Government digital chief outlines extent of legacy IT challenge

As the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) progresses with its vision to evolve the UK government’s digital, data and technology (DDaT) function, its leader said tackling legacy would be key to achieving digital transformation ambitions across central government.

The CDDO was set up in January 2021 to lead the DDaT function across departments and strengthen its collective leadership, in collaboration with senior IT decision-makers across government. The goals of the new office are directly related to digital and technology transformation, particularly in relation to improving user access and experience of government services and harnessing the use of data.

Working alongside the Government Digital Service (GDS), the brief at the CDDO also includes monitoring and assessing the delivery of major digital and data programmes across government, looking at issues such as systems resilience and interoperability.

At an event promoted by industry association TechUK on 22 September, CDDO executive director Joanna Davinson talked about the office’s broad agenda, which has the delivery of public services as one of its key pillars.

“It all starts with how to ensure we are actually serving the general public, whether that’s individual citizens or businesses or others that interact with government,” she said.

“We have to recognise that in a digital world, there’s no reason why we should expect people to understand how the government is structured. What matters is that people can access the services they need when they need them,” Davinson added. “That takes us into a whole world of how we genuinely measure, test and challenge ourselves to make our services as usable as possible.”

“In a digital world, there’s no reason why we should expect people to understand how the government is structured. What matters is that people can access the services they need when they need them”

Joanna Davinson, Central Digital and Data Office

While recognising that delivery of these services is up to departments, the CDDO leader noted that the government needed to be “much more consistent” in relation to providing an end-to-end user experience. “That’s challenging, [because] the government is very, very federated,” Davinson said. “We’re doing a number of things on that, and it’s not going to change overnight.”

Commenting about a case whereby a citizen told her about her inconvenience of having to fill out a vast amount of paper forms to apply for UK citizenship and her frustration about why such processes were not yet available online, Davinson said the government needed to get “much better” at how it sets the standards that lead to interoperability in digital and data.

“We’ve got a mission to set appropriate data standards and work across departments to work out how we can share data more effectively,” she noted. According to the CDDO head, evolving on that front depends on addressing the issues caused by the ageing IT infrastructure across government.

“We still have a lot of legacy, [as well as] a lot of risk in our legacy platforms. But we’ve got a fabulous opportunity as well, in terms of moving more [applications] into the cloud, doing that in a way that enables us to continue to be interoperable and to actually know where our data is,” Davinson pointed out, adding that she is often quizzed about this.

“Increasingly, that is something that I get challenged on by ministers in terms of [whether] we really understand where our data is and have we really managed the risk,” she noted.