The man from the ministry

James Gardner has been chief technology officer at the Depart­ment for Work and Pen­sions (DWP) since August 2009. Previously, he was head of innovation at Lloyds Banking Group (LBG). He talks to Angelica Mari about the challenges and opportunities posed by his new job.

What prompted you to move to the DWP?
I was at Lloyds during its integration exercise and had an interesting, big role. But at the DWP, we know that we’ll have to do things differently in the future and that is going to mean a lot of change. LGB is doing integration work, whereas the DWP will have to transform.

What was your brief when you started?
I am here to run the tech strategy, innovation and architecture teams. When I got here, we were concluding the previous funding cycle and starting a new round of planning and it seemed we would be in a position to integrate those three strands of technology.

You have an unorthodox view of innovation. How hard is it for you to put your ideas into practice in a public sector department?
When I was working at LBG in a highly regulated banking environment, it was quite difficult to introduce change. By contrast, when I came to the DWP, I found there was a lot less inertia with regard to innovation. Everyone accepted that innovation was key to what we’ll do in future.

There is one key difference between introducing innovation in the public and private spheres: in the public sector, you don’t have a proper budget whereas in the private sector you do, so there is a difference in the drivers for being innovative. In the private sector, what matters is the innovation that hits the top line.

You recently worked for a week “on the ground” at a Jobcentre. What were the key lessons of that experience?
It was an eye-opener to see frontline staff customise the systems and processes we had provided by creating Excel spreadsheets and Word macros to make their jobs better. It goes to show that these people who aren’t IT professionals can actually do IT professional things when they have the opportunity to do so.

What will be your main focus areas this year?
We have some budget challenges coming up and we are thinking about radical ways in which we can face those challenges. One way is to crowd source strategy development – we felt we needed a level of detail on our business case that might take years for our strategy team to come up with. By bringing all the brains of our IT organisation together, we made 200 decisions in one and a half days and contributed 50,000 words to a strategy document.

Read the full interview with James Gardner here