Mike Bracken
Executive Director of Digital for the UK Government
How did you tackle the biggest challenges facing your organisation in 2014?
Delivery. We’ve found time and again that building things (whether that’s prototypes or tools and services) has been the best way of finding solutions to the challenges we face – not just for us, but across government.
G-Cloud and the Digital Marketplace is a great example; the best way of making it simpler to buy technology and services is by building something which makes it easier. We’ve been iterating it constantly over the last year, getting feedback from users and releasing improvements every day.
What are your department’s top priorities in the last months before the general election?
GOV.UK, the Verify platform, the Transformation exemplars, rolling out new technology for civil servants... lots of things. GDS is made up of dozens of agile, small, multidisciplinary teams working on different services and platforms, not to mention our work with other departments. For many of them it’ll be business as usual while we keep delivering and improving digital services.
What’s your favourite Christmas treat?
Well, spending time with my two girls obviously... but this Christmas I’ll probably be checking the GOV.UK stats too. On Christmas day there’s always a bump in traffic when people get new tablets and phones, and do stuff like register new cars; and this year we expect – for the first time – more than half of our traffic to be from mobile devices. It’s a sign of the speed at which digital technology is changing people’s lives.
And what makes you say: ‘Bah, humbug!’?
People who say government’s no good at technology. We’ve got some of the best people in the country working on digital services around the country. Up in East Kilbride, there’s a team doing bold, challenging things opening up Aid data. In Swansea, they’re cracking driving services open to make motoring cheaper for everyone. Digital transformation is happening in Government, and it’s a very exciting time to be a civil servant.
Happy Christmas.