Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery

by Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken

This book is for people worrying about their sinking ship. Based on experience, it is a guide for navigating the blockers, buzzwords and bloody-mindedness that doom any analogue organisation trapped into thinking that while the internet has changed the world, it won't change their world.

Companies that grew up on the web have changed our expectations of the services we rely on. We demand simplicity, speed and low cost. Organizations founded before the Internet aren't keeping up - despite spending millions on IT, marketing and 'innovation'.

This revised, expanded second edition of Digital Transformation at Scale is a guide to building a digital institution. It explains how a growing band of reformers in businesses and governments around the world have helped their organizations pivot to this new way of working, and what lessons others can learn from their experience.

It is based on the authors' experience designing and helping to deliver the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS). The GDS was a new institution made responsible for the digital transformation of government, designing public services for the Internet era. It snipped £4 billion off the government's technology bill, opened up public sector contracts to thousands of new suppliers, and delivered online services so good that citizens chose to use them over the offline alternatives, without a big marketing campaign. Other countries and companies noticed, with the GDS model now being copied around the world.

Genres: Technology, Business

240 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2021

Reviews

[Michael Howden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Describes the success story of the digital transformation of the UK government, breaking down the steps they took and lessons they learnt into easily digestible (and summarised) chapters. I'm not in a position to follow their plan verbatim, but there's plenty of good advice about building a digital team and how to hack bureaucracies.

[Nathaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Personal Notes:

Interesting book. Definitely more focused to higher levels of people in the public service. Talks about how to attract people to government. Innovation versus digital transformation. How to define which things to improve. The need for procedures/processes that are good.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ignore the endorsement from David Cameron on the back. This was genuinely interesting and useful.

[Zdenko Vrabel]

This is must-read book for everybody who's somehow dealing with eGov systems. It's not only about UK eGov. I think all what Andrew wrote is applicable in any eGov.