Three problems facing government that G-Cloud 10 can fix

If you can help government solve these three problems you should definitely be on G-Cloud 10! An excellent blog by our local government and digital transformation expert Dave Briggs.

G-Cloud 10 is imminent, providing an opportunity for new suppliers to access a huge market of public sector buyers. But how to attract attention, and get eyeballs on your products and services? One way is to ensure you are meeting a challenge faced by your potential customers – so what might some of those challenges be?

1. Dependency on legacy suppliers

Much of the technology used by local government is starting to get a little crusty. Systems have been in use for years, if not decades, and they have been designed for a pre-internet, pre-mobile era.

Now, the suppliers of these legacy systems are working to improve this, but dealing with that amount of technical debt takes time. This creates a great window for new G-Cloud 10 suppliers to step in and offer modern, flexible, low maintenance systems that will help councils deliver improvements to the way they deliver services. Procurement used to be a big barrier for new companies challenging incumbents, but the flexibility of G-Cloud can massively reduce this potential blocker to sales.

2. Short term skills shortages

Digital transformation in councils requires a large number of new human capabilities as well as technology ones. The kinds of skills needed to effect genuine change are not often present in organisations, and so to ensure success in a transformation programme, they need to be bought in. These include technology skills like user interface design, coding and data science skills, and also business focused skills such as user research, service design, business analysis and so on.

There’s also an importance issue of mindset to be tackled – the need for people who are in step with digital culture and ways of doing things. The best consultants and contractors help upskill the people they work with to reduce dependency on external support over time, building capability in their host organisations. Bringing in talent for short term contracts or specific projects has never been easier, and for service-supplying companies, G-Cloud 10 provides a great platform for selling into a market desperate for this kind of support.

3. Speed of delivery

Invariably large transformation programmes can take a long time to get going and produce results. New approaches, such as agile, can mean that big bits of work can be broken down into chunks that can be quickly delivered, but in the past that hasn’t always been an option for some elements of a project, particularly procurement. A key problem holding back success in transformation in councils is the sheer amount of time it can take to make anything meaningful happen. The scale of the budget challenge facing many councils means that this simply has to change, which means ramping up delivery speed on transformation projects.

Those suppliers able to articulate to potential customers this ability to deliver quickly will be hitting a sales sweet spot. G-Cloud 10 will help here, as mentioned above, as the framework dramatically decreases the amount of time spent on procuring products and services needed to make change happen in councils. But it’s also the kind of products and services that will be found on G-Cloud 10 that will matter, and the culture of the companies providing them. Agility, flexibility and ultimately speed will be real winners as councils race to improve their services and find efficiencies.