The Department for Work & Pensions has created the post of director general for digital transformation, and hired business IT expert Kevin Cunnington. Winnie Agbonlahor asks how he’s finding life after the leap into Whitehall
Open water swimming isn’t for everyone, but Kevin Cunnington has recently taken the plunge. “I do it all year, so I get used to the cold temperatures,” says the Department for Work and Pensions’ new director general for digital transformation. Recently, he adds, “it’s been very mild: the coldest has been about six degrees centigrade.”
The resilience he’s acquired may come in handy in his new job – for Cunnington has just dived headfirst into the blood-freezing task of turning around DWP’s digital operations. In recent months, a series of excitable headlines have highlighted problems in the department’s IT operations – particularly in the flagship Universal Credit programme – and in a vast, widely-dispersed organisation seeking to deliver digital by default services, there may be more shocks to come.
Plunging from private into public sector
DWP’s digital estate is vast, and with good reason: it employs around 90,000 people, pays out £166bn every year, and accounts for a third of all banking transactions on any given day, Cunnington tells CSW. “It’s a big deal,” he notes – but not that much bigger than Vodafone, where he worked as head of online for more than three years until 2011. “Vodafone is located in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,” he says; DWP is in “Preston, Leeds and Newcastle, which is a lot easier to get to. But it’s the same kind of challenge.”
There are some clear differences, though, between working in the civil service and the private sector: “I’ve observed that there are many more women in the civil service than I’ve worked with in the past.” Does this have an impact on working dynamics? “No, I don’t think so,” he says, addingly jokingly: “I’ve had to remember many more female names, which has been a challenge, because they’re more diverse than men’s names. It’s things like not confusing Ilene with Elaine.”
Many private sector people who take senior civil service jobs notice Whitehall’s greater risk aversion – a characteristic highlighted by Stephen Kelly, government’s chief operation officer. From Cunnington’s perspective, though, this looks more like long-established methods and speeds of work: “I wouldn’t necessarily describe it in terms of absolute risk, implying financial risk,” he says. “I think there is much more a sense of: ‘We’ve done it a certain way, which has a certain rhythm’, and part of my job is to change that rhythm.” Traditionally, he adds, the department might work with suppliers to develop a new piece of software every six months – but he’s trying to up the pace so that software developments occur every two weeks, as part of a “big shift in government to pull things back towards us”.
So what has Cunnington come in to achieve? What does a DG for digital transformation actually do? “I’ve got three things I’m accountable for,” he explains: oversight of the digital components of all of DWP’s projects, of which there are around 45; the department’s digital capabilities; and transformation – “the way the department looks in 2015-’20, based on using things like digital technology to transform the way we work.”
In simpler terms, he is there to create a digital vision for the department; provide guidance for all things digital in the department’s projects; and make sure DWP civil servants are digitally savvy. To that end, he works closely with DWP’s (departing) chief information officer Andy Nelson, who implements many of his ideas; the DG for operations, Noel Shanahan; and Mike Driver, chief financial officer. Cunnington manages a total of 1,600 people, 200 of whom he describes as his “core team”. He reports directly to permanent secretary Robert Devereux.
A sea of projects
Let’s look at his areas of responsibility one by one. On his vision, he says he wants to transform the department’s public services. Anyone interacting with DWP today, he says, will “probably fill in a form, go to a job centre, call us on the phone”. But “our vision for 2015-’20 is that most of those interactions will be done via a web or mobile phone interface; and behind that, most of those transactions will be automated so we remove the need for manual processing”.
The overarching aim is to make DWP’s systems and services “outwardly-focused”, in Cunnington’s words – meaning customer-centric. There is within the department a “latent desire to be more future-orientated”. In light of DWP’s outdated IT systems, he admits, the stated drive to move into the future may in reality mainly mean dragging the department into the present day. “We’ve certainly got a lot of older systems and services that we’re looking to refresh,” he says. Refreshing, in this case, means “ultimately, replacing”.
Cunnington believes this change is overdue – but will it happen? With every realised cost saving eliciting another round of Treasury budget cuts, is it realistic to want to replace every DWP civil servant’s computer with a better, faster machine? There is a workplace transformation budget, he replies, to cover such IT upgrades; and other digital projects are funded within the development budgets for existing services. Such spending needs Treasury and Cabinet Office approval, he acknowledges – but this is “normal business,” he says. “Vodafone, and all large corporates, work exactly the same way.”
When Cunnington worked at Vodafone, he created a digital academy to improve digital skills. And when he arrived at DWP, he did exactly the same. The academy, located on the top floor of a jobcentre in Fulham, runs an eight-week course for up to 15 DWP employees at a time, in what he calls “quite an intensive foundation in how to do digital”. Teachers are a mix of DWP officials, members of the Government Digital Service (GDS), and external experts. For one of the eight weeks, civil servants are sent to another department – “the Ministry of Justice, DVLA or GDS, to see how they do things – and then they come back in week five”, Cunnington explains.
So why does DWP need its own academy: why not use the courses provided by Civil Service Learning? “There isn’t a Civil Service Learning package that does what we need it to do in terms of digital development,” he says. Other departments are setting up similar courses, he says: “If you look at HMRC, they are also building out their own digital development centre and, potentially, academies, so we are talking to HMRC and GDS about how we take material that we’ve developed and leverage it more broadly.” The cost for the academy – which will soon be joined by a second, in Leeds – comes out of his programme budget. It is, he insists, “tiny” – particularly because the alternative would have been to “replace the people with a lack of skills with a load of new people.”
Mastering the Universal Challenge
Under his mandate to oversee DWP projects, Cunnington is currently concerned with two main pieces of work: the single tier pension scheme, which will replace today’s state pension with a single amount based on 35 qualifying years of National Insurance contributions; and Universal Credit (UC) – or “Universal Challenge” as he accidentally and repeatedly calls it during our interview. His slip of the tongue is understandable, considering the controversy surrounding the programme. Designed to combine six benefits into one, reducing complexity and ensuring that claimants always see their incomes rise if they take a job, the scheme has come under attack for ineffective management, inadequate financial controls, unusable IT and slow progress.
How will he take forward the programme, which was publicly criticised by the National Audit Office (NAO) for wasting millions of pounds in procurement mis-steps? “Obviously, I wasn’t here at the time of those criticisms,” he says; but he adds that since then Sue Moore, who runs Cunnington’s portfolio management unit, has put in place “three lines of defence” to ensure everything follows the appropriate processes.
“There is a sense that the programme is responsible to itself, so there’s an internal governance,” he explains. “There’s then a secondary governance process performed by Sue independent of the programme; and then there’s a third line of defence, which is external review by people like Major Projects Authority”. Is this all new? “I think it’s been strengthened, compared to where it was 12 months ago,” he replies.
It was the departmental oversight that was described by the NAO as “ineffective” in September 2013. This is now largely the responsibility of the portfolio management board, which is chaired by Mike Driver and includes five of the department’s DGs – Cunnington included. But as a new arrival, he can’t compare it to what went before, so we move onto another criticism of the programme: that the UC pilots are being run without the requisite technology, leaving staff dependent on paper-based systems.
Dame Anne Begg, chair of the Commons’ Work and Pensions Committee, told CSW last year that JobCentre Plus staff working on the UC pathfinders are writing jobseekers’ personal information down on paper because their IT systems are so “clunky and cumbersome”. But Cunnington says he’s seen UC operations in a Hammersmith centre and concluded that the service is “a lot better than the service it replaced”. All in all, he says, the systems currently being tested are “perfectly workable”. But, he adds: “For us it’s just a stepping stone on the path to the new all-singing, all-dancing super-duper” system.
In any case, Cunnington has stayed clear of reading stacks of documents attacking UC. Asked whether he’s read up on the UC project’s troubled history, he says: “To be honest, only a little, because my very specific responsibility for Universal Credit is to build the new digital service which enhances the current live service that we have today.”
Cunnington’s new digital service is set to supercede the current working system, which was bought with the wrong capabilities – and whose purchase made headlines when the work and pensions secretary accepted that much of its value would be written off. Currently, says Cunnington, the UC team is “building out a more interactive and customer-centric digital service”; and whilst at the moment that project is running in parallel with the pathfinders, it will “ultimately replace, merge with the stream that we have today”.
So what if something goes wrong again? “Right now it’s on track and going well, so hopefully I won’t have to face the question of: ‘What if it goes wrong?’,” he replies. “We’re focussed on making sure it goes right.”
All going swimmingly
At the moment, Cunnington says, he’s really enjoying working with the DWP’s other top civil servants. “It’s been great here,” he says. “I like Andy [Nelson]. He’s a really good guy: very receptive to new ideas, very supportive in helping to produce the joint approach. The relationship between Andy and I has been great and worked well.” Nelson, however, is leaving the civil service this summer – “for personal reasons”, Cunnington says. A replacement has not yet been found, but Cunnington – a “key stakeholder” – is going to be involved in making the selection.
Nelson’s departure may be connected to the changing relationship between traditional IT staff and the new breed of digital experts within Whitehall: with GDS in the driving seat, the role of CIOs has weakened across the civil service. Cunnington acknowledges “that CIOs have had to become much more digitally literate and embrace [everything] about this new heartbeat and method of working. In addition, there are people like me brought in specifically just to help accelerate the digital agenda within the organisations.”
Cunnington joined the civil service – accepting a pay cut – because, he says, he was keen to take up the “opportunity to do some good after spending most of my life in the commercial sector”. But there is a second reason, he adds – an attribute of the job that “really makes it compelling: the challenge, particularly around things like Universal Credit, and the scale of what we’re trying to achieve there”.
That challenge certainly is big. Unlike open water swimming, where the best approach is to jump straight in and get out after a few minutes, in handling the DWP’s major projects Cunnington will have to deploy careful planning and long-term commitment if he wants to achieve success.
In a pool of complex currents, choppy waters and sucking undertows, it won’t be easy to keep his head above water. But Cunnington is, at least, clearly moving with the technological and social flows. In the months and years to come, CSW will watch carefully to ensure that the signals coming from DWP are of a set of projects that are not drowning, but waving.
See also: DWP to launch second digital academy this summer in Leeds