The man from the ministry

James Gardner has been the chief technology officer at the Department for Work and Pensions since August 2009. Previously, he was head of innovation at Lloyds Banking Group. In this interview, he talks to Angelica Mari about the new challenges and opportunities of his new job.

James Gardner talks to Computing Magazine

What prompted you to make the transition from the private sector to civil service?
I was at Lloyds during their integration exercise. I headed innovation and was also the CIO of technology investment, an interesting, big role. But at the [DWP], we know that, partly because of the financial circumstances, we’ll have to do things differently in the future and that is going to mean a lot of change. The challenge at Lloyds Banking Group was more about integration than transformation.

What was your initial brief when you started?

I am here to run the tech strategy, innovation and architecture teams. When I first 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. I’m interested in what can you achieve if you have those three areas together; strategy is like steering a ship, innovation is about discovering how to make the ship sail faster, differently or better. And the architects design the ship; so having these functions together brings a whole host of opportunities.

You are known in the IT community as someone with 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 difficult to introduce change. There were also challenges around introducing new ideas, particularly during the integration [with HBOS] because they had that massive imperative to join those banks.

By contrast, when I came to the DWP, I found there was less inertia regarding innovation. Everyone accepted that innovation was key to what we’ll do in future, so I didn’t have to convince anyone of its value. It has been easier to make things happen here.

When it comes to introducing innovation in the public and private sectors, there is one key difference: in the public sector, we don’t have a proper budget whereas in the private I did, so there is a difference in the drivers for creating change. At the DWP, for example, it is all about increasing efficiency while reducing spend. In the private sector it is different: you want all those things as well, but the innovation that matters is the stuff that hits the top line.

You recently worked for a week “on the ground” at a Job Centre in Scotland. What lessons did you learn from a technology standpoint?

It might seem obvious, but what you imagine it is true at the centre, it is not always true when you get to the frontline. You spent a lot of time putting together requirements and building user cases, but they don’t always suit all the people that will use them.

It was an eye opener to see how staff at Job Centres adapt the technology. They customise what we do for them in order to work more efficiently. The extent to which that is happening is interesting. Staff are building their own systems like Excel spreadsheets and Word macros to supplement what we provided. This shows that these people who aren’t IT professionals can actually do IT professional things when they have the opportunity to do so. This is an example of the business-IT line blurring.

What sort of agenda are you trying to push at the DWP in terms of its online strategy?

As a result of government policy, the department has a digitalisation agenda and we want to put as many services online as possible, so much of the work we are doing is around that. However, there is a lot of human decision-making involved in what we do, making the digitalisation agenda very challenging - there are many things we do that can’t be done electronically.

What will be your main focus areas this year?

Like the rest of the public sector we have some budget challenges, as does the rest of the public sector. Meeting them will require some radical differences in the way we do things.

We are planning some really radical approaches which could see differences in the way technology is delivered as well as the assumptions we might make for some of the systems we build.

Regarding these cuts, you can’t just present an idea and hope you’ll get investment money for it. You need a certain level of detail on your business case and we felt it could take years for our strategy team to achieve this.

The DWP has a very large IT organisation, so we used all those brains for feedback in what we called a crowd sourced strategy development. By doing that, we made 200 decisions in one and a half days and the result has been about 50,000 words on a strategy document that is very detailed and can answer the questions we need to answer.

Can you provide some practical examples of ongoing innovative projects that might help reduce your overall cost base?

We are now looking at increasing virtualisation, consolidating datacentres and enhancing the way we operate our networks. It takes a little longer for us to get into production, but we will virtualise more. As a large IT shop, how can you not?

Ways of cutting travel is also important, since the department is geographically distributed across the UK. It helps with our carbon targets and also with our travel expenses if we can find smart ways of using technology [to that effect]. For example, we are trialling web cams on personal computers and immersive videoconferencing. One challenge is to get people to agree that videoconferencing can be just as good as face-to-face.

What will be your main challenges in 2010?

In order to meet the budgets we need to, we will have a work hard to “bring people along”. The most rewarding thing for me so far has been that at the DWP, your ideas get challenged, but people don’t try to kill them just because they are new.