Metro-Mayors and Building Digital Capacity
(This post was written as an assignment for DPI671M, a course at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government)
Here I intend to shamelessly borrow the framework of Theo Blackwell to unpack what building digital capacity in UK combined authorities might look like. Theo’s original framework was intended to set out a national strategy to realise the potential of newly created local government units, but I’m going to apply it to the way that an individual metro-mayor could begin delivering on their ambitions when it comes to digital, data, and technology.
Theo’s five steps are as follows:
Step 1: Understanding digital maturity of the local authority
The first step is recognising what current digital capabilities are. This is particularly important for metro-mayors, because the curious nature of their position as chairs of combined authorities is that they have very limited personal offices and staff. The control they have is informal, through the leaders of constituent councils and down to the heads of IT departments. This exercise in understanding the status quo therefore needs to be conducted with humility, working to map both the capabilities and also the ambitions of each individual local authority and beginning to consider how these could be coordinated to create greater value.
Theo recommends three key questions to guide this inquiry, which are an effective starting point for a metro-mayor:
‘(1) How many lines-of-business does the organisation have and what IT is supporting them and how?
(2) How does the organisation hold data from these lines-of-business and other sources corporately and to what extent is it computable and shareable?
(3) How does the organisation buy technology, how open to smaller tech firms is the council and what is the typical sales cycle for Big and small tech providers?’
The only additional line of inquiry that I would recommend is borrowed from Mike Bracken at GDS, who initially mapped the traffic of all online government services and prioritised the top 25 for an intervention by his team. A strategic metro-mayor would need to understand how the majority of individuals interacted with councils, and then start working out how to make that engagement more effective.
Step 2: Digital devolution leadership and infrastructure
Metro-mayors need to consider the appropriate governance to act on their analysis of digital maturity. They should consider adopting the model used by New Zealand, where instead of creating a separate digital government unit they instead brought together stakeholders from across government in a Digital Government Partnership. This approach unlocked dormant digital capacity, without causing some of the organisational friction that was characteristic of both GDS and USDS.
Step 3: Driving transformation
Theo highlights in another blog that ‘digital transformation’ does not appear in any of the UK devolution deals. This step is therefore crucial in order to encourage a greater focus on digital government in future devolution deals. In practice, individual metro-mayors can contribute to this effort by making a digital approach central to the implementation of newly-devolved powers. Whether through new user-facing transportation apps as part of city-region wide transport services, or seamless platforms for adult-skills, metro-mayors can ensure that they embrace technology while adopting their new legislative powers.
Step 4: Support for pioneering authorities — a ‘coalition of the willing’ in local government
At a national level the best approach is to get behind local authorities that are ambitious when it comes to digital. The same rule applies when it comes to metro-mayors deciding which areas are ripe for innovation. In Argentina, the digital innovation unit that sits in the Ministry of Modernisation waited for colleagues in the Ministry of Health to come to them with a suggestion for a drip campaign aimed at pregnant women. They argued that they could develop something more user-focused if they were given access, and ended up creating a new chatbot on Facebook messenger that reminded pregnant women about scheduled check-ups and resources they had access to. Metro-mayors should adopt a similar approach — think strategically about those projects where they could partner with a ‘coalition of the willing’ in order to have a meaningful impact on citizens.
Step 5: Future investment in GovTech
The last step is probably the most challenging — metro-mayors will eventually reach the limit of their powers. The difficulty will then be how to advocate to central government for more responsibility. The final step in Theo’s original framework makes a much more focussed point about the need to advocate for expanded investment in GovTech focussed on local government. Individual metro-mayors may need to think more aggressively. Their focus must be on how to use successes in digital transformation to advocate for a broader transfer of powers, both to themselves and the local authorities that they represent. Only then can digital transformation be the key to unlock the revolutionary potential of city leadership.
