Recommendation 9

To maximise the value obtained from digital procurements, departments need to ensure that digital people are sufficiently involved, as well as a range of project delivery, finance and legal teams. This entails more than just working collaboratively; it needs to address how digital expertise will have much greater input, accountability and responsibility.12 We asked how government was managing the relationship between digital and commercial teams within departments and ensuring that they were aligned and fully integrated with one another. GCF acknowledged that between 8 State of digital government review, page 35 9 Qq 20, 75 10 C&AG’s Report, para 10 11 Qq 8, 10–12; C&AG’s Report, Key facts 12 Q 6; C&AG’s Report, para 17 10 the commercial and digital functions, “sometimes there is a bit of tension there about the right way to do things and about different approaches”. DSIT acknowledged that part of its job was to “keep encouraging the whole of the commercial function to take this agenda really seriously, the same as we do on all sorts of aspects of this work across Government”.13 This seems to us that digital concepts are simply not well enough embedded in the GCF. Every time someone is recruited, they must have the right digital skills. Equally all 6,000 staff need to be trained so that they work closely with digital specialists to understand how to incorporate digital elements into new procurements.