a fundamental transformation of the business model of governments. Utilising new technology is one of the key tools in being successful in this – and the good news is that there are plenty of existing solutions that can accelerate the process. Cloud technology offers flexible and scalable computing power and storage, with a vast range of plug-and-play services. Maximising the benefits of existing tools demands a shift in mindset away from more traditional, large, expensive systems that quickly become inefficient, outdated and no longer fit for purpose.
Focus on needs – not features – to justify the cost
Time spent carefully mapping the technology landscape is crucial for understanding the next steps in any digital transformation. You first need to evaluate every solution against the existing needs. It is not about simply adopting the latest technologies, such as blockchain, just because they’re new, nor is it about investing in a tool just because it offers the broadest set of features.
Warren Smith, associate director and procurement specialist at transformation consultancy CURSHAW and former global digital marketplace programme director at the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS), emphasizes the need to engage with the marketplace early. It is easier to identify viable solutions once strengths, weaknesses and the overall maturity of available tools are understood.
While digitalised systems bring additional benefits, such as the ability to scale quickly, roll out additional services and introduce more modern security features, the investment in new technology must be set against the cost of having to maintain legacy systems. The money spent on new tools will be a fraction of what was being spent to keep outdated systems in place.
Make procurement simple
Innovative technology and traditional public sector processes do not always align. Procurement processes can be complex, expensive and time-consuming. Smith shares an example of why the UK government procurement process had to be made more accessible for the SME market. Smaller organisations stated that the former contracts involved were “complex, bureaucratic and created barriers for us to do business with government.”
To improve accessibility for SMEs, the UK government sought to create a digital marketplace of pre-approved suppliers, rewrote and simplified contracts to eliminate irrelevant information, made complex language clearer and required civil servants to use the digital marketplace when seeking to procure any services.
The Digital Marketplace allowed some departments to get services up and running within days, and replaced a system that had run for four years and 10 months, during which time government spent £178 million through it. In the first four years and 10 months of the Digital Marketplace, that amount rose to £2.8 billion, and around 50 per cent of government-bought services came from SMEs. Importantly, the simplified process made it much easier for government to buy services from vendors other than the usual big providers.
And the UK government experience has benefited other governments. The Australian government worked with the UK GDS team to stand up a version of Digital Marketplace in six weeks, subsequently adapting it further to meet their needs. UK GDS also worked with the Indonesian National Public Procurement Agency in 2020 on simplifying contracts, bringing greater clarity to a previously complex system. The teams developed a clear introduction to the bidding process to help potential bidders understand the basic requirements, procedure and rules. They also provided examples of the types of documents bidders would have to complete, clarified opportunities in government procurement and refined the criteria for how potential bidders are assessed. They designed editable standard online forms, where users could remove irrelevant elements such as tables and terms and include any visuals they wanted.
Deal with legacy IT
Replacement of a legacy system must allow for decades of legacy technological debt – the features and problems built up with each successive change to the system. If it can’t be replaced immediately, then a system must be maintained in the interim – for example, in the UK the Government created a company, Crown Hosting, that took the management of legacy IT off people’s hands and looked after it until it was possible to “turn it off.”
Not every legacy feature can or should be replicated on a new system, and it’s a mistake to try. For example, a new loan application system might not need to support a traditional call centre as well as a website, email and mobile messaging channels. Its users, typically younger people, might not want to use the phone. Challenger banks (retail banks whose non-traditional model is challenging high-street banks) show that an app and a chat interface can be an alternative to a call centre and a bricks-and-mortar branch.
As Shodhan Sheth from digital consultancy firm Thoughtworks says, “The key is to offload capabilities, not applications. The latter is the language of technology, while the former is the language of business. If a capability is offloaded, then it is easier to get rid of legacy tech.”
The next feature in this series from AWS will focus on how hyperscale cloud platforms offer an effective solution in addressing data security concerns for governments.