Transform UK: SME – small, mighty, essential #techUKDigitalPS

A worn-out aphorism states that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. The UK’s SMEs know this and have been investing time and money in new technologies. Combined with the public sector’s opportunities there’s plenty of scopes to create the luck we so badly need right now.

12 years ago, I was working for one such SME when we offered to help the government out for free in researching, analysing, and writing the “DirectGov review”, colloquially known as the Martha Lane-Fox report. This was not the first time that someone had proposed that Agile, open source and User-Centred Design was the right way to deliver technology services, but it was the first time that these recommendations actually stuck and moved from the drawing board to reality.

The Government Digital Service was created and the monopoly big tech players had on the market was broken. The government’s digital marketplace was open to players of all sizes, and companies like mine jumped at the opportunities this presented. We delivered faster, cheaper, and better. Like our work with the Office of the Public Guardian, re-building a poor and expensive big-tech service in a high-quality, value-for-money way. But even more importantly, we upskilled civil servants so they could take ownership of the service and run and develop it themselves going forward. Demonstrating our partnership approach in the easiest way and displacing the myth that consultancies only ever land and expand. Then we moved on to other, equally interesting opportunities.

Over the coming decade, new opportunities arose, often from chaos. Brexit shocked us all, including it would transpire, an unprepared UK government, that needed help to build “global Britain” – or at least make certain our international trade did not collapse. Again, SMEs were quicker to learn and adapt to the new trade regimes, helping the newly formed Department for International Trade build processes and systems to manage tariffs and quotas, trade disputes and everything else that the EU had done for us previously. In parallel, the Northern Ireland situation introduced hard deadlines for changing regimes, and here we helped HMRC, Department for Transport and multiple agencies avoid catastrophe by providing the technology needed to deal with the new borders.

And then the world was struck by a plague! Millions of schoolchildren were forced to stay at home, and the government scrambled to try to get them the internet connectivity and equipment necessary to continue their learning in a remote fashion. My team was in the Department for Education within 2 weeks of being asked, working in 1-day sprints to deal with the fluid situation and manage the complex roll-out of equipment, connectivity and services. I’m not certain if we did everything right, but I’m 100% certain that things could have been much worse if we hadn’t been there to help.

And then there was a war and even before that was over the next wave of uncertainty is upon us.

There doesn’t seem to be any online space that isn’t full of voices worrying about both the threat and the promise of AI in all its different forms. There are many similarities between the fear and uncertainty surrounding Brexit and Covid, and I’m convinced the SMEs of the UK can once again make a big difference here. We’re diverse, open to experimentation and able to move fast and pivot existing technology to new uses. To paraphrase another wise man, even if we don’t take the UK to heaven, the epitome of small but mighty.

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This article was written by Johan Hogsander, Managing Director, Transform. Johan is the Managing Director of Transform, part of the Next15 group. Johan’s experience in digital transformation started in the early 2000s, supporting both businesslink.gov.uk and Directgov and later going on to work with the team writing the Digital Service. Johan has since then, worked with public and private organisations to help them adopt Agile approaches, build internal digital teams and capabilities, use their data more efficiently, and develop new digital services, and generally become fit for the digital age. To learn more about this author, please connect with him via his LinkedIn.

Transform is a consultancy helping public and private sector organisations through successful Digital Transformation. To learn more about Transform, please visit their LinkedIn and Twitter.

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