Recommendation 16

Government faces uncertain but profound technological changes, particularly around artificial intelligence, and recognises that it rapidly needs to develop the skills to deliver the next generation of programmes for digitally enabled change. At the same time, it needs to bring the skills of its people up to an acceptable standard to enable them to successfully deal with historic programmes and challenges from its legacy digital environment. GDS told us that often the challenges relating to legacy systems, and the ability to meet them, were not evenly distributed. It explained that some of the areas with the biggest challenges are often the teams who did not have the scale or skills to address them.24