Technology as the infrastructure of everything
“We need organisations that reflect the world they’re part of. A world where everything – from the global economy, to the services and systems we interact with everyday – runs on software and technology. You simply can’t be a modern service organisation without technology as part of your DNA.”
This is an adapted quote from Multiplied.
I was talking about how modern startups think about technology. The comparison being organisations where IT is a siloed function or capability. This is still a big issue in the public sector, including how technology, digital, or transformation programmes are often set up and funded as delivery mechanisms. Something that’s seen most clearly in the relationship between policy and delivery in many parts of government, and also meaning that technology programmes come with predetermined outcomes, or work that’s within fixed sets of criteria.
The infrastructure of everything
I’ve been following the US and DOGE situation with a real sense of shock and horror from the UK. I found this article by Emily Tavoulareas for Tech Policy Press a very useful analysis of some of what is happening. Emily was a founding member of the first agency-level team of the US Digital Service and her post clearly sets out how understanding the relationship between policy, modern services and technology is crucial.
In a recent post I unpacked my understanding of digital as change with technology. This definition becomes even more important once we recognise how technology is the infrastructure of everything. As the introduction of Emily’s article explains:
“…I am coming to terms with the fact that the Trump Administration seems to understand something that few others do: Technical infrastructure is the infrastructure of *everything.* It can accelerate or obstruct policy goals. I, and many of my colleagues, have spent the better part of the past ten years trying to convince lawmakers, academia, and the media of exactly this. That it has been largely dismissed would be an understatement. Now, I fear the lesson is being taught in the hardest (and potentially most irreversible) way possible.”
Emily then makes the case for how important the work of the US Digital Service was in going beyond just fixing technology. To looking at combinations of everything from procurement, policy issues and the need to fix business process. This is also everything government teams in the UK have been trying to fix for many years under the banner of ‘digital’.
The really important part here, again described really clearly, is the disconnect between policy and technology:
“Technology (and implementation more broadly) has long been dismissed as an afterthought by policy experts both inside and outside of the government. Over decades, the US government systematically outsourced technology to the private sector through multi-billion dollar contracts […] In this formulation, technology is subordinate to the policy work, when the truth is that policy is inextricably entangled with technology. Separating policy from the technology it depends on has been a root cause of much of the dysfunction we have grappled with across government for decades.
Technology is not an extra thing that you add onto government programs and services—it IS the service. It’s not an extra thing that you add into the institution—it is the spinal cord of the institution […] People working in tech understand this implicitly.”
And the reality check for all of us, including those of us working in digital elsewhere in the world:
“The US DOGE Service recognises that technical infrastructure is not just the infrastructure of websites and apps—it is the infrastructure of everything, and they are now in control of it.”
I’ve been reflecting on this article from a UK perspective for the last few days. I want to be clear that what I think we’re witnessing right now in the US is technofascism. Or, put simply, tech-led change being used to consolidate power in a very dangerous way. But if DOGE is in any way seen as politically succeeding in its stated goals of efficiency and cost-cutting, the question is whether we will eventually hear arguments for similar radical approaches applied to UK public services (legal or not)?
Technology IS the service IS the policy
Emily Tavoulareas’s article goes on to set out the clear differences between the goals of the US Digital Service and the US DOGE Service. The important question being: what is technology a means to?
What I’m certain of is the need right now to ensure we modernise how our UK public institutions understand and work with technology.
There are still few examples of truly digital policy implementation in the UK. I would point to Universal Credit as a programme and system of work where a policy was essentially built in code, prototyped, and built with technology as its DNA. There are challenges to this, especially with the risk of excluding the most vulnerable through a digital-first policy. But digital approaches, or systems designed and implemented with technology, are also the right way to help us to solve this, including with incremental test and learn approaches.
We need more of UK government to understand technology in this way and that an organisation’s technology maturity is linked to its ability to respond to the challenges of rising service demand, complexity, and expectations while effectively managing or reducing costs.
In managing how technology is best designed, tested and iterated, this is also recognition that traditional policymaking is not equipped to imagine technology and system requirements outside of implementation work. Modern policy needs to be developed as technology in more incremental and joined-up ways.
Technology as a means to service organisations
Shifting this technology mindset should mean that we find better ways to reduce bureaucracy and wasted resources, but most of all, to create modern, responsive systems that improve services and better meet the needs of society.
Last week, speaking to an ex-NHS Trust CDIO, I heard an important example of how an Integrated Care System (ICS) was transforming patient care through fixing the data infrastructure across a UK region. There’s the hard transformation work of how data is managed, shared, and maintained. But what was most important was how this had changed how the system works together. And by the ‘system’, I mean the people and professionals that make up the system. It was no longer the case that one organisation had to email another to manage patient care or hospital discharge, as real time reporting and collaboration were now in place.
Technology or data is the service here. It’s the means to better patient journeys, care coordination, and work between multiple organisations and teams to deliver the best possible outcomes for people. It’s also where real efficiencies are found through service and organisation design, enabled by fully understanding needs across the whole system.
The different methods required
There’s a contrasting set of methods we can consider compared to the dangerous, destructive, and even reckless approaches being demonstrated by DOGE.
What I think of as design is something more considered. It’s the need for a more careful unravelling of systems, organisations, policy complexity, and business processes. This is the need for approaches that support how we reset relationships and that give us new ways to build, test, and scale modern solutions. These are still approaches that require tough conversations, but through creating and maintaining safe environments that enable meaningful and transparent collaboration.
As a final reminder from Emily Tavoulareas’s article – done right, technology can be, and should be, in service to people.
If there’s one thing we can do in the UK right now, it’s demonstrating better ways of making progress and realising efficiencies in how we modernise government. But in doing so, recognising that many organisations still need to reset their relationship with technology if we’re going to see the depth of change that’s really needed.
This is an open notes post. Where I’m sharing bookmarks and ideas I’m finding useful combined with thoughts of my own.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.