What Do You Want From Me? Being a CDIO in Government

Gina Gill, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Ministry of Justice UK

I didn’t grow up wanting to be a CDIO. It’s not really a job that children aspire for. It certainly doesn’t have quite the same pull as being an astronaut did for me when I was young, or that perhaps being a vlogger does today. But here I am and, on most days, I wouldn’t change a thing!

About me

I was in the first year at my school to have computing lessons. They were on a BBC Micro and we shared one between four, mostly playing basic games controlled by basic commands. Soon after, my brother and I got a Spectrum ZX for Christmas and many hours of gaming later, I was hooked!

I went to University to pursue my new passion and study Computer Science. This involved lots of sitting in a basement, programming in a language called ML, and not being taken very seriously by the men on my course who outnumbered the women by 25 to 1. After University I joined a graduate scheme where I was one of three women on a whole floor of developers, most of whom wouldn’t look me in the eye, let alone speak to me.

All of this made me want to escape the world of computing, so I did a whole bunch of other things that in reality didn’t ever really take me away from it - I found myself negotiating contracts for technology services, project managing technology delivery, and building digital and technology capability.

About being a CDIO in government

During that time, as I broadened my knowledge and experience, the industry was rapidly changing along with the role of the CIO. Some spotted the change sooner than others and understood that technology would no longer be a back office function or cost overhead but a core part of service delivery and competitive advantage. They moved the role from under the COO to the top table, and started thinking about how to leverage technology to change and improve customer experience.

The civil service sort of got caught in the middle of two worlds. There was a huge push from the centre to build digital capability, work in a more agile fashion, and deliver services centred around the user. Meanwhile in individual departments we started to build digital capability and online services, but still remained firmly under that COO and in the cost overhead column.

So, when I started this role a little over 2 years ago, I had a lot to think about. I was now responsible for 800+ services provided to 80,000+ internal users across 1,000+ sites, as well as the general public. A lot of these services were old, creaking and needed to be updated or replaced. I didn’t have enough people and had gaps in my leadership team. And while some of our stakeholder relationships were good, some were really not.

“As part of defining our future, we therefore need to keep one eye on how we think technology advances will change the way that we live and work, so that we can intersect them rather than continue to lag behind them ”

But underpinning all of this was the really big question - what do you want from me? It wasn’t clear to me whether the organisation wanted to continue to provide services in a traditional manner with a back office IT function supporting that delivery, or whether it wanted to provide truly user centred services enabled and informed by technology and digital ways of working.

It’s still not clear. When I look across our services, I see some things that are fully paper based, some that have been poorly digitised, and some parts of services that are really user-centred, digitally-enabled, and pushing the boundaries. Why that is relates less to logic and planning and more to the right people at the right time with the right budget.

As much as I would have loved to have jumped straight to this question, I wasn’t really in a position to - I had to build trust and earn my licence to operate. So last year we launched the MoJ Digital Strategy. It was unusual in that it was bottom up, summing up the impact of a lot of in-flight work and over 40 individual strategies. Not ideal, but right for us at the time.

This has allowed us to demonstrate (a lot of!) delivery, the value that we add to the organisation, and to build trust, so that I am now in a position to ask that real question - what do you want from me!

About the Future

In March this year, I had the opportunity to ask senior leaders why they want to be digital and how digital they want to be. It was a quick and dirty exercise to understand people’s gut reaction and therefore our starting point. We learned 3 things. The desire to be digital comes from a good place - meeting user expectations, delivering better outcomes for users and making better use of our data. There is not enough recognition of the connection between the way in which we deliver our services and our ability to recruit and retain talent in operational areas. Our level of ambition and expectation of how quickly we can change the way in which we deliver services is relatively low.

A mixed bag, but a clear starting point to continue conversations, workshops and learning to be able to define a future vision for service delivery. My focus will firmly be on progressing this over the next 6-9 months so that we can then set ourselves on a path to that future.

I can’t talk about the future and not talk about how the pace of technology change is skyrocketing at an exponential rate. We’ve been saying this for a while, but I think advancements in generative AI over the last few months have shown that we’re in a different place now. This is both exciting and worrying for many reasons. I’m sure you will have read much about the opportunities and risks so I won’t talk generally here, but instead about two things that are specific to me in this role.

Firstly, I work in an environment where it is hard to deliver at pace and leverage new technologies quickly. As part of defining our future, we therefore need to keep one eye on how we think technology advances will change the way that we live and work, so that we can intersect them rather than continue to lag behind them.

And secondly, and finally, I do wonder what the next iteration of the CIO role is or whether it even exists in the future. Not because it might be done by a robot, but because is there a future in which the leader of any organisation isn’t effectively running a technology company? I wonder if there’s still time to become an astronaut?!

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