Insight: Gearing up as the digital transformation of public services accelerates

We are further embedding a culture of improvement and innovation to gear up for increasing digitisation of public services, writes Bradley Ebsworth-Willis, Associate Director of Continuous Improvement and Innovation at Reed in Partnership.

At Reed in Partnership, we are all about making things better. Outwardly, our services are designed to positively transform people and their communities. Internally, we also have a strong focus on evolving and improving the ways that our services deliver our mission.

Successful continuous improvement does not just happen – it’s the product of building and developing an exceptional team, investing in the right tools at the right time, and fostering a culture of shared knowledge and expertise across the entire company.

We are proud to be recently recognised for our continuous improvement success with four nominations at the Quality Professionals Awards.

As the wave of the current technology revolution begins to define the future of public service delivery, we anticipate significant changes to ensure they meet the needs of the country.

The UK faces challenges that demand responsive public services. Disruptive technology will accelerate the options available for service delivery, requiring careful implementation and optimisation. Continuous improvement activity will increasingly intersect with digital innovation. Embracing evolving capabilities like AI will enhance services, find important efficiencies and boost productivity and personalisation.

To prepare us for these challenges, we recently merged our Continuous Improvement, Product Strategy, Innovation and System teams to position ourselves at the forefront of the digital transformation and elevate our improvement culture to better harness new technology effectively and augment our talented workforce.

We are confident that this strategic move will deliver three key benefits:

1. Clearer vision: By aligning our creative and innovative resources around a single vision, we foster a shared mindset and common goals. This enables us to navigate complex challenges effectively.
2. Greater impact: We invest significantly in ideation. Our SPARK programme is designed to generate creative and impactful solutions to problems. So often missed or undervalued in innovation initiatives, we prioritise defining the right questions at the beginning. Creating a safe space for co-members to contribute ideas leads to solutions that deliver value for the company, our customers, and participants.
3. Better learning: We want to play a leading role in sharing and learning from sector-specific best practices and global trends. Our recent membership of techUK will enhance our ability to contribute to broader discussions.

Moving forward, we have set ourselves three focus areas to unite our continuous improvement and innovation projects and resources:

1. Elevate service user experiences: We will raise the quality and impact of every interaction and create memorable moments for people who use our services.
2. Empower our employees to thrive: We will streamline workflows, improve productivity, and support our people to maximise their impact.
3. Inspire creativity and deliver results: We will find more ways to deliver what’s most important to our commissioners – value for money, high performance and agility – by prioritising learning and effective deployment of emerging ideas and solutions.

Our existing technology solutions power our services effectively, but we’re not stopping there – we want to do more. In particular, the potential for advancements in areas like AI means that new frontiers can be opened in terms of both the outcomes and expectations for what digital public services can offer.

Exciting plans lie ahead in the coming months and years. We’re confident that our commitment to continuous improvement and innovation will allow us to meet the needs of our customers and strengthen our services.