Do government services need a rethink for AI and automation?

Operational Delivery Profession (ODP), the public face of the civil service, must keep pace with advances in technology and artificial intelligence (AI), which has implications on skills, a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report has concluded.

In the Smarter delivery of public services report, the PAC noted that while the ODP has created a skills framework, which sets out the skills that staff need at different stages of their careers, the capabilities and expertise that its members need are changing and will require skills associated with other professions, particularly digital.

“Automating straightforward types of demand means that staff can spend their time dealing with customers with more complex needs, or who cannot access digital services,” the report’s authors said.

The evidence submitted to the PAC shows that the civil service needs understand how technology can reshape interactions with citizens. In response to a question from the committee on the need for operational delivery capabilities in government services, Peter Schofield, permanent secretary for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), said: “At its heart, this is about delivering the services. That is partly about making sure that we have people who are able to think about how to deliver customer service at its best, and partly about how we innovate and how we use technology in different ways.”

Schofield used the online portal for child maintenance as an example of where technology helps to improve service. “People can do the most straightforward accessing of information about their claim or their case online. It frees up our people to deal with the more complex situations,” he said.

When asked about creating an operating environment to improve operational delivery, Schofield said: “During the really difficult time we had during the pandemic in 2020, there was a huge amount of innovation and creativity … at every level in DWP to find ways of changing and improving processes, and bringing in automation … to have that objective was quite phenomenal. It did not require me or the leadership of DWP coming up with the ideas – these ideas were happening across the organisation.”

Another witness statement in the PAC report shows that there may be a need to overhaul services to make better use of the new technology that is now available.

In his written statement to the PAC, Mark Thompson, professor of digital economy at University of Exeter Business School, said: “The prevailing culture of ‘digital skills’ which, in its focus on building and/or procuring technology, glosses or actively disregards the growing need to overhaul the business and operating models of public services – to ask questions about what it is we think we are building for the future.”

Thompson warned that there is currently little-to-no business education about technology-enabled business, or operating models and their implications for UK public services, and very few with the capability to provide such education.

He also noted that modern, digitally and AI-enabled organisations are modular in structure, and are able to point to clearly defined operating models that show where it is appropriate to innovate and spend money, versus where such innovation/spend is inappropriate and undesirable. Where innovation is inappropriate, he said: “Capabilities are routinely standardised, shared and consumed as services over the internet.”