Mayor of London’s CDO turns smart city visions into reality
hello and welcome to CIO UK leadership live I'm Doug drinkwater I'm the editor of CIO UK and today I'm joined by Theo Blackwell who's a chief digital officer at the mayor's office in London Theo thanks for joining me today a great pleasure to be here thank you for inviting me fantastic so today um so we're going to tackle a few things today but before I go into that Theo has been the first Chief digital officer since 2017 have informally worked in digital transformation roles at um at Camden it's a 20 years experience across public and private sector and working for startup accelerators and UK trade bodies as well today we're going to look at vo's role as Chief digital officer we're going to look at some of these challenges and opportunities and we're going to look at where next I'm sure there's a link for the to-do list that he's currently working through but yeah I want to start really with um if you can just talk us through your role as Chief digital officer and I guess I'm interested in the breadth of responsibilities but I'm also interested if there's any misconceptions around what you do um great well um thanks for the opportunity of uh explaining my role I mean the role of the chief digital officer in London uh emerged out of the 2016 Manifesto it was called for by um London first uh which is now called business London so the business community and also uh Tech bodies and other major cities had begun to appoint Chief digital officers for varying purposes and the needs that they saw was more strategic approach to digital transformation in the city so uh as we know London is 32 boroughs each with their own uh separate technology Estates and Innovation record um and then you've got big players like tfl and the police and wanted a more of a strategic Direction uh on that and also to troubleshoot in areas such as How We join up data how we promote Innovation and also on digital connectivity and talent and skills so the role was created um at the election it was in everyone's uh Manifesto um and um the appointment notice went out um and uh I was selected in In from from quite a wide wide field to advise the mayor on those key points and strategic digital transformation uh what it means to be a smart City how do we join up data and digital inclusion as the top priorities that he set me at the outset fantastic and actually that there's a lot of good stuff there we'll tackle later in terms of joining up local government data regulation as we look into emerging Technologies but also that digital divide uh which I know is close to your heart and something you've worked on for it for a number of years but um just uh before I go on to that kind of smart City kind of London vision and what that's entailed where were the only misconceptions around about or have there been I think the one that stands out for me was I think as you were referring in a previous interview to the CDO in San Francisco who was talking about it's not all essentially sexy kind of strategic work some of it's kind of I guess core Plumbing it's less interesting I guess uh if you want to call it that yeah I suppose there are two misconceptions one is um in the word digital it could sort of apply much more broadly to the digital economy so uh are you championing the tech tech sector and are you uh sort of opening uh new workspaces uh and uh you know sort of funding accelerators and um there are chief digital officers who are very very involved in that digital economy side I would say my job is probably less so um because uh one of the challenges the base the need for the role was how we develop our better capabilities for Partnerships in the first place and there are lots and lots of champions of the tech sector you've got Tech London Advocates uh then had technation and I don't think London really needed another person to sort of Bang the Drum for the tech sector um because there were quite a few or already um so yeah the question was really uh we've got this amazing Tech sector bubbling up and then we also have a London government in its various forms um how do we create the right conditions for that Innovation to work really on behalf of citizens and meet City challenges and so um that's really where I've been trying to uh Point uh the role because there's plenty of stuff that is sort of below the radar you know below the surface if you like that we could be doing to make sure that those conversations which usually start at a high level but invariably um sort of end up only as small Pilots not seizing the opportunities of scale um and to really just sort of focus on that so what do we need to do to fix the plumbing to make sure that Innovation flows right through for the benefit of londoners I'm sorry let's go back a bit to to that kind of smart City London Vision which I think came from Khan in that road map in 2018. um and I think if I kind of summarize there seems to be a desire to your points just there on this not been yet another top-down Smart City pilot um but but rather kind of user-led design LED is that a fair assessment yeah my my influence came very much from those kind of um that early pioneering work from government digital service which I was sort of seeing over the water when I was at Camden Council and really thinking that actually that those sort of that that user-led uh Focus that was redesigning government services um is probably best applied uh in the place where people receive most of their services in local government and whilst the focus has been on Central actually there was tremendous opportunity in in driving that forward so taking those principles as GDs principles user-centered design um uh and you know more broadly design thinking approaches um and applying them to London government was really really really uh top of my list as opposed to kind of um you know thinking in what I would consider to be more more traditional Smart City terms yeah that makes sense and that's kind of put on or I believe as if following from that you had the smarter London together roadmap it's got these kind of five core missions is that right because talk us through what they're aiming to achieve and I think to quote it how data and Technology serve those who live in work in the capital yeah so what are the what are the what are the five things that um I would say any organization needs to do in order to be uh Innovation ready and I wanted to focus on those I mean there's an element of the road map which was an exercises in consolidation because I was Finding initiatives here and there uh when I went to the uh the GLA um but the large um uh emphasis of the road map which Sadiq asked me to do in my first six months um was you know first of all to go out there and listen so I did a about 70 or 80 events with businesses in the public and understood what they what what they were thinking about when they thought about data and technology in smart cities um and I wanted to really sort of say okay well you know what were the five things that we really need to be better at so we can have better conversation create a better environment for Innovation that benefits londoners so the first of those is championing user design principles um uh it's common these days to talk about human-centered design but perhaps you know less so um uh five years ago in local government environment second one was to join up data better now London has a really good track record with the London data store and transport for London's open API um but we need to do much much more than just have a platform um I think the promise of data um in 2010 when the open data platform was was was created was you know if you put the data all in one place um then great things will come you know like armchair Auditors will you know sort of uh drive forward with transparency you know yes to a certain extent but I think what people who've created those platforms realize is that you need to be really really close to the users of that platform to develop the platform according to what they want and what kind of data they're looking for and how they want to have it and also to set questions like the big policy questions with data people domain experts in the public so that you can build products and services or drive insights for specific purposes so how do we engage with our ecosystem the third area that London really really needs to be uh better at was digital connectivity I mean a huge copper Legacy across London um you know only four percent of London uh London's homes were connected on full fiber in 2017 um as of in January a couple of days ago um that's 50 so what we need to do is talk to telcos talk to the borrowers and say well how do we make London more investable for the private operators going in um and is there a play that we can make ourselves uh which we have with uh Transport for London and its partnership with Bai which is laying hundreds of kilometers of full fiber through tube tunnels as we speak um the fourth area was digital skills um this is obviously a moral and political imperative uh for the mayor we need to make sure there's Talent pipeline of jobs uh that uh um to to londoners um it it is also you know I cannot talk to our elected representatives uh at a Borough level about um digital transformation and making Public Services better through the use of Technology without answering that question um and um being able to you know develop a strong piece around digital inclusion was really really important so the fifth area um which is really again sort of taking a leap out of um of uh you know Mike Bracken government digital service is creating new institutions for the digital age uh to put it grambly it's like we don't have the we didn't have in London the kind of team central team that enables us to explore some of those really complex and sort of off-grid problems that stand in the way of all of the things that I've said before so in 2019 we created the London office of technology and Innovation which has gone from strength to strength and that is a core team of people who work on agile principles they've done about 40 to 50 projects so far with the boroughs it convened all of the London cdos of local authorities in one place it's examined things like new methodologies uh and creating things like new methodologies to do great data services it's done great work on um new business models that we can apply to social care it's looked at how we can use our Market power on the technology estate and disrupt some of the market that really holds local government prisoner kind of thing that the taxpayers don't really realize is that you know we are essentially sort of subject to quite a lot of big Tech and it's not as flexible um uh or as cheap as it should be um so Lottie uh being a collaborative body really really important to London um no no other city in the UK has a body like Lottie and we constantly talk to uh cities uh in the UK and across the world on how they can develop teams like that so that was setting up that as a new institution was really really important for us um uh to be heard and I guess that's what I'm going to go next actually fear was um I guess playing there was Advocate how do you kind of drive that I mean collaboration will be part of this clearly but driving digital change across 32 borrowers um and not least given some of the The Wider Market constraints we've seen over the last kind of two to three years how are you trying to kind of balance that local autonomy and power with you know what what you as a group can provide well I mean it is a balance because of course London boroughs are their own Sovereign bodies and they don't have to do um anything that I suggest um but um I think increasingly people are looking at how they can use data more dynamically and if that's the case um how do they join up with others how do we make that as simple and easy and effective and responsible as possible and that's what that's what we can do here um there are projects of course that um you know that go beyond borrow boundaries something like 40 of London's population live within a kilometer of of our boundary um so projects around air quality where we should put electric vehicle charging the Project's on digital inclusion um all of these uh are ones that transcend uh Borough boundaries so our ability to um work with borrower boroughs and their needs and enable us to combine those boroughs based upon their needs so I think in the past you know you know with with the sort of legacy of shared services it was quite often that you know boroughs would consider joining up with a neighboring geographical Borough so you know I was involved in the at the beginning of the shared service with Islington and haringey there was one which stretched from Westminster across Kensington Chelsea and Harrisburg and Fulham which is ended um but you know ultimately you may well have outer London boroughs at different ends of London there are have the same needs so how do you bring those borrowers together and I'll tell you there's also like something quite fundamental uh that someone um who led on public health in Camden once told me about data um the average size of a London borough is 250 000 people and 250 000 people isn't that big when you're using data and if you're looking at particularly vulnerable users the numbers diminish in those cohorts that people tend to be you know suffering um you know you know serious or chronic or multiple conditions um and they are very very costly uh in terms of uh triage in them and uh with with local government or the NHS if you're able to identify the needs of that group um on a much larger scale let's say a million people or two million people four million people Etc um you are then able to get greater Insight develop better Services than you would if you just did it alone and then I think increasingly we as a um as a city are seeing these problems in the round I'm thinking how do we combine our knowledge and experience and insight into tackling um you know some of these uh some of the challenges faced by these groups of people yeah given that is to have a great uh well it's going with that question was is there a greater desire for Club collaboration I know for example in in central government as an example that there's not always there's always been a bit of skepticism in terms of local versus centralizing UH responsibilities or leadership but do you get the sense that there's more there is more appetite to share findings to share challenges so you can work as a collective to some of these problems which as you say go beyond you know the boundary of one boa yeah I mean you know it's a difficult one um I mean London's on a journey um and the day job of local authorities is delivering services to the arrests that's what they do so um that often uh is a top in our conversation with them and um the um sort of time and opportunity for collaboration um you constantly have to prove a sort of you know business case or a moral case um four um so there there is there you know it's not uh sort of it's it's not as intuitive as one or common sensical as one might uh think however when new challenges arise um there is clearly uh a drive in London to do things together so for example you know when they wanted to trial e-scooters in the city an unprecedented number of boroughs got together to do that I was 13. now like 13 borrowers you know what was that that's that that already is in terms of population size the largest city in the country um so um and and equally on air quality um discussions around retrofit How We join up data um all of these challenges coming down the road people are thinking okay I don't have the capacity or resource to do this alone and then when you go into things like smart cities it is inconceivable that um you know if you think about the human technical expertise needed to create sensor networks and ingest data and to uh link it with your staff in the environment department or housing requirement or whatever um uh you know 32 borrowers all employing the same kind of person um would not be feasible so people thinking about combinations coming together in groups of of councils sharing resources pooling resources in order to do things um so I think increasingly that's the uh that that's the way forward especially with um as it were new challenges yeah absolutely um you prepared to data that's obviously a key commitment that has been for some time I think in the in the manifesto from from the mayor um and and you speak about enjoying data sets up and strategically and operationally I know data store has an important role to to play it just talk us through some of your you know progress there if it does seem like there is real momentum behind that okay so we the the basis of data in London is the London data store which was created in 2010. now that is um what's called an open data publishing platform uh primarily it um took data that was being published by government and other bodies and put it all in one place we'll link to it in one place really um over time um over five six seven years it grew in functionality um it was able to share other kinds of data 2018 it was able to link private data sets now that's really important because you can develop more personalized Services you and insights uh you and it gave rise to a whole host of what we call data services uh from that now you'll note that when you change from just being an open data platform into being something else it's sort of like outgrew its original specification so now we're looking at um sort of rebuilding the London data store and we're going to call it the data for London platform with a much better search and Discovery uh function so it kind of Acts sort of like a data mesh it works in a Federated way so that goes with the grain of London government with all of that uh sovereignty that you were talking about before and so stand slightly in in contrast to a to a traditional big city smart big smart city data platform I.E the sort of um you know weighed on the amount of data that it has in one place and instead this is more like like a digital service for joining up data it works as a city registry so like a like a kind of Library index card in a in a University Library um you go along and you you and the platform would be able to point you in the direction to a data set that you were looking for or possibly needed for your project so that you could you could um either access it if it was open data or a range of data sharing agreement with the owner of that so the data store itself doesn't hold data just tells you what and where it is we think that works really really well for a city like London um because of its size the number of Institutions it has and um it also means that in a sense the you know like 20 of the discussion around the platform is the technology built and the software 80 is right we need to invest more in central information governance um either in human beings and processes or in technology that assists you to do a dpia or or information sharing agreement or whatever you need um and things like data ethics um how we create templates for that um and a user community that would drive the iteration of the platform um onwards the previous data store was so open we didn't ask who the users were so over time they became you know they loved it and they you know very sort of intense group of people using the data store but it became more and more a smaller expert audience rather than constantly engaging with data users saying what more do you need than search and Discovery um how do we ingest live data feeds is there something that we need to build on top of our platform so that's a journey that we're going on now uh with the London data store which will really put us into um a kind of era where uh certainly on the big data front we're able to engage much more dynamically with the kind of sensor data that will be coming out of public and private buildings and streets and so forth yeah it has a nice almost sick way into future Technology's emerging Technologies and and you spoke just briefly about I guess ethics and I guess that a by word that wasn't mentioned there but regulation um now I know you've got this kind of emerging Tech Charter uh for London okay what was the the intention of that and like you want to come on from there into I guess as we move into new technologies like AI like facial recognition obviously with that comes a whole swathe of concerns on privacy and how data is going to be used yeah I mean we published something called the emerging Tech Charter for London because we need to get into the space of setting down some values um and some guidance around what we expected when a sensor or a camera was put in the public realm or will certainly public realm that the public thought was public I mean quite often you've got private squares that for all intents and purposes look like they're run by a local Authority but but are not um so um we uh designed this uh with londoners and it's a partly a kind of clarity and consolidation exercise because if you're an innovator or a Londoner or an elected representative of londoners and you say okay what what are good rules and questions to ask around data ethics uh and privacy um yeah if you're an innovator what's acceptable in London beyond the law um it's just a box ticking exercise or you know how should I engage with the state now there are various bits of guidance and experience around the place lots of bits of government are published guidance on it but it's not in one place and also our lived experience from Transport for London um the police local councils was hidden in um departments so the guidance brings together what we've learned and sets out a series of principles and examples and measures that we think people should be mindful of you know not all of the principles be open uh trustworthiness and data respect diversity which is about um design principles and be sustainable which the public asked for there were three principles at the start four at the end um all of these um are brought to life by particular measures which may or may not be applicable but something you should think for think about so it's like kind of like an aid Memoir to trialling and deploying new technologies in uh the city and I've urge people to you know give us their comments and read up on it um because it's an interesting document and what we want to do is make London a safe and effective and responsible place for the deployment of these Technologies see and I think your point there about there being that guidance but not necessarily in one place is a good one we see that I guess with all governments or or Doug it's too high level yeah because it becomes too abstract for people to apply in their daily lives and I mean and actually ultimately you know I think a real driver you know that this is a voluntary thing it's it's not you know there's no enforcement mechanism apart from reputation yeah if someone deployed something that infringed on people's rights and um they hadn't followed the charter I want people to ask questions yeah and that's a fair point um I guess yeah on the other side of that and everyone wants to come on to you've already touched on it already is that element of digital inclusion because as we all know of society and Genworth we can erased new technologies that digital divide potentially becomes uh bigger and I think people often kind of assume that when we speak about digital inclusion we're speaking primarily about the elderly but actually you could argue those social economic background um there could be a whole host of reasons why people don't have access or awareness of these tools or how to use them and I know losses doing some work with lots of good things Foundation uh you've done some work going backs in 20 years so what are you trying to do and I guess it's a quest that all the the end goal will always be changing I guess it's not a kind of a tick box exercise you can often say you're done because the technology will move so quickly that people bringing them bringing them on that Journey takes time you can't bring everybody with you at the same time well this went right up to the top of the agenda during the pandemic yeah people who were stuck at home and they were excluded um so um we we looked at the problem like this um there are lots and lots and lots of corporate or Community charisable Council initiatives around uh digital inclusion and they don't they they're often quite specialist some are about skills some are about a device some are about connection but this there's no way to triage someone's need um effectively across the city so what we what we did was we thought about this as a potential service so if someone was helping or supporting someone with um digital inclusion needs how can we ensure that they are directed to the free offer of basic digital skills available from your local College which is paid for by the great London Authority um or free resources from you know good things Foundation secondly how can they get access to data or a social tariff which is provided governments asked the uh telcos to provide uh and thirdly a device um and our work with uh digital exclusion task force glas made up people from Edge UK and telcos uh and councils and lossy led us to this really really exciting partnership with good things Foundation which is creating a service so that if someone presents themselves with one or more of these needs for skills device um connection that they can be satisfied and because we have that connection with the user we can develop that service according to their needs over time what was happening before with these hundreds of small scale projects is that we weren't capturing that need we were not developing our offer at scale um so a service approach enables us to really know about the effect of our work and to improve it over time um so many times during the pandemic um a corporate would say um we have these SIM cards or we have these devices we want to give them two digitally excluded people they'd approach a council and accounts will just not be able to tell um uh the the the the corporate or the government precisely who needed what so we want to change that by having uh not doing another report on digital inclusion that says 23 of this group and 67 of that group you want actual people and that is a that is the call to any service providing a service to people [Music] what's your view more generally on on digital inclusion obviously I think you work with Martha uh Lane Fox some 10 years ago on on digital inclusion and I you know having been on a few round tables recently with the likes of digital property Alliance often there's that assumption that there's just too many silos there's a question perhaps more politically of how engaged central government is and in in achieving this watch if someone has worked in this space for for over a decade what is it is that is it that communication that collaboration piece is it obviously there's no Silver Bullet to this but what do you see I mean I mean I think I think it started off as a campaign so race online and go online um and um you know there's some really notable achievements I mean uh Martha's work led to the creation of the government digital service I think over time um digital inclusion went uh less about numbers and more about accessibility and web design and making things mobile friendly and compatible and so on and when the pandemic hit us uh it was it was like back to numbers it was back to um lots and lots and lots of people cannot access the internet because they cannot afford a connection they don't have a device they don't have the basic skills so it was I I totally applaud the kind of movement into making um uh websites much much more user-friendly you know that is a necessity yeah um it was not it's not a substitute for the basic um fact that lots of people when I say lots of people there are you know probably about you know eight percent of each Borough since you know would talk about 10 50 000 people in each Borough in London do not have this connection and there's a that's in the city with one of the highest rates of inclusion in the country so um so I think that um we our approach of saying this is actually a service so let's understand user need um and develop it from there and also work in a different way with uh Civil Society to effectively we're commissioning uh this money uh two good things Foundation which is in the process of changing their business model towards creating a service um that we can co-exist if you like where we don't you lose the benefit of all of those hyper local initiatives and Goodwill but we can provide a layer on top where it's greater than some of their parts yeah that makes sense um fear we're coming towards the end but also to finish with three questions one uh I guess is a typical question and then two a slightly different um for those of you that have tuned in to leadership life before you know do we always like to ask a couple of off the off the wall questions or slightly different questions to find out more of the person really that we're that we're speaking to but um Theo I guess the final serious question if you want to call it that is it's going to wear next to you in the mayor's office and I guess a key part of that is you know for those that are watching today um perhaps in public sector could be private sector how can they partner with you how can they work with you well there's um a number of opportunities to uh work with us um I would say follow the work of the London office and technology and Innovations doing some really interesting things it's got some open um uh sessions where you can understand uh you know or work on digital conclusion and doing some really interesting work on on how you engage with residents and using digital tools to do that so lottie's work is really really important to follow if you want to understand our story uh in in London secondly we often do some open calls so whether us or tfl um we will design a problem statement that we'll put out to market for rapid prototyping with a local Authority uh or or in the transport system so those open calls are currently called challenge London or doing work uh at the moment um there will be a series of open calls in the future around the green uh green economy so um our door is always open um you can also internet people internationally uh or uh with a more business orientated uh view can also connect up with London and partners which is the London promotional agency so I work very closely with on um on issues of inward uh investment and how you uh sort of negotiate the London Marketplace which you know um is not um as intuitive uh has um some might think and where next view out of interest in terms of the edge a couple of priorities for the year ahead what's on your to-do list yeah so three three priorities for me Doug um firstly um we are in the process of building the new data for London platform and establishing that user community so creating a new Central register of data uh in London is the sort of talktop uh priority and you know I would be immensely pleased to see progress in that area and not least because we will not get to Net Zero as a City without a better use of data and particularly Big Data sensor data so um it is a critical part of that conversation secondly uh this year we're going to launch the digital inclusion service it's already being spun up we're giving devices out to homeless people um who we'd the mayor had housed uh in in uh over the Christmas period that that came from essentially a device upcycling from public sector organization so they retired their end of year end of life devices and they were upcycled by good things Foundation donated to people um so that service will be really important and then the third area is what I'd call broad broadly speaking open Innovation we're doing a lot of thinking about um how the city does more open calls in the future so linking together with boroughs linking together with those in transport or the police you've got a particular problem to solve and how can we do really really exciting prototyping work and what sort of structure do we need to do that because I don't want London to be a kind of like theater of Pilots I want us to be able to say here is a problem that is faced by a significant proportion of the population and we can we can do these things at scale um so there'll be of interest to the market because you'll be serving potentially hundreds of thousands of people um and it will have a kind of longevity or sustainability because it'll met the need that we'd set out there so there's a big buck about open Innovation probably less Advanced on how we think about that in its next iteration than the others but nonetheless uh really really important yeah absolutely some great priorities there's some interesting um work ahead but I guess um you know Theo I mentioned before and at the start of this session I'd like to ask a couple of slightly different questions at the end so I guess the first one would be what are you most proud of that could be professional or personal you can take your pick or give me both if that's uh what you prefer to do oh gosh um I I think that um in in my in my current job uh I have really um I'm I'm really really pleased on the progress that we're making on connecting London and dealing with just the legacy of under investment uh in connecting up people's homes so we're now over 50 some say um we could hit 95 by 2026 if we carry on going at the current rate so not saying that you know the kind of infrastructure you know London is a Global Tech Hub so infrastructure in its sort of recent state did help London achieve that status but it doesn't help us is as we move to kind of web 3.0 and the new Advanced Tech stack that's being developed here so it the the mayor being able to influence that and our team that was created at the same time is me being able to work with boroughs and telcos to make London a better connected Place totally fundamental to London on all sorts of levels so I'm really really happy with the progress that we uh that we've made there and you know underneath our feet transport for London hundreds of kilometers of dark fiber being laid uh with cruise out every night doing that people sort of witnessing it by getting a 4G connection on the tube but it's so much more than that that fiber spine um will light up London so um we're really pleased with progress on that no help from the government though yeah interesting um and then finally growing up what do you want to be what was it what was your aspirations when you were a kid appeared that's that's I I kind of thought back when you said that I think at one point I was I I'd seen some film or something and and I thought being a diplomat sounds quite a good job I didn't really know what it was but they seemed to have quite a good life but but actually you know kind of relating it to um Chief digital officer I mean I'm saying I'm like particularly diplomatic but um but the uh most of my work doesn't actually have a huge amount um to do with discussions around software or Hardware yeah most of my work is about culture um process change design getting people on board getting buy-in and um the most important change comes about when people go this is the right thing for me to do and um laying the groundwork for that I think is um is a key part of of my job so I suppose it's diplomatic yeah brilliant that's a great note to finish and I think that resonates with a lot of uh well CIO CTS or Studios and any number of uh Industries in terms of how they collaborate and get people on site to make change happen whether that change may be but yeah it's been pleasure to chat with you today thanks so much for your time thank you Doug and of course thanks to you viewers for tuning in today I hope there's some interesting insights to take back into the day job that's all for me for now but thanks for watching goodbye and see you soon
2023-02-17 09:55
