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With all the uncertainty in 2020, one thing is undeniable. Success, if not survival, in the challenging economic landscape of the past few months has been heavily linked to digital skills. Over the past decade, many of the esteemed British institutions have been slow to depart from the business models and ways of working of the 20th century. In 2020, in the face of a great and unexpected event, the cost of this inertia was revealed.

Despite five years of significant spending on digital transformation, government departments and leading private companies still largely have pre-digital technology. The way we work beyond the digital team is relatively unchanged – it’s about more than meetings at Zoom. The reluctance to choose complex, aging, mission-critical legacy infrastructures and applications is understandable.

In this context, the early large-scale digital transformation focused on simple and important websites and, more recently, on complex but unimportant websites like AI and VR. The hard but crucial work of deeper technological change and everything that goes with it has been neglected.

Before the pandemic broke out, there was huge investment in improving online services and increasing noise levels from new technologies like AI and IoT. However, Covid-19 underscores the need to fix the plumbing to bring these two things together and be successful in a fast-moving environment. Partly due to the globally recognized early successes of the Government Digital Service (GDS) and the heavy investment in tech startup London, the UK’s digital maturity seems overrated.

The UK tech start-up scene was vibrant in the years leading up to 2020. Now, many of our companies have scaled early on to replace or seriously disrupt the existing established organizations that we rely on for so many of our vital life activities – insurance, banking, social benefits, healthcare.

In fact, the data suggests that despite the cult of the startup, we face increasing societal dependence on a small number of large American platform and technology companies that will continue to grow exponentially due to the power of network effects. This lens makes our economy more polarized and less diverse.

Many of our institutions certainly need to be shaken up, but it is important to all of us that they continue to exist and remain relevant. The oversized impact of the pandemic on the UK economy and the government’s struggle to cope shows that a deep modernization of our businesses and the public sector should be a major national priority.

The pandemic has exposed an underinvestment in mission-critical technology and a superficiality at the center of our approach to the fourth industrial revolution. This is reflected in both the public and private sectors. What is the long-term strategy for Government Digital Service? Why are online meetings being called digital transformation and how can you offset the noise about AI in our healthcare sector given the more pedestrian challenges of track and trace?

Advisor to the rescue?

At this point those of us in the consulting industry should turn the mirror on ourselves. Most of the appropriate size institutions rely on outside partners for strategic advice and delivery expertise. The reluctance of the UK’s largest institutions to embrace the digital economy suggests that these partners either failed to convince their clients of the need for fundamental change or were unaware of the need themselves.

When people and organizations face uncertainty or fear, they tend to turn to the familiar or the safe. When it comes to digital business models, technology and data, there is a risk that the shocks of the pandemic and Brexit will lead more institutions to turn back to precisely those companies whose advice helped them to be in this position at all.

The large consulting firms and system integrators are now offering digital services. But they were late for the party and many have turned to acquisitions to expand technology and digital expertise rather than even bothering about them. Regardless of how good the digital talent you are acquiring or employing, making it work in a pre-digital culture and environment is often the result. Can these experts get to where they need to be to best support their customers?

Foundry4

For this reason we developed Foundry4 to find a new style for external consulting and delivery partners. We are individually differentiated, focused and highly specialized in our own technology or modern business discipline. Together we can offer our customers the specialist advice and experience of SMEs while at the same time mitigating concerns about size, financial security and influence. There is a demand for this.

This is not just about a list of preferred suppliers. I’m talking about a conscious and careful amalgamation of a network that can meet your needs and deliver partnerships rather than projects. This takes time, focus, money and diligence. But what is offered is nothing more than survival.

As the economic impact of Covid-19 becomes clearer and the importance of digital, technology and data becomes indisputable, the combination of high consulting fees and non-specialized expertise may seem unattractive for institutes under desperate pressure to recover. Avoid falling into the same deliberative trap of the last decade that Britain seeks to recover. The country has the option of activating a reset that takes place once a year.

If we are to emerge from the pandemic in a strong position, we must first reform the institutions and systems on which our recovery depends. It will be vital to lead them with real experts in design, modern technology and data.