A combination of a lack of resources, the ongoing skills gap, and legacy IT continue to create problems for the public sector’s plans for digital transformation, said Northdoor CEO, James Cherry.

Northdoor provides IT services to the public sector, specialising in helping organisations protect sensitive data. But despite a willingness to transform, Cherry (pictured) said that the sector still faces an uphill battle when it comes to implementing change.
“A lot of it comes down to having the right resources available, whether that’s skilled people, financial resources to complete projects – we’ve always found it quite difficult to make that transition from those organisations really understanding the art of the possible to implementing take a long time,” he said.
“I’m recruiting at the moment for people in the organisation, and technical skill is hard to come by. And with the public sector, with some of the constraints they have with the salary and budgets, [it’s] a bit of a blocker.
“[These] things are quite well known and have been around for quite some time. But if you combine that with legacy, which there is an awful lot of in the public sector, those start stacking up as quite big challenges to making big changes happen.”
Out-of-date IT, a lack of skills and budgets have meant that Northdoor now engages with public sector clients differently, said Cherry.
“There might be some accelerators that we’ve already built so there’s less financial impact, and we might work hand in hand with the existing teams. We’ll help implement something, but we’ll train you as part of the implementation, so that you’re involved part of the work, and you’re picking up the skill, and that means it doesn’t impact as much on the day job – they don’t have to send people away for training. But also, there’s then not the reliance on the third party to try and look after those systems once they’re in. [We’re] aiming for self-sufficiency in those agencies…It’s more collaborative, and we have to be far more flexible in terms of how we do that engagement, to overcome those things like the skills gaps, the legacy platforms that they’re dealing with.”
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Looking beyond the ‘IT project’
Cherry also noted that organisations can often view such projects as IT transformation, rather than adopting new processes, which is a missed opportunity for real organisational change.
“For example, if you just move to cloud and continue to do things the way that you do before, you don’t really get a lot of the benefits from it,” he said. “‘We have on premise infrastructure, let’s move it to the cloud, and then suddenly we’re very flexible, and we can do all sorts of things’ – but it never really materialises. The business still operates in exactly the same way. So, I try to encourage people to see it as you had a blank sheet of paper: how would you do things differently, knowing that you have this different capability, a different operational model? Some people are very receptive to that, some people not so. Some people just don’t have the organisational breadth and bandwidth to deal with that.”
Cherry highlighted Northdoor’s work with the NHS, which often works in silos, with no overarching view of its data.
“We put in some great data and analytical platforms for the NHS, and that has taken time to bring everyone together to see how they can do things differently. So that may be clinical, operational, finance, and we’ve had some success doing that, but it’s hard work.”
Public sector consultancies must show value
For an IT provider or consultancy, the focus must be on how much value it provides to the customer, said Cherry.
“I think the accelerators that we have, the frameworks that we’ve delivered, the reusable code components that we can bring to bear, the ways of engaging on different aspects of digital transformation, they add a lot of value. I think a lot of the consultancy approach is very much ‘day rate, time and materials. We’ll throw some bodies at it. If the price is too high, maybe we’ll offshore it and get some cheaper bodies.’ I don’t always see [them] adding a huge amount of value to the end customer. So, the things that we’ve developed… I want to see those being used to deliver the value to the customer. So, there’s a lower price point, there’s a quicker delivery, there’s less risk, all the things that you’d want [when you] embark on a transformation style project.”