Adopting 'open' has driven change in the UK government

The government knows that data is important, but enacting change needed a shift in both culture and structure

As the UK government's National Technology Adviser, Liam Maxwell's job revolves around collecting more tax to fund public services and create "more and better" jobs in the economy. Sometimes, it's an unpopular role!

"[The government has] been through a fairly big change over the last six years", Maxwell told delegates at the Teradata Universe conference in London this week, as it moves towards an agile structure. This hasn't been without its own challenges.

The government was built in the wrong shape for agility: its siloed structure prevented it from moving quickly, and the culture was also a block. "It's very difficult, culturally, to move to a modern technology environment with reusable shared platforms," said Maxwell. In the end, he said, the contractors whom the government had outsourced work to were some of the most vocal in pressing for change.

To introduce change, the government used the concept of ‘open', in reference to four areas: open markets, open standards, open data and open source. Maxwell noted, "By driving our technology strategy towards those four goals, we started to be able to break down those silos."

Open standards was "perhaps the most difficult barrier… It took three years to get a proper open standards policy." However, it was recognised as a crucial area to focus on with the proliferation of the open internet.

The government's use of open source is quite different to its normal use in IT: there's no Github here. According to Maxwell, it is a way for governments to learn from each other by sharing knowledge, components and delivery about common practices such as issuing licences, or taxation. This should aid both speed and security.

On the use of data, Maxwell bemoaned the fact that so many governmental decisions - not just in the UK - are taken based on "‘Who has the best anecdote?'" The government, he said, needs to base its decisions on data and evidence, which means "opening up our data and…[using] the right sources of information."

Finally, ‘open markets' refers to encouraging competition in the public sector, especially when it comes to bidding. "We had spent years and years under a regime, which had made sense at the time, of treating technology like infrastructure… We had to change the way we bought things, because there was no point in trying to build things in the same way as we built a bridge."

To encourage competition the government introduced the G-Cloud (now called the Digital Marketplace), where both large and small companies can bid for tenders. Maxwell said that this has encouraged innovation by making government contracts more accessible, and 52 per cent of the spend is now with small businesses (although the platform is not without its critics).

Bringing it all together

With the transition from inefficient silos to common, reusable platforms underway, the government brought data into a single area "for policy": the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

The DCMS is intended to act as a co-ordinating body across the siloed structure of the government, to support data sharing and use across departments while also maintaining citizens' trust in data and the way that it is handled.

Acting as a single co-ordinating body means that the DCMS can bring various technology drivers under its leadership, which Maxwell named as data; artificial intelligence; data protection; the digital economy; and the internet. Legislation and regulation are key to many of these elements, he said.

With data at the core of digital - it represents as much as 15 per cent of the economy and is growing twice as fast as the economy as a whole - it is no surprise that the government is (slowly) recognising its importance, this year announcing the new Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. However, fellow Teradata attendee and speaker Justin King, ex-CEO of Sainsbury's, thought that any legislation would inevitably be two years behind the times. We'll have more of his views in a separate article.