CIO interview: Simon McKinnon, chief digital and information officer, DWP

The digital agenda

The merger fits nicely into the department’s wider and rather ambitious digitisation plan of existing services. Over the past few years, DWP has moved away from being a largely outsourced department, gradually moving services and products in-house.

A prime example of this is the build of its in-house virtual machine environment (VME), which replaced 11 key benefit systems paying out more than £150bn a year to citizens, without any downtime. The project came to a culmination in the midst of the pandemic, and was a massive undertaking.

DWP’s old VME mainframe services had been fully managed by Fujitsu since the system was first installed in 1974, and most of the department’s critical IT systems, including the benefit systems, were still being run on the proprietary operating system, originally developed by ICL before its acquisition by Fujitsu.

There was, unsurprisingly, no longer a wish to maintain a 40-year-old operating system, says McKinnon, adding that many of the old services in the department no longer met users’ needs.

“Users now want to have, in general, an online service. They want to have better communication, and those services are so old, it’s very difficult to give them the sort of experiences they want, so we’re rewriting all of them over the coming three to five years,” he says.

Moving services in-house has also meant changing the way teams work. The department has built agile teams around the services and built up skills and capacity over recent years.  “Our intention is to use those agile squads to advance on a fairly broad front – the transformation of our services and the automation of those services,” he adds.

Changing culture and branding

“We were largely a supplier management function five or six years ago [but] we’ve now built our own capacity. That’s meant we’ve had to change our culture, we’ve had to change the way our brand is seen in the marketplace so that we can attract people who have more contemporary skills,” says McKinnon.

“We think we’re now a fairly modern IT function, whereas historically we were rather behind the curve. I think we’re now quite close to the front.”

About two-and-a-half years ago, the DWP began a project to migrate most of its hosted applications from a managed service in a third-party datacentre to services that the department built out through the Crown Commercial Service framework, taking a hybrid cloud approach.

Following its migration to the cloud, McKinnon says service levels have improved beyond all recognition. “We have less than 10% of the outages that we used to have four or five years ago,” he says.

However, moving services in-house does not mean getting rid of suppliers. The department still works with several third parties to supplement its skills base and bring additional capacity, as well as working with software providers and consultancies.

“It’s not that we brought everything in house – what we have done is brought the ownership of things in-house. [Rather than being] dependent on suppliers, we now use them to supplement our own teams, and that’s been extremely effective in helping us drive forward some of the transformational work we’ve already done.”

Universal Credit

As well as bringing existing services in-house, one of DWP’s biggest projects over the past few years has been the much-talked-about and sometimes controversial benefits service, Universal Credit (UC).

The UC programme first began in 2010, before a restart at the end of 2013/early 2014 when DWP began rolling out the new benefits system in stages. By the end of 2015, it had rolled out a limited version of the system, referred to as the “live service”, but targeting only the simplest of claims and using an IT system run by external providers that was rarely updated. 

In 2016, it began rolling out UC “full service”, covering the entire complexity of the scheme to replace six different in-work welfare benefits with a single payment. The roll-out was completed in 2018.

“You have to understand your customers really well to give them the services that they can consume”

The service has had its challenges, but McKinnon describes UC as a “really resilient service” that “got us through the pandemic”. Without the digitisation of that service, he says, DWP wouldn’t have been able to cope with the extra demand, which in the first week of lockdown was 10 times greater than normal.  

During the first couple of weeks of lockdown in 2020, nearly one million people signed up for UC.

One of the issues around UC has been the use of the government’s identity platform Gov.uk Verify, which resulted in users struggling to verify their identity. The government is now working to shut down Verify and replace it with a new digital identity service.

“The trouble with Verify was that it was not very well suited to the demographic of people that we serve. It required people to have passports and driving licences, and ready access to data that would substantiate who they were,” says McKinnon.

“Many of our customers are simply not in that position because they’re a little bit more vulnerable in society and may not have access to those sorts of documents. So we’ve broadened the ways in which we can verify people, including using our own data to make that possible. That’s increased our ability to verify people online and therefore give them access to the benefits they are entitled to.

“Part of the lesson we’re all learning is that you have to understand your customers really well to give them the services that they can consume,” he says.

Coping with Covid

As well as ensuring the department could cope with the huge increase in demand for Universal Credit during the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, DWP also had to figure out how to enable a largely office-based organisation to work remotely.

“We had to do some pretty challenging things to increase our capacity to work from home, but also to get PCs to people. We’ve rolled out over 80,000 PCs to people’s homes,” says McKinnon.

The DWP also had to build new services quickly. In eight weeks, the department put in place an online application form for pension credits to free up capacity on UC, as well as spinning up its new Kickstart scheme in six weeks. Kickstart aims to provide funding to employers to create jobs for young people on UC.

McKinnon says these sorts of experiences have provided two lessons for DWP. “The first one has been that demand for digital services is high, and that the propensity of some people, particularly those on pensions credit, to use digital services was probably higher than they thought.

“It’s also taught us something internally about the value and opportunity that comes from digitising our services, and that’s why we have ambitious plans to move forward on that automation journey.”