The capability is there. Why public sector still needs specialist transformation support.

Here is a statistic worth sitting with for a moment. In research conducted by Forrester on behalf of KPMG, surveying over 140 technology and transformation leaders across UK public services, only 17% rated their digital transformation efforts as successful. 

It’s crazy to imagine that 83% of Public Sector leaders suggested their  digital transformation efforts were unsuccessful, by their own measure.

The tempting interpretation of this individual stat, is to suggest that the public sector is falling behind and not delivering, and that these organisations are under-resourced, risk-averse, burdened by legacy systems and procurement rules designed for a different era. However, there is little truth in all of that. 

Here is a more useful framing: the capability to transform exists, the appetite is there and the behaviours can be adapted to. Maybe what fails on the odd occasion is the model in which transformation is attempted.

Let me explain. 

The problem is not digital immaturity

The 83% who rate their transformation as unsuccessful are not institutions full of people who do not understand digital. The Forrester research points elsewhere. 49% cite a lack of coherent technology strategy. 44% point to budget constraints. 42% highlight a gap in technology-specific skills and knowledge.

Notice what is not on that list. The absence of digital tools. The absence of willing people. The absence of ambition.

What those three barriers share is that none of them is primarily a technology problem. They are organisational and structural problems. A skills gap is a workforce and knowledge-transfer problem. A missing technology strategy is a leadership and alignment problem. Budget constraint is a prioritisation and business case problem. You do not solve any of them by procuring a platform.

This matters because the most common response to slow transformation is to buy something. A new platform, a larger vendor contract, a more elaborate framework agreement. The investment goes in, and the 83% figure barely moves. Because the bottleneck was never the software.

Across our work in the public sector, a pattern recurs. Individual teams within institutions are often highly capable. Clinical informatics teams in NHS bodies understand their data better than many technology consultancies give them credit for. Policy teams in central government are sophisticated about what they need. Digital delivery units know, often quite precisely, where their services are falling short.

The failure tends to happen at the seams. Between the team with the clinical knowledge and the team with the technical remit. Between the policy intention and the service design reality. Between what a procurement specification says and what a working digital product actually requires.

These are not technology gaps. They are translation gaps. And closing them requires a partner who can sit across both sides of the seam, not one who arrives to deliver a pre-defined scope.

Our discovery work with Public Services Delivery Scotland for Scotland’s first nationally-delivered Targeted Lung Cancer Screening programme illustrates this directly. The clinical and policy knowledge was already present in the room. What the programme needed was a partner who could translate evolving clinical protocols, operational constraints, and technical requirements into a coherent foundation for a safe digital platform.

Over eight weeks, working across more than 30 stakeholder interviews and site visits spanning clinical, policy, operational, and technical teams, the output was a validated set of service blueprints, a requirements catalogue of over 200 items, and a technology and data architecture signed off by the NHS Technical Design Authority. The work was fast because the institution was ready. The speed was unlocked by the partnership model, not by the technology.

What good looks like

If you are planning a significant digital transformation programme and trying to assess whether your approach will put you in the 17% or the 83%, a few questions are worth asking honestly.

Is your partner model designed for delivery or for translation?

A partner who arrives with a fixed delivery team and a pre-scoped plan is structured to execute what you already know. That is valuable in the right context. But most complex public sector programmes do not begin with a settled problem statement. They begin with a set of constraints, incomplete requirements, and competing stakeholder views. The partner you need at that stage is one who can do the diagnostic work first, skilled in surfacing and resolving ambiguity before any code is written.

Is knowledge transfer built in from the start?

One of the most persistent failure modes in public sector digital transformation is the exit problem. The programme delivers. The partner leaves. And the institution is left with a product it cannot maintain or evolve, because the knowledge lives in the partner’s team, not in its own. The best partnership models treat knowledge transfer as a first-class workstream, not a final-week handover.

Is your technology strategy driving procurement, or the other way around?

Procurement frameworks like Digital Specialists and Programmes exist to simplify access to the market, and they do. But simplifying access to a supplier is not the same as having a coherent strategy for what you are trying to build. Institutions that move from strategy to procurement tend to fare significantly better than those that let the existence of a framework substitute for the thinking.

The direction of travel

The Forrester research paints a clear picture of where citizen expectations are heading. People want self-service digital channels. They want services that work across departments, not just within them. They expect the same standard of digital experience from public services that they get from the services they choose privately.

That pressure is not going away. And the institutions most likely to meet it are not necessarily the ones with the largest digital budgets. They are the ones that have been honest about where their capability actually sits, and deliberate about the partner model they use to close the gap.

The 17% who rate their transformation as successful are almost certainly doing a few things right that the 83% are not. They probably have a clearer technology strategy. They probably have a partner who can work at the seams, not just within a defined scope. And they have built their programmes in a way that leaves the institution more capable at the end than it was at the beginning.

That is what good looks like. It is not complicated. But it is harder than buying a platform.

If you are working through a transformation programme and struggling to map your strategy to execution, we are always up for that conversation. Reach Jamie and the Waracle public sector team at waracle.com/contact, or explore our public sector work at waracle.com/public-sector.