DCMS looks back over decades on how government’s approach to digital policy has evolved.
In 1992, the US Congress passed the Science and Advanced Technology Act, which paved the way for the modern Internet. In the UK, meanwhile, Prime Minister John Major created the National Heritage Office, bringing together for the first time the responsibilities of arts, sports and culture policy.
The two events – one being a milestone on the road to the digital age and the other being, as Major said at the time, the realization that “human beings cannot live on GDP alone” – seem unrelated. It may look
But its sector, now known as the Digital, Culture, Media and Sports sector, plays a central role in helping governments meet the challenges and opportunities of the digital revolution. Undersecretary Sarah Healy has developed what she described in her recent speech as a “coherent and integrated capability” for digital policy-making within the civil service.
It said the setup was “nearly unique among governments” and represented “an incredible asset for the UK compared to governments abroad that continue to suffer from a fragmented division of responsibility for digital policy”. she claimed.
Healey’s speech explained both how the UK came to this unique arrangement and the benefits it brings, while acknowledging that there is still much to learn as the pace of digital change continues to accelerate. rice field.
This speech marked the beginning of a partnership with Strand Group, part of King’s College London. Healey hopes it will help ensure that digital policymaking in the UK continues to improve.
“How the Internet evolved, how tech giants came to dominate our economy, how technology improved and transformed nearly every industry sector, and how we There is constant commentary and analysis of how the lives of
“But even more so for how governments and administrations have responded to the impact of technology on our lives, economies, security and societies. Individual policies are scrutinized, challenged and celebrated. Of course, there is little debate about whether governments and civil servants are organized to effectively set digital policies.”
Healey therefore wants to start this conversation to continue improving the UK’s ability to formulate digital policy. She defined it as “a shorthand that governments use to make policy” rather than “how governments use digital technology to deliver their own services.” In response to the massive transformation that digital technology has brought to the world we live in. ”
The partnership between DCMS and Strand Group is modeled on a similar relationship between Strand Group and the Ministry of Finance. The Treasury Department was established in 2015 when then-Secretary of the Treasury, Nick (now Lord) McPherson, wanted to improve the understanding of the organization and policy history among Treasury officials.
“[Macpherson] I felt that too much knowledge and memory was lost, making future policy decisions difficult as a result,” Healy explained. “I agree with him. Historical analysis is a hugely underappreciated aspect of policy analysis conducted by public officials.”
The partnership with the Treasury began with a series of speeches by McPherson and now includes a wide range of events and activities, including research placements for graduate students working in the Treasury archives and making papers available to officials. I’m here. Civil servants were also given the opportunity to participate in a graduate course on the history of the Treasury Department’s policy activities, with lectures from McPherson alongside course leader Professor John Davis and guest lecturers such as Ed Boles and George Osborne. You can
McPherson’s speech on the history of the Treasury spanned 400 years, but Healy’s was just over a decade, despite a decade marked by the rapid pace of change. She outlined her three phases of digital policymaking. [across government] Responds to technological change, largely as felt within existing structures. This included a Cabinet Office-led effort on cybersecurity and a business sector team looking to the digital sector. At that point, he was as focused on old tech giants like HP and IBM as he was on new online his platforms. “Even when more detailed research was done, they still didn’t anticipate how big an impact the change would have and how rapid it would be,” he added.
Healey argued that this began to change in the mid-2010s. By 2014, DCMS and the business sector operated a joint unit working on the digital economy. In this second phase, “the public sector was better off to cover some of the new landscapes of digital policy, but our efforts were still premature”.
She said there was still “a focus on growth, but less on safety and harm,” and that different policy teams were still grasping “the links and synergies between these issues.” said it wasn’t done. There was also a gap in the government’s policy capacity.
To some extent, she argued, these are challenges facing countries around the world, countries that have not yet understood the need for coherent digital policies. efforts were limited because the internet was seen as too big, too global, too ubiquitous for any single government to coordinate and plan a response,” she said. I was. “Given the supranational structure of the Internet and the industry that grew out of it, there was a sense that national action would not succeed.”
In response to questions after his talk, Healy said this assumption is reflected in technology companies as well. According to her, there was a time when many of these companies “didn’t necessarily think they were in a space that could or should be regulated” and “believed they existed in some other fleeting world.” The central government was irrelevant or not possible. ”
In the UK, the third phase of the government’s digital policy evolution changed this assumption about policymaking ‘almost by accident’. The mechanics of government change in which the DCMS adopted media and internet competition policies (and which led to the merger of the DCMS with the Digital Economy sector of the Business, Innovation and Skills sector) was not part of a grand scheme of things at the time. Promoted by Vince, who was the business secretary. Cable’s take on Sky. But since 2015, a series of what Healey called “the enlightened machines of government change” began to integrate other areas of digital policy within the DCMS.
At this point, Healy had joined DCMS as Executive Director, reporting to Permanent Secretary Sue Owen. By bringing these teams together in one division of hers, she says, “it has begun to show not just how interconnected the issues are, but how many gaps remain in digital policy coverage. I remembered.
This has greatly increased the digital capabilities of DCMS, expanding its mandate to include digital identity, digital competition, AI regulation, international digital policy, and more. It also prompted a name change to recognize these new responsibilities. The Digital Group within DCMS currently consists of approximately 1,200 staff. This is more than half of DCMS’ total workforce and more than double the division’s total headcount in 2015 before the new capacity began to grow. Healey said this coherent policy capacity growth means that not only will officials be able to “support ministers on the full spectrum of digital policy issues,” but that “capacities are all mutually reinforcing and informing.” “Because we can, it will lead to better and more complete policy decisions.”
This will also help governments understand the impact of digital on other sectors. “The DCMS is also now able to speak with a single expert voice on digital policy within HMG. It became,” he said Healey.
Finally, she suggested, the change helped build strong relationships with the tech sector. Among departmental platforms, it helped change the assumption that regulation was impossible or undesirable, and the recent debate over Russia’s aggression in Ukraine showed this. And there was no doubt that we were responsible for the content that passed through the site,” she said. The change to the integrated digital team has not been “seamless,” Healey said, noting that some elements of the data policy were returned to the Cabinet Office under her DDaT function in 2018 and “precisely There were occasional turf wars over what was digital and what wasn’t.” She has a strong interest in policy, especially in the blurred field of emerging technologies.”
“Having digital policy embedded in the DCMS means it benefits from the attention of more ministers than the larger economic sectors.”
Nonetheless, the DCMS is a digital We continued to build our policy. Data and Online Harm Policy.
The change was also supported by the quirks of the British system, Healey suggested. “The inclusion of digital policies in the DCMS has benefited from far more ministerial attention than it has in the larger economic sector where the attention of politicians must be more thinly distributed. It brings drive and ambition and means policies are pushed faster.
But she admits that even this rapid change has outpaced the pace of change in the tech sector and beyond. “When we chart development against key milestones in the development of the technology sector, it is clear that civil servants are lagging behind,” she said. “In hundreds of different areas, there is evidence that the world has changed faster than policy can catch up.” He acknowledged that there is still a need to build decentralized digital policy capabilities in the department, given the many areas of focus in the sector.
“It took 30 years for technology to become central to our economy and society. It will be forever,” she said. “Governments must be able to respond and learn lessons about how to anticipate and respond strategically and comprehensively to the enormous threat posed by change, and in some cases, technological innovation.
“We are in the early days of digital policymaking, and the great challenges and great opportunities are yet to come. The global debate on digital policy will mature. Societal views evolve, and if we can identify, explore, learn from, and document the lessons of our current efforts, we will be best positioned to respond.”
Sarah Healy will give the next speech in the series on November 16th. For more information, visit thestrandgroup.kcl.ac.uk/events/.
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