THINK Smarter Working for Public Sector 2018

Chair's Welcoming Remarks

• David Bicknell, Editor, Government Computing

Analyst Keynote: Smarter Working, Smarter Government

GlobalData Public Sector’s chief analyst Jessica Figueras discusses the landscape for smarter working in government. Jessica will examine what tools, technology and methodologies public sector organisations need to properly equip their staff for a future with fewer buildings.

• Jessica Figueras, Chief Analyst, GlobalData Public Sector

Government Keynote: Smarter Working and the Future of Public Service Design

Like in many countries, the UK government is the nation’s oldest and largest service provider. Most people who work in government are involved, in some way, in delivering services. Everyone wants to help make the best service they can, working as smart as they can.

The challenge in government isn’t in convincing people of the value of service design. Or the value of building things for users. It is linking people up so that they can work together effectively and so deliver joined-up end-to-end services that can be sustained over time.

In this talk we’ll show how the approach of GDS and others to service design has changed over the past 5 years to tackle the next challenge for service design – scale and sustainability

• Lou Downe, Director of Design and Service Standards for the UK Government, Government Digital Service

One Team Government

Kit Collingwood-Richardson describes how in June 2017, 186 people came together in London to talk about how they could work across disciplines to make government more effective.

They aspire to make Civil Service policy and delivery the same thing, break down barriers, and talk about shared problems and goals to bring an end to siloed thinking. In short, One Team Government wants to help reform government for the benefit of citizens, with a focus on making it fit for the internet age.

• Kit Collingwood-Richardson, Deputy Director, Universal Credit, Department of Work & Pensions

Digital Dialogue

Conversation discussing the promise of Smarter Working with one of our commercial partners. What is their insight into the Smarter Working landscape? How do they see that landscape developing? What sort of developments might we expect in Smarter Working throughout 2018?

• Iain Patterson, Chief Digital Officer, UKCloud

The Capability Driver

The Civil Service Workforce Plan for 2016 – 2020 says technology is likely to reshape roles and the Civil Service will need effective leaders who can support people through these changes and equip them with the right skills. In response, the Civil Service must do things differently: becoming more agile whilst transforming its services, and improving the capability of its staff.

Oliver Lewis, Deputy Director of Learning and Development for the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) profession and the Government Digital Service will discuss the role of the DDaT profession, which represents 17,000 digital, data and technology specialists across government and the strategic solutions that are being deployed, notably through the GDS Academy, to enable the profession nationwide to scale up in line with government ambitions for digital government.

Oliver will discuss the need to build capability within departments – and everything that sits around it including the development of a cross government learning and development offer focusing on the critical skills departments need to transform now and will need in the future.

• Oliver Lewis, Deputy Director of Learning and Development Digital Data and Technology Profession, GDS

Smarter Working in a Big Department - Meeting the Challenges

What are the challenges involved in making Smarter Working a reality in a large department? The Home Office recently instituted a Smarter Working Programme (SWP) that led to the design of a ground-breaking new office building in Manchester. The building design enabled smarter working by offering staff flexibility in their working arrangements and equipping them with modern technology.

The Manchester project was described as an exemplar of how senior sponsors, managers and staff have worked closely together to embrace change and drive better collaborative working between Home Office business areas, suppliers and customers, and is said to be helping the Home Office achieve better outcomes. But how did the Home Office meet the challenges along the way? And what are other departments’ Smarter Working experiences?

Hubs Through the Ages (2015-2018)

Matrix Booking has been helping various local and central Government departments realise their vision of Smarter working & Collaboration hubs since 2015. Projects including the Ministry of Justice commuter hubs, the HMRC and Government Property Unit flagship hubs as well as innovative local government collaborations across Cambridge and Staffordshire.

Kieron will run you though a short series of ‘Hubs through the ages (2015- 2018)’ with some lessons learned and some outstanding questions to inform and confuse you as you embark on the next steps of your smarter working journey.

• Kieron Murphy, Managing Director, Matrix Booking

The Promise and Potential of SD-WANS

One of the hottest areas in public sector networking is software defined networking.

A software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) is regarded as a specific application of software defined networking technology applied to wide area network (WAN) connections, which are used to connect enterprise networks – including branch offices and data centres – over large geographic distances. Previously, such WAN connections would have required special proprietary hardware. What the SD-WAN movement wants to do is to move more of the network control into the “cloud,” using a software approach. Newly emerging SD-WAN technologies can offer more flexibility. For example, because SD-WAN connectivity can be controlled through cloud software, a customer can scale up or “burst” connectivity during times of peak demand.

Such acceptance of internet-based cloud services offers an intriguing backdrop to the rapidly evolving SD-WAN sector especially in government and the wider public sector.

• Where and how might government bodies use SD-WANs for smarter working?
• How do SD-WANs fit the public sector’s working requirements?
• What is the promise, potential and pitfall of SD-WANs to change the landscape for connectivity?
• How can SD WANS create a more dynamic and smarter public sector working environment?

• Michael Bowyer, Chairman, Innopsis

Digital Dialogue

A further conversation on a key aspect of the Smarter Working environment with one of our sponsors, discussing how it is developing and its implementing its strategy in this developing area.

Panel Session: Technology and the Future of Smarter Working

Martin Donnelly, the Chair of The Way We Work Delivery Board has reiterated that people are an organisation’s greatest asset. And the dedication and commitment of its people is said to be one of the best things about working in the Civil Service. But all too often people have been struggling to deliver high quality services against a background of outdated IT, poorly designed workplaces and inflexible working practices. People can only realise their full potential, and that of the organisation they work in, if they are empowered with the right tools and the right environment.

Working smarter means challenging all the assumptions of our traditional ways of working and bringing in new approaches to management and teamwork. Transforming the way we work is not a ‘nice-to-have’. It is the only way to make sure the Civil Service and wider public sector provide the services customers expect and demand, both now and into the future.

So what is the next wave of smart working likely to involve, and how can technology help? In this panel session, we look into our crystal ball and examine the possibilities.

• Patrick Stephenson, Client Managing Director: Central Government, Fujitsu UK
• Jessica Figueras, Chief Analyst, GlobalData Public Sector

GovRoam: A Joined-Up Approach to Public Sector WiFi

There is a simple way to both greatly reduce the overheads of providing guest connectivity in a GDPR-compliant way, and to provide your staff with zero touch access when they roam to other participating organisations.

The govroam model – building on the global success of eduroam, its sister service for education – is delivering a federated roaming environment for staff of NHS, government and blue light organisations that is already realising savings and enhancing productivity across the public sector at the national scale, with over 2,500 public buildings offering the service today.

With the challenges of securely authenticating roaming staff visitors largely eliminated, participant sites are free to explore new opportunities to share resources and estate, undertake multidisciplinary approaches to service delivery and to minimise the barriers to productivity for an increasingly mobile workforce. This session will introduce the govroam service from Jisc and provide an opportunity to discuss its potential for the organisations represented in the room.

• Mark O'Leary, Head of Network Access, Jisc

Chair's Closing Remarks

• David Bicknell, Editor, Government Computing