Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 7
7
Accepted
Publish regular updates to ensure departments deliver committed digital transformation tasks.
Recommendation
Pressures on spending in the current climate require better delivery for improved efficiency at lower cost.9 However, competing pressures and changing priorities will present challenges to the delivery of the Roadmap, despite CDDO’s best endeavours. CDDO is using quarterly assessments, supported by its digital dashboard, to monitor progress against commitments and identify where departments may be going off track and the steps needed to correct this.10 CDDO must maintain suitable levers to keep progress from stalling.11 As a committee, we believe in transparency as a means of holding people to account and in our view CDDO should publish updates to keep departments to the tasks they have committed to.12 Senior leadership understanding of digital
Government Response Summary
The government agrees and CDDO commits to updating the Permanent Secretary level ‘Digital and Data Board’ and publishing a public update every six months, ensuring Parliament also receives this update by February 2024.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
6.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: February 2024 6.2 CDDO is committed to updating the Permanent Secretary level ‘Digital and Data Board’ on departmental and overall progress against the Roadmap every six months, as well as publishing a public update. 6.3 CDDO will ensure that Parliament also receives this update, with departmental progress included. Some Roadmap commitments are joint goals and will be reported on as a collective. For example, commitment 3 states that all departments will work to make all ‘essential shared’ data assets available and in use across government through trusted application programming interfaces (APIs) and platforms such as Government Data Exchange (GDX) and the Integrated Data Service (IDS), along with commitment 22 stating CDDO and HM Treasury will work together to develop and trial new approaches to financial processes, business case and impact tracking challenges, and pilot with four departments ahead of any potential wider rollout.