In the fourteenth century, the Woolsack was adopted as the seat for the Lord Chancellor of the House of Lords, the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Stuffed with English wool, due to the importance of the wool trade to the British Isles, the Woolsack was a symbol of the nation’s prosperity. Now the seat of the Lord Speaker, the Woolsack retains its status as an important link between the past and present.

If he could have a Woolsack in the Cabinet Office, Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) CIO and CISO John Suffolk would probably do so. A practitioner of rare sheep husbandry in his spare time, he cites analogies between tending rare sheep and overseeing IT for HMG. Indeed, the Transformational Government initiative Suffolk has spearheaded for the past four years embodies some of those very connections.

“If you create services and projects that are compelling to citizens and businesses, they will respond well,” Suffolk says. “Rare sheep don’t always flock together but rather scatter. It thus takes a great deal of patience to herd them.

“The same is true of change management in any large, complex organization, which is the core of the Transformational Government initiative: It is about patience, about playing the long game, and getting the conditions right internally.”

Transformational Government: three themes

The Transformational Government initiative was commissioned by then Prime Minister Tony Blair and launched in November 2005 with the vision of delivering public services via the power of new technologies. The initiative touches all organizations and aspects of HMG; strategy and action is coordinated by the Cabinet Office. Suffolk explains that it takes a macro-level view of technology with three primary themes.

The first places citizens and businesses at the core of what IT does. “All too often, in both the private and public sectors, customers and citizens are expected to conduct business on the terms of the provider rather than on their own terms,” Suffolk says. “Rather, we want to approach IT initiatives from the lens of the citizen and business.”

The second is about shared services. “Many IT organizations focus on back-office functions such as HR and finance,” Suffolk says. “Our approach is all about sharing: everything from knowledge, architectural design, facilities, and computer systems—anything that allows us to stop reinventing the wheel. With nearly five million public servants, we’ve likely solved most problems.”

The third is the professionalization of IT-enabled business change. “This is not about professionalizing IT,” Suffolk says. “Change is a horizontal activity and not vertical. It is a whole host of things: the portfolio of management, the allocation of resources to projects based on their requirements and level of priority, competency models, and accountability.”

These three themes drive the IT initiatives of each agency and department. And while the different IT projects they initiate are based on their own priorities and requirements, the overall frame doesn’t change; these three themes serve as the lens. The Cabinet Office provides the macro level, while the individual agencies, departments, and local authorities drive the micro-level component.

Focus on citizens and businesses

Suffolk explains that it is not the job of the Cabinet Office to do the work of the individual departments, agencies, or local authorities. “They are the experts in terms of their specific constituents and organizational requirements and understand the needs of their constituents much better than the Cabinet Office,” Suffolk says. “Instead, we take the best ideas, package them, and then replay them as a best practice. Of course, this doesn’t mean everyone must use them—or more specifically has a need to use them.”

Suffolk and his team have spent a lot of time gaining insight into the requirements of citizens and businesses, and this is used to help guide decision making at the department, agency, and local authority levels. “We must work with every citizen, in every language, of every ability, across every single channel,” Suffolk says. “Satisfaction of services and the intimacy of the interaction are determined by the type of service being provided and local requirements and culture.”

As part of this process, a Customer Insight Forum was established to champion the cause of the service. A series of documents were published to be used a baseline for measuring customer satisfaction. In conjunction with this effort, the Cabinet Office rolled out a Customer Service Excellence standard, achieved by more than 100 government organizations to date.

Shared services

As with the private sector, the economic shifts over the past year are shaping the agenda of Suffolk and the Cabinet Office. “Excellent service to citizens and businesses will still be at the forefront of our agenda,” he says, “but even more focus on driving value out of the investments we make will be paramount. To make progress we must re-use, not re-invent. We must invest where we can create value for all, not for one. We must engage with citizens, as we cannot second-guess the needs of those who use our services. We must collaborate and integrate services across the many and varied boundaries, as we cannot operate in isolation.”

Efforts involving shared services fall into three phases. The first phase was to evangelize the concept of shared services and to ascertain if they would be internal or external. With the objectives of flexibility and agility in the foreground, the Cabinet Office determined they should be developed and managed in-house. As a result, centers of excellence were created that limited the number of shared service centers; this increased volumes while improving and refining processes for lower cost.

“We picked departments from the upper end of the curve in terms of capability,” Suffolk notes. The majority of central government employees are now served by shared HR, finance, and procurement services. The Department of Work and Pension is a poster child, providing shared services across multiple departments and agencies for its more than 118,000 customers. To date, savings are estimated at £100 million.

The second phase focuses on driving the adoption and breadth of shared services. Suffolk and the Cabinet Office formed the Pan-Government Shared Service Group to bring together directors of key public sector shared services centers. They share best practices and encourage joint problem solving and strategy development. “The efforts are really beginning to gain momentum,” Suffolk reports. “Some of our shared services have won awards.”

The final phase is all about consolidation. “We are just reaching this point and will begin to rationalize existing services and focus on non-HR and finance functions and establish workflows that span multiple shared services,” Suffolk says.

IT-enabled business change

Suffolk argues that IT cannot enable business change without the right level of professionalism. With this in mind, the Cabinet Office established the competency and skills frameworks that provide organizations and individuals with a common professional language. These consist of elements such as skills identification, recruitment, performance management, and workforce planning.

At the end of the day, the success—or failure—of the IT initiatives for HMG falls to individuals. “Projects and technology are all transient, here today and gone tomorrow,” Suffolk says. “However, what never changes and is enduring is the investment made in people. One of the most important pieces of feedback I received during my career was when I assumed charge as the chair of the CIO Council. A member came to me and told me ‘John, we do things, not because you tell us to do them, but because they’re the right things to do’.”

Procurement benchmark, standards

Each U.K. agency, department, and local authority manages its own data center, set of applications, IT functions, and contracts. Along with open, common standards as a core requisite, the Cabinet Office established supplier procurement criteria.

Suffolk and his team began by identifying technology components that could be reduced to a logical view, a benchmark of functionality and cost. They started with desktop systems and required suppliers to reset their pricing to be in line with the predetermined benchmark. Given the scale of HMG, £100 saved on running each PC in the organization saves HMG about £400 million annually. Suffolk is doing the same with telecommunications components, which will accrue another £500 million in savings.

“And we’re doing the same thing with data centers right now,” Suffolk says. “We have about 130 data centers in the central government today, and we probably need about 9 to 12. The research shows that we’ll probably save a net £900 million in the first five years and £300 million annually thereafter.”

Suffolk goes on to explain that HMG will create a private government cloud and application store, and from those they will build utility-based services. “Cost efficiencies are very important right now, and these initiatives will save many hundreds of millions of Sterling,” Suffolk says. “Nonetheless, delivering the right services to citizens and business, where they want them and how they want them, is our number one priority.

“The job of the Cabinet Office is to help our IT suppliers gain insight into our business requirements by signaling and sign posting,” Suffolk says. As a result, Suffolk seeks out strategic relationships with his suppliers. “I want to understand the strategies and direction of our suppliers and for them to understand mine at the same time.”

Eventually, once these services are in the cloud, Suffolk predicts they will be purchased at the level of HMG. “We will buy them at the Crown level, not the departmental level,” Suffolk predicts. Therefore, any department, agency, or local authority will have the ability to use the service.”

A history of transformation

Sheep husbandry on the British Isles dates to about 50 CE when the Romans established a large wool processing factory in Winchester. By 1000 CE, England and Spain were recognized as the twin centers of sheep production in the Western world. And by the time of Elizabeth I, the sheep and wool trade was the primary source of tax revenue to the Crown of England.

Just as the sheep and wool trade was critical to England’s transformation from a water-bound island state to a world empire, technology possesses immense potential to transform how HMG communicates with and serves its citizens. Ironically, the connection may be more than an analogy; the high concentration and more sedentary nature of husbandry in the British Isles gave rise over time to an exceptional variety of breeds—some of which may have descendants among the sheep tended by Suffolk today.

Patrick E. Spencer (Ph.D.) is the editor in chief for CIO Digest and the author of a book and various articles and reviews published by Continuum Books and Sage Publications, among others.