Interview: John Seglias, chief digital information officer, Defra

New contractual goals

When Defra renewed its key supplier agreements with IBM and Capgemini, a key objective set out in the new contracts was the reduction of operating cost.

“When we looked at the contract and did some benchmarking, we knew that through procurement and disaggregation into many service lines, we could reduce running costs quite substantially,” says Seglias, adding that Defra achieved a 30% reduction on the previous supplier arrangement in its annual IT budget.

Another key point to be addressed was improving the user experience, which involved renewing the equipment people use, as well as infrastructure.

Defra has a large laptop estate that still runs on Microsoft Windows 7, which is no longer fit for purpose and doesn’t support modern and smarter ways of working, as many machines don’t even have a camera.

Infrastructure-wise, Seglias returns to the example of the Environment Agency to illustrate the issues faced. “If an EA colleague wanted to come and work in a Defra building, they couldn’t connect to the network,” he says. “So we had to create a temporary guest Wi-Fi network to allow them to connect, or even provide them with a separate Ethernet cable to plug in.

“People could not share diaries across different organisations because they were on different Exchange platforms. That made working together as a single group difficult, and the legacy IT was creating these problems.

“So we have addressed those problems, as we now have one active directory connected to the same platform and we have moved it all to one network.”

There were many other back-end IT issues that Defra had to address, such as the support layers for Microsoft applications.

“We had a variety of active directories that were created and built many years ago,” says Seglias. “And through many years’ worth of IT change, those have become a bit more complex in terms of the way they hold the user data.

“Of course, you can’t remove the old active directory until you’ve also remediated all the applications that use it.

“When we decided to move everyone over to Office 365 and cloud and create a new cloud-based active directory, we had to work with Microsoft very carefully to ensure the way the data flows between those and that the new active directory remains up to date – which is why that was such a complex project for them.”

Defra has a small innovation team whose job it is to look at a five-year horizon and consider what digital technology could be applied to the department, and carry out proofs-of-concept.

“We do a good job at going out to the business and saying, ‘Look at what this technology has done elsewhere – we could apply this to Defra’, then use innovation to solve some of the problems that we have within the group,” says Seglias.

An example of innovation-related projects is the work Defra and outside bodies are doing around developing digital tools for activities such as waste-tracking with the EA.

Use of robotic process automation is also increasing, which is already in place at the EA and is predicted to increase across the group to boost efficiency. Machine learning proofs-of-concept have also been carried out and now Defra is looking at how this can be turned into products and services that can be used in the various departmental bodies.

But when it comes to innovation, Seglias says he is having to adopt a pragmatic approach and accept there are more pressing priorities right now.

“While we can’t stop everything and do lots of innovation, we can definitely think of how we can work to deliver outcomes in a smarter way,” he says.

“We also have to be honest – for us to take advantage of innovation, we have to finish implementing the projects under UnITy, and only then will we be able to implement some more advanced innovations. But we’re not talking about years, we’re talking about just a few months.”

Leadership challenges

With multiple demanding projects on the go, leading the people involved can be difficult, and that is no different at Defra. On the other hand, Seglias says the organisation’s IT staff engagement scores have reached the highest level on record over the past three years.

“But it takes effort from the leadership and teams alike to spend time with people to talk about their wellbeing and health, to guide them through the restructuring process and to help them understand the different complexities, timeframes, and so on,” he says.

“Finding time to do that while you’re also very much head-down in terms of Brexit has been very challenging. And finding space to even have a voice when there’s so much happening already has been a challenge.

“But we have great people who are hugely committed. When they come to work for Defra, they choose to do so because of what we stand for.”

The situation is compounded by the fact that the IT function is also being restructured as UnITy progresses.

“We want the function to be structured correctly,” says Seglias. “So there will be some short-term instability for just a few months, but we will come out of it knowing exactly where everyone is in the function and what their roles are, and so we can offer better outcomes and delivery for Defra.”

However, Seglias is upbeat about the future and proud of what the department’s IT team has achieved so far under his watch, particularly around Brexit.

“I think it was probably one of the most exciting digital programmes we’ve ever done,” he says. “There is definitely a feeling of professional fulfilment when I think of what we have done over the past couple of years. We are still recovering from it, actually – but we don’t mind a bit of a challenge in IT, do we?”