Digital Transformation at Scale Quotes

“For the UK government, policy and economics have long reigned supreme. This created an institution exceptionally strong in those disciplines, and therefore very good at addressing issues that could be solved using just the two specialisms. For everything that requires a different perspective, such as operations, design and technology, the picture is less rosy.”
― Andrew Greenway, Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

“The challenge of digital transformation is to overcome inertia. Crises offer an opportunity to do that.”
― Andrew Greenway, Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

“It is often difficult to redesign or transform a digital service without tying it back in some way to the legacy IT. To have a chance of success, a digital mandate must make it possible to stop poorly conceived, hugely expensive and long IT contracts from being let. It must also ensure people with genuine technical knowledge are given the opportunity to interrogate new investments in IT;”
― Andrew Greenway, Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

“Four years after GDS was set up, the UK government announced that it had saved over £4 billion from its IT bills. A new marketplace to supply digital expertise enabled more than 1,200 small and medium-sized enterprises to provide services to government,”
― Andrew Greenway, Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

“The message for public officials and politicians is clear. If you don’t change the relationship between the citizen and the state to fit with the internet age soon, someone else will take over that relationship, and in ways which are not always predictable. In Los Angeles, around 30% of drivers use Waze, a smartphone app that allows road users to share real-time traffic and road information. It provides information on things like traffic accidents or police traps. Because it has become so popular, Waze has now effectively become part of the city’s transport infrastructure, with the city administration working directly with the company to alert drivers about potential delays. Perhaps that doesn’t sound especially radical – just a good example of public–private data sharing. But Waze is now much more than a transport app. Having become a part of many people’s daily lives, the app has unexpectedly morphed into a broader”
― Andrew Greenway, Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

“the CTO is there to guide the board away from making decisive calls that are logical to people with a limited understanding of technology and the market conditions associated with it, but are clearly dangerous to somebody in the know. For example, buying a new proprietary HR and finance system on a five-year deal from a supplier that the department has already worked with for ten years might seem sensible to a non-technologist. The fact that the system is a complete pain to use (and ruinously expensive) may just about crop up on the leadership radar. What may not is the fact that systems like this are likely to become commoditised–which is to say, cheap and easily swapped with similar alternatives–in less than five years. Through a combination of ignorance and inertia, the department would be locking itself into the wrong deal, and constraining itself strategically as a result. A CTO stops this kind of mistake.”
― Andrew Greenway, Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

“If it takes a real effort to find the existing rules, it is safe to assume that few people are paying attention to them. To test that hypothesis, the GDS decided to take down all of the existing web pages on standards, and wait to see what would happen. Nobody noticed.”
― Andrew Greenway, Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery