Principles for Digital Audit

I’m joined today by audit manager Morag Campsie and auditor Lucy Jones. They’re part of the Audit Scotland team who have produced a new summary, looking at the lessons that can be learned from the success, or failure, of ICT projects in the public sector. 

In the past five years, the Scottish public sector has invested around £4bn on ICT and digital technology offers huge potential for improving and transforming about public services. 
But history tells us that it can be hard to get these projects right, not just here in Scotland but across the world. 

First of all, I’d like to do is talk a little about the nature of the publication that’s out today because it’s not your typical Audit Scotland report. Could you talk me through the thinking behind it and what you hope to achieve with it? 

MC: Yeah, sure, we’ve reported as you say a number of times over the last few years on public sector ICT programmes that haven’t gone so well, and last year we reported on the Scottish Government’s CAP Futures programme and at that point we committed to pulling together some lessons learned from all the reports we’d done in the past, BECAUSE we thought there was a number of common themes across all these programmes that we’d looked at.

We also thought it’d be useful to look at other countries further afield, and to look at other auditors and reports, to see what they’d found, to see if there was any common themes there too.

We also wanted to do something a bit different, that could be used as a handy guide to actually help public sector organisations as they tried to deliver successful digital programmes going forward and as I say, we realised that our reports were saying similar things to other reports across the world.

LJ: As well as being a slightly new approach, it’s also going to look a bit different so it’s got a different format: It’s digital, it’s interactive, and it’s a short, sharp report.

That sounds fairly fitting, a summary about digital and lessons learned about ICT and it has interactive element to it, so that’s interesting. Now I’d mentioned about the significant investment that the Scottish public sector has made in ICT over the last few years and the potential that digital technology has to improve public services. I’d like to talk a little bit more about that, so why is it so important that improvements are made in how the public sector bodies are approaching ICT projects? 

MC: So like you say, there’s a lot of money that’s invested in it and I think that digital and ICT has the ability to transform the way that public sector organisations deliver public services

On top of that, we’re seeing more and more public sector bodies undertaking really big business transformation progs, which are obviously enabled by digital technologies.

Also, the Scottish Government, they launched their new digital strategy a couple of months ago and they have their Digital First standards as well, which are encouraging public sector bodies to use digital and engage users more when they’re undertaking big transformation programmes. 

LJ: And following on from that, people are much more digitally able. Everyone now has a mobile phone, everyone interacts with their computer on a daily basis and they have an expectation that they should be able to interact with public sector organisations digitally as well. So it’s very important these organisations keep up that pace of change and on top of digital. 

The document pulls together case studies from your recent audits on ICT projects, and it uses them to design principles for public bodies to follow when they’re embarging on this kind of work. Can you give us a flavour of what the principles are and how you identified them? (Lucy)

LJ: We have five main principles- planning, governance, users, leadership and strategic oversight and assurance. We undertook a lot of research to see if other countries had experienced similar issues or not, and we found that they did. From this research and drawing on our previous ICT audits, we collated these five themes or principles. 

Within that, there’s a number of subprinciples or areas for consideration that are important for organisations to look at as well. 

MC: So for example, in the planning principle, we look at how important it is to understand and appreciate the complexity of the programme and what they’re trying to deliver. Identifying the right people, with the right skills and experience, particularly at different stages of the programme as well. 

Ok, so, is any one principle more important than the others? (Lucy)

LJ: No, they’re all equally important. Some organisations will be better at some than others but really they shouldn’t be considered in isolation, it’s a suite of principles and you need to consider them all to help you achieve that successful project.

What I would say is that a key factor underpinning all the principles is having the right skills and experience on the project at the right time. Throughout the report we have highlighted this by including a special skills icon.. 

MC: Yes, this just highlights that across the different principles, that’s an important consideration. 

Ok, so as well as Audit Scotland’s work which is cited as case studies within the briefing, you also make mention of projects across the UK and beyond, actually, indeed all over the world. Could you explain a bit more about these other examples and why you included these? 

LC: The problems that we’ve highlighted previously in our reports are not unique to the Scottish public sector. Across the world, the same themes and issues come up time and time again. And so, we’ve included these in the summary to help illustrate the principles but also show how other organisations have dealt with issues to help the public sector organisations in Scotland manage their digital programmes.

So, and it’s probably worth mentioning at this stage that not all of the case studies and examples within the briefing are negative. Indeed you do talk about projects that have been successful in their approach, could you talk to me a little bit more about that?

MC: Yeah so, like you say, the nature of our job, we tend to look at the ones that have gone wrong but we do come across parts of programmes where things have gone well, or where organisations have managed to turn things around. 

For example, we could look at Registers of Scotland who featured in one of our first Managing ICT projects back in 2012 and again in 2015. They were having quite a few problems and they’ve since invested a lot in the way they deliver their digital projects and using an agile methodology, they seem to have turned things around, so we use quite a few examples like that as well.

I’d also say that it’s a very short summary so we can’t fit everything in there, so the summary as well at the back has links to useful website and also a further reading list as well so if people want to get more information, ideas or insight they can go to these links as well. 

Right, great. So the briefing obviously has a lot of important messages for public sector bodies looking at developing ICT projects in the future. Given it’s not a typical Audit Scotland report, how are you planning to share the messages and get out there to the people who would actually benefit from this? 

MC: So the summary will be published on our website, like we say it’s a digital summary. We’re also looking to develop a digital e-hub on our website, and that’ll have links to useful information. We’ll also be publishing our own digital strategy over the summer as well. 

We’re also appearing at the Holyrood Connect conference, our colleague Gemma Diamond will be there in June. And we’re really keen to get out and about and speak to organisations about what we’ve found. We’ll be speaking to the Scottish Government, the Scottish Parliament, and MSPs as well, just to try and get the summary out there.

Great. Morag, Lucy, thanks for your time. And as Morag has mentioned, the briefing is available to download from our website, www.audit-scotland.gov.uk