The Digital Agency

Digital Asset Ownership

In addition to being digital transformation leaders our managers need to be confident and competent in managing technology assets, just as they are with traditional “old economy” assets. They must be the financial/asset owners of the IT systems that drive their businesses, giving them the right incentives to manage them efficiently and effectively. They need to exhibit all the symptoms of ownership in every sense of the word, especially given that these assets are intimately connected to their business model and business transformation objectives.

It’s also important to recognise that the nature of these assets is changing. Historically ICT assets (in the CIO’s eyes) have aligned with capital assets (in the CFO’s eyes), but as more-and-more services transition to the cloud with consumption-based charging, this relationship increasingly breaks.The traditionally strong link between financial asset management and digital asset management has to evolve to one that focuses on a Digital Agency’s real assets: its information, its technology supply framework, and the digital competence of its staff. These all need to be just as actively managed and invested in as the “tin” once was.

Digital Service Delivery and Identity Management

It will become increasingly unacceptable in the digital age for customers to have to maintain separate electronic relationships with many different Digital Agencies in order to manage their personal and business affairs. Currently it is not uncommon for a business or a citizen to have to provide the same information and validate their circumstances multiple times to multiple Agencies, for ostensibly the same purpose.

Addressing this problem increasingly requires the Digital Agency to work with other agencies to deliver genuinely customer-centric services, with all of the financial co-operation and system integration complexities that entails. In other words, taking digital service delivery to “the next level” of sophistication requires an all-of-government approach that requires some level of government-wide governance. As we all know, that’s hard work, but it’s important to make our customer’s experience more joined up and satisfactory.

Equally challenging is the inescapable conclusion that integrated digital service delivery has to be underpinned by some form of digital identity management. That is not a big challenge for businesses, but can create significant public policy concerns in relation to citizens. We need to find a way to making digital identity management work at a national level while also protecting citizens’ legitimate rights.

Do we still need a CIO?

I was recently asked how I was going leading my agency’s digital transformation. I answered that I wasn’t, that I was supporting the executives in my Agency with their digital transformation efforts. As this article makes clear, I am absolutely persuaded that that’s the right approach. In fact I’d go as far as saying that if an Agency believes that digital transformation is the CIO’s job, then they are already in trouble.Yes we will always need some high-end technical expertise in our Agencies just like we will always need legal and financial expertise. But more critically, we need transformation skills, digital skills and information-age asset management skills that are in evidence in all of our leaders at every level, and we will have to invest heavily to get there.