PUBLIC has recently launched a school of technology in an effort to break down some of the barriers to public sector innovation and embrace startup technology and culture.
Edd Elliot and Mia Millman from PUBLIC, Europe's leading GovTech accelerator and venture firm join the Govlaunch podcast to discuss the core skill set public servants will increasingly need as we move toward more data and technology driven organizations. They share how public servants can up-skill and become equipped to handle this increasingly digital and data driven space.
More info:
Featured: PUBLIC (public.io)
Episode guests:
Edd Elliott, Head of Growth, PUBLIC
Mia Millman, Programme Manager, PUBLIC School of Technology
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're looking at industry trends with a group championing the use of emerging tech in solving public problems and improving the lives of citizens. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today, I'm joined by Edd Elliot and Mia Millman from PUBLIC, Europe's leading gov tech accelerator and venture firm. Public has recently launched a school of technology in an effort to break down some of the barriers and embrace startup technology and culture. I'll turn now to Mia and Edd to share how you can up-skill and become equipped to handle this increasingly digital and data driven space.
Lindsay: (00:52)
I am back again with Edd Elliot from PUBLIC and he is joined by Mia Millman who's the program manager for the public school technology. Edd, can you reintroduce yourself? And then Mia, you introduce yourself to our listeners so they can get to know who's on the podcast today.
Edd: (01:08)
Sure. Hi, I'm Edd Eliott I am head of growth here at public, public in one line. Uh, we help government work with new technology and new technology providers and indeed vice versa, trying to help new technology providers like startups work with government in new and interesting ways.
Mia: (01:26)
And hi, I'm Mia I'm program manager at public, and I focus specifically on learning programs, including the public school technology. We've actually recently just launched public school of technology and we've, we've launched it to meet the urgent need for upskilling in the public sector when it comes to digital and innovation. So we've launched a range of courses, both kind of specific deep dive courses, as well as broad, slightly longer courses for junior to mid-level civil servants, as well as senior leaders with the idea being that these courses will provide civil servants with what they need to know when it comes to digital innovation technology.
Lindsay: (02:05)
Last episode, Edd and I talked about the state of gov tech and the growth, and also the potential in this sector with the advancements in technology. How do you think changes in technology have changed the way in which public sector bodies operate?
Mia: (02:20)
I think there's a few different ways. And one thing that I think has been particularly noticeable, in the last year and a half, nearly two years now with COVID is to do with the accessibility of public services and public service delivery. It's a lot easier for people to access things at home, which makes a lot of sense during COVID, but also means that it's a lot easier for citizens who are in remoter areas of the country, um, to access services as, and when they need it. Similarly, it's also a lot easier for citizens to be involved in kind of policy-making processes and kind of government decision-making is digital, is allowing them to be more involved in the design process.
Edd: (03:01)
Absolutely. And just to add to that as well, that, you know, technology is changing lots of parts of the way that government is functioning in terms of government is almost inviting technology in, as Mia says in shaping the policy process in new digital interfaces to do everything from paying tax to sorting out, you know, car parking in the most mundane of circumstances. Um, but it's also important to recognize that, you know, technology is dramatically changing every other part of our lives outside of the public sector, um, from the way we bank to the way we travel. And, and a lot of that in terms of shaping our experience of citizens in interacting with cities also has a knock-on effect in government. The way in which we use platforms like Uber or Airbnb or Amazon, that that does have knock-on effects and the way that cities have to adapt to the changes that will cause in terms of what's happening in the places they oversee.
Edd: (03:58)
When I think of that challenge. I always think of, um, a book by a, an individual Mitchell vice who's, an academic at Harvard. And he writes incredible sections around how the city of Amsterdam had to really upscale a huge amount when Airbnb moved into the city, because suddenly they had to think about, okay, how do we regulate this incredibly sophisticated platform? How do we find the skills to do that? That is a reality and increasing reality for lots of civil servants across the globe. It really puts more attention on the facts that technology and learning about technology is, is ever more important. Tech is becoming easier, faster, and cheaper to build every year, you know, every month almost to the point where it's now getting to the point where almost anyone either due to, um, Loco technology. So technology that is, is, um, requires less technical skill to build almost no technicals builds bills or in fact, the kind of digital literacy of a lot of people who coming through school at the moment at the ages of 2025, we are reaching a tipping point where, you know, the option to build technology, um, is increasingly not only going to be available to most civil servants, but possibly even expected by civil servants in 10 or 15 years time.
Edd: (05:17)
Imagine, you know, you are a nurse working in a local kind of care home in your city and, you know, you're, you're trying to support your patients and you think actually, wouldn't it be fantastic if alongside the case management solution that I'm using, we can add a feature that would allow the families of those, those individuals, those patients to express what their dietary preferences would be. At the moment, that's an incredibly difficult, uh, technical problem to try and solve where you'd have to go through a series of different primes or even technology technologists within your own team in 10, 15 years at the rate at which this is improving, it should be possible for that nurse themselves to solve that situation. And that's really where I think we're increasingly going to see technology change the way in which the role of sort of civil servants and public servants, how they experience life and experience problems in their jobs will change.
Mia: (06:12)
Yeah. And I think, you know, that's a super exciting and interesting future to be looking forward to in say 10 to 15 years time, but even kind of on a more short timescale, I think at the moment digital and innovation is very much seen as a specialism and this is something I'm probably gonna, I imagine I'll end up buying you on about a bit today is that this shouldn't be the case anymore. Innovation and digital needs to be seen as a core aspect of civil Southern's roles going forward. And I think that's a key area that hopefully we will see change in the future where even if it's not, you know, knowing how to code and how to build things into apps, which at the moment may seem a bit daunting to say that this is going to be a core competency, that every civil servant is going to have to hit. But having just a strong enough understanding of how these technologies work and where they're going, um, and the differences in innovative ways of working, I think is a key way that things will be changing in the shorter term at least.
Lindsay: (07:07)
You mentioned core competencies and I imagine this is something you think about a lot, the public school of technology. What would you say are the digital and innovation skills that are becoming more prevalent or really core competencies that are required in the public sector?
Mia: (07:23)
So I think what we've seen recently is that increasingly there is a focus on things like agile ways of working and integrating things like user centered and citizen centered design, when it comes to designing policy and designing, public service delivery. This is something which requires the use of technology quite heavily. The other thing which we're seeing a lot more of is the use of data in how services are delivered and how they're developed. And it was so in the very early stages of what this could mean. Um, but I think this is a key area, both in terms of the fact that it's been used, but this is, you know, becoming a key skill that people are going to need to be able to use and understand people are going to have to know how, how they can be best using citizens' data to ensure that the services that they're delivering are relevant to the citizens that they're working with.
Mia: (08:17)
In terms of specific things, obviously we're looking at how data can be used to improve public service delivery. This means that everyone needs to be able to look at a data set and understand what it means and what the key things they need to take out of it all when it comes to the changes that are being made to public services. Um, when we're looking at things like agile ways of working and user centered design, it's not that everyone has to have a detailed understanding of how to run a design sprint, it's more looking at the broader pieces of what the benefits are of this process versus other processes and why these are the things which are changing in the future.
Edd: (08:55)
I think I'd completely agree with Mia, and I think particularly that final point around sort of agile and innovation, I think there's a general sense going throughout the private sector, which I think is slowly moving on into the public sector, which is, is a core competency of anyone, regardless of their role, to be thinking innovatively about how they solve the challenges in front of them. I think increasingly when we look at okay, how do you do that? How do you effectively think through that, over the last 10 years, there's been an explosion of different kind of innovative and agile ways of working to think through how to solve those problems. Um, that goes through from everything about, you know, uh, user testing, prototyping. Um, these may not be things that, you know, every civil servant will be doing tomorrow, but particularly if you are in a leadership role, um, or you're sort of managing a team or a function, as Mia says, being able to kind of understand data effectively analyze this new systems to, to take insight from that data, which could evolve SQL, you know, it could involve Python from that could involve a whole range of different approaches will increasingly be incredibly important.
Edd: (10:08)
But also there are gonna be sort of broader trends, in terms of understanding, you know, how to use increasingly sophisticated tools. The level of complexity of tools that are coming out, whether it be anything from, you know, smart messaging tools right through to this kind of collaboration tools, um, is increasingly important and, and showing real efficiencies when it comes to the private sector and will be increasingly expected of when you're working in the public sector. Learning how, when and when to use these tools will be, um, I think increasingly important to public servants lives over the next five to 10 years.
Lindsay: (10:45)
I think we should get into how specifically public and the school of technology are helping solve for some of this. And how our listeners could get involved if they were interested. So if we could take a little segue and talk about that.
Mia: (10:59)
Yeah, of course. We just launched with three kind of main courses. So we've launched with an innovators fellowship, which is quite an intense, it's a 12 week full-time program, um, which we're targeting towards kind of junior or mid-level senior civil servants with the idea being they get embedded into a startup, so they can be immersed in the startup culture. They get a chance to develop their own innovation project, um, which is kind of like coming up with their own startup, um, as well as, you know, working through lectures and workshops with their peers and building off case studies based on the public sector and private sector. We've also launched an executive education course for senior leaders in government with the idea being that, um, as I said earlier, you know, innovation and digital, isn't something that is a specialism anymore.
Mia: (11:48)
It's something that we think everyone should be able to understand whether that's the most junior civil servant, right up to senior leaders, um, from the leader side, it's more about how do you lead organizations and support innovation through your teams and departments as opposed to being the ones actually implementing it. Um, and the last kind of category of courses we've launched is our deep dive courses. And I think this is, um, potentially a key area that your listeners can get involved in at the moment. These are shorter one to two day courses on specific topics. So this means that, um, say, you know, you're a generalist, but you're interested in becoming a specialist in procurement. We're going to be starting running our, um, deep dive courses shortly. Um, and we've launched with one on procurement and one on cyber security. We've also got one on data analytics and database in the works at the moment, and we're building up a whole bank of those. Um, and I think one nice thing about that is that it's the, it's the easiest one for us to do global. So there's definitely, um, an easy way for people to get involved.
Lindsay: (12:50)
That's fantastic. So the deep dive sort of mini courses that would be accessible for more, more of the community that we're talking about, are those available online, are they set class times?
Mia: (13:04)
So they are online, but all our content is typically delivered live. We find that, you know, a lot of the benefit is being able to interact with the people who are delivering these courses. Um, a big focus for us is that these are practitioner led and you've got people talking about their experience in government in say designing innovative procurement policy, but also hearing from, um, maybe an SME. Who's had a terrible time trying to get through the procurement and work with government and has, uh, amazing new technology that could really transform public services, but hasn't been able to get past that procurement barrier. Um, and so that live interaction is quite crucial to what we're doing at the moment.
Lindsay: (13:43)
Definitely, obviously there's a lot of obstacles that are keeping public servants from developing the various skills that we've talked about. Availability of courses and related materials is pretty limited. I mean, there are options out there, but to your point, your first intensive course on innovation requires three months of your time. And not many public servants would say they have that flexibility in the role that they're in. What would you say are some of the biggest obstacles that are keeping public servants from developing this skillset?
Edd: (14:13)
Well, to jump in there and maybe to answer your question, Lindsay, with an anecdote. I remember speaking to an official within the ministry of justice here in the UK and they, they put it incredibly eloquently. And although I'll probably paraphrase a little bit here, which is, um, I remember them saying, if you are in the position of someone who is looking to up-skill and technology, it's really hard to know what courses you need. Often it's not something that you're, you're told as you go through your career as to what technology skills you should be looking out for. Once you’ve thought of that, it's really hard to know where to find them. Once you have found them, it's hard to know whether they're going to be any good or in particular, whether they'll be tailored for a public sector context. A lot of the courses that are out there in the space virtually online, a very private sector focused, and some of the specifics that are relevant to the public sector, and particularly when it comes to dealing with system concerns, won't be covered in quite the same way.
Edd: (15:09)
And then finally, the point you made at the end, Lindsay, which is really sure is even if you do find the perfect course for you, it can be a real struggle to navigate through. Okay. You know, how do I get my manager or the designated HR person in my local council or in my sort of central government department to sign off and give me either the space, the time or the funding to be able to really get to the level that, that, you know, I feel like I need to be, to be better at my job. The number of barriers there is not just impacting on, you know, trying to get these things done, but also the kind of, I guess, the cultural response to trying to find training many people give up before they've even started. And I think, you know, to be as pointed earlier around the public school of technology, we can't solve all of those problems. But what we hopefully can do is to provide courses that are flexible in terms of time, um, flexible in terms of location, very much tailored to what particular public sector skill sets might be.
Edd: (16:06)
And also providing following courses, a community of individuals who you can continually go back to and ask, even if, you know, you've had your one week, you've got to where you need to be, you've then got a cohort of individuals you've studied with, or a part of the school of technology that you can then keep checking in with and, and keep kind of road testing what you've learned with, um, to make sure you're progressing as you, you continue from there.
Mia: (16:30)
And I think just to add what you were saying about the blockers that they face when deciding whether or not to look for training, I think it goes beyond that too. It's not just, you know, is it going to be difficult for you to be released from my day job to go do this training? It's if I then gain this skill set, am I actually going to be able to use these skills? Or am I just going to be shut down afterwards? So I think beyond just looking at, it's not just about, you know, what are the obstacles to getting the skillset it's also about what are the obstacles to actually implementing this change within government?
Lindsay: (17:03)
Yeah, that's an excellent point and unfortunately, something that most folks in local government are gonna be up against. PUBLIC is obviously producing a ton of tools and resources to help upskill and public servants’ understanding of digital tools and the startups and different technologies out there. Are there any tools, you want to talk about any of those from PUBLIC’s side or potentially any tools or resources you all have used as inspiration as you've launched this public school of technology?
Mia: (17:36)
Sure. Why don't I talk a bit about some of the tools that we use and we've been developing it because I think a lot of those, so for example, collaboration tools are super interesting for a lot of different contexts. So what we found with the public school of technology is that we've brought together a whole host of different people and that's meant, you know, trying to collaborate often remotely, not just because of COVID because, you know, we've got lecturers based in the us, um, as well as in Estonia and all sorts. So we use tools such as Miro, which has a really great kind of white boarding tool, great for collaboration and great for brainstorming. And I think something that, um, you see increasingly big corporates also using, but I think, you know, I don't see a huge amount of governments using it yet.
Mia: (18:18)
And I think that that'd be a great tool that can be starting to be used there. We've also used things like Trello, which is very good for, um, managing processes. And also what we've seen, especially with the last learning program that we've run the Percy Hobart fellowship was increasing using low-code platforms like ed mentioned earlier. It's a really great way for people to kind of have a play around with how technology is built and just kind of get their hands on what it actually means. And it helps them develop an understanding of a lot of the technologies they use just by being able to build it a little bit.
Edd: (18:53)
And to add to that as well. Just to name my favorite tool that we use in public all the time, I fully recommend air table, um, to any civil servant that's that's I'm shooting in it's, it's a flexible database that is, um, you know, effectively like an improved version of Excel that I have a strong belief will improve all of our lives if, if we were to use it. Um, I think just to add to that and, and maybe just assign post a few of resources, obviously, cause there's, there's a whole range of different resources out there beyond just the public school of technology. We've always been huge fans of apolitical who are a member of our portfolio, um, and provide, you know, online and flexible training for, for civil servants and a community-based forum, obviously, you know, Govlaunch does a huge amount purely in terms of just connecting individuals to, to others in their community, to, to learn from and post a huge amount of really excellent learning articles as well.
Edd: (19:43)
So those are definitely areas that we've, we've drawn collaboration from, particularly when it comes to that area of how do you create a community? Because I think so much of what we're trying to break through here and government is, you know, connecting individuals. So they feel it's normal to learn about technology and they have people to talk to, as Mia says, when they go back into government and, and maybe it's a slightly different atmosphere to where they've learned some of their skills, how do they maintain the momentum and the confidence to keep innovating and keep trying? It helps when you've got someone alongside you, who's doing it as well.
Lindsay: (20:16)
Yes. It's going to be so much easier to develop these skill sets when you have like-minded individuals to kind of bounce ideas off of, and really identifying your niche too, there are so many different levels of expertise across public service and being able to find people that understand very complex issues at the same level you do, or perhaps people that are as equally confused about some of the new technologies coming out. So we've really at Govlaunch tried to make it as open and accessible as possible. So like search projects across any category, look at articles about how other local governments across the world are trying to implement some innovative new technologies, or even in a lot of cases, just more creative process flows or better ways of collaborating across teams. So if you aren't able to attend some of these courses, if you don't have the support to do continuing education and build the community, there's still a way to search for free what thousands of local governments across the world are doing.
Lindsay: (21:18)
In closing, can you each share a final sentiment or bit of advice for our listeners? Something we haven't touched on already would be great.
Mia: (21:29)
Sure. So I think when it comes to digital skills and technology, we talk a lot about government needing to catch up and how the private sector is miles ahead. And we need to just, you know, keep up with the rate of change there's that's occurring. Why I would say is that, you know, obviously we do need to catch up and that's definitely true, but we need to reframe this as, you know, government can't just be at the back, but keeping up government really needs to get ahead when it comes to digital. And a lot of that will be to do with the people and to do with making sure that going forward, um, public servants really have the necessary skills and knowledge to be at the forefront of implementing innovation and digital rather than just, you know, keeping up with the pace of change.
Edd: (22:11)
And maybe just to add a kind of anecdotal example. One of the first programs we've been running, um, and we've been running for a year or so now has been with the Royal Navy here in the UK. And, you know, it's, it's really remarkable when you talk to these individuals who've been in the service for a long period of time and they've had this opportunity to take part in a three month or a six month course where they're working with a startup, how much that opportunity kind of has expanded their horizons and made them feel like, you know, they are really getting opportunities to be ahead of maybe where they could have been without the course. And one of the things we do, which I think Mia touched on earlier is ask these individuals to develop their own products or that they're in pilots idea.
Edd: (22:56)
The number of individuals who grasp that opportunity with both hands and created really amazing products and features that they've then had the chance to show back to their manager or in many cases, their managers, managers, manager, you know, people who sit right at the Crow at the top of the Royal Navy in the UK. That opportunity, but also the confidence that comes with that opportunity. Um, I think in many cases is, is a really amazing and unique opportunity that that is not just good in terms of learning skills, but also boosting confidence, demonstrating capability within staff and, and building a community within public services where there's greater trust, greater innovation, um, and a greater reliance on the people around you to come up with solutions that are facing the whole community that you're working with them.
Lindsay: (23:42)
Something Johnny brought up in our last episode, which has been reinforced in all my conversations with local governments. In fact, we're doing an episode after this one on strategies on selling the public sector. And the biggest thing brought up across the board is make sure as a startup, as a company in the space that you are solving a problem that actually exists. So what better way of identifying the problems that actually exists, then having those in public service tell you what the problems are. And then looking to tackle those. So excellent points. I want to thank you both for being here. Edd, for joining me again. If you're looking for a deeper dive into the state of gov tech, uh, the state of gov tech is now available on public's website, as well as on govlaunch. It's an enormously insightful piece on where the industry or the space is today and where, where we think it's going. So, again, thank you for joining us and thank you, Mia.
Mia: (24:38)
Thanks so much for having us.
Edd: (24:39)
Thanks for having us Lindsay
Lindsay: (24:48)
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, and this podcast was produced by gov launch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki@govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the gov launch podcast.