NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) has launched a new digital strategy with an emphasis on cultural, people and process issues rather than technology choices.
It has published the strategy, to apply until 2023, saying it is more about focusing on user needs and designing accessible services than being prescriptive about which solutions it will adopt.
Darren Curry, chief digital officer at NHSBSA (pictured), commented: “Our digital strategy is not defined by the services and the products that we deliver to millions of users every day.
“We don’t mean a concentrated effort to deliver robotic process automation, artificial intelligence or blockchain across our services or any other hype tech of the moment. We may adopt some of these technologies, they may even be a by-product, but they are not our strategy.
“We mean our culture, our practices and the processes we apply to create, manage and maintain our services. On the ground, this is ‘lived’ in how we talk about our services, how we behave and interact, the values that we work by and the thinking that drives our decision making when delivering services for our users.”
Tech enabler
The document includes a section on technology as one of its five enablers, but this emphasises the need for flexibility and says there are plans for a playbook on how to design and delivery services.
It indicates that one priority will be the re-use of existing frameworks and solutions where possible, with a focus on education, experimentation, continuous iteration and ‘open first’. The latter will include publishing all of the code from service design in GitHub unless there is a clear security or commercial reason not to do so.
The others are: designing services around user needs; building teams that are diverse and inclusive; building tools, governance and processes to support the effort; and getting the best out of the organisation’s people.
Front image from iStock, Natalie Mis
Darren Curry image from NHSBSA
