Yesterday, July 3rd, came the news that Mike Bracken, head of the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) will be leaving. During his 5 years in post, he revolutionized the way government thinks about technology and delivers it. His leadership and inspiration spread way beyond the UK and beyond government. He probably achieved more of lasting consequence in that period than many CIOs do in a whole career. However, inevitably if you shake things up a lot, the forces of status quo will eventually muster and your time will come to an end.
Image source: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2015/08/03/onwards/
Some of the plaudits about Mike being written by journalists and commentators are like the kind of praise a top actor might receive at the end of a long running London West End play. Here’s just one example – from Tim O’Reilly.
If Tim can gush, then so can I, because so many leaders can learn from Mike’s example.
I first met Mike at a Gartner CIO Academy event we run in conjunction with Oxford University. He was preparing a presentation about his work creating a digital platform at the Guardian Media group. The following year he delivered that great presentation at Gartner Symposium 2010 in Orlando. My subsequent visit to his office was a marvel. Open drop-in desks inhabited by hackers, some of them volunteers – working directly on mobile apps, content and code – most of it very open. He’d taken a conventional newspaper IT function and turned it into something that looked more like a tech startup.
When he moved to be the head of tech for UK Government, I wondered how the step up felt – maybe it was a bit intimidating. But when I interviewed him last year he told me:
I got to government, and I recognized the facade, which was the buildings are big, but the services are just not that complicated. Once you see that, as a technologist, you just become a lot more confident.
He went on to explain that many government online systems, even in a country with a population of 64 million, don’t have a particularly difficult magnitude or complexity of transactions to process. In a world of Ebay’s and Uber’s – the majority of government administrative system loads seemed comparatively small, to his technical architect mind. That was a breakthrough insight. From there, he quickly formed a group that took online capability requests from elected political leaders – and just implemented them directly, sometimes in only weeks, using small teams of in-house full-stack development staff. By stripping away the traditional process of endless white papers, committee debates about functionality and big outsourcing contracts, Mike was ‘disintermediating the policy generalists’ – as he would put it. The citizen user was the center of design and the developers worked only on what mattered to that user. Bracken applied all the tactics of a startup entrepreneur to bootstrap and grow an organisation where there was none. The GDS just kept delivering breakthrough, easy to use web based systems for citizens – from voter registration to car tax payment.
However Mike’s biggest achievements are as a true digital leader, more than a manager. He applies critical thinking, diagnoses the fundamental condition of a place, creates strategic remedies at a root cause level then generates a real sense of mission that others can sign up to. He inspires people and simplifies the problem for them at the same time. Often he and his leadership team moved forward by coining pithy aphorisms that encapsulated a fundamental truth, idea or principle. They even had some printed on the backs of business cards, very deliberately choosing the ITC Johnston font made famous by the wartime ‘keep calm and carry on’ poster.
Image source: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/07/28/doing-the-hard-work-to-make-things-simple/
“Digital by default”, “Show the thing”, “The strategy is delivery”. These are memes Mike has imprinted on a whole new generation of digital leaders, including in the private sector, who will no doubt take his great work onward.
Nobody is perfect and if you work in UK government IT, I expect you can see plenty of flaws in the centralized, cabinet office originated, GDS approach. But leaders of this kind – people who positively redefine the landscape – are too uncommon and we should celebrate them. Wherever he lands next, I’m sure Mike Bracken will be taking digital to the core of that organisation and it will benefit greatly. We are very grateful that he and his GDS colleague Russell Davies gave us some of their precious time during the research for our new book.
Publishing October 20th
Pre-order here
