UKtech50 interview: DWP chief digital and information officer Mayank Prakash

Changing ways of working

Prakash and his team have put a lot of effort into changing the way the department works. It’s about breaking down traditional barriers, he says, showing that everything doesn’t need to be done with a huge outsourcing contract, it can be done in house, and that agile ways of working do work, even in a huge government department.

Prakash has worked to create a DevOps culture across the entire organisation, not just on the fringes, which has helped to change the way the department thinks.

The DWP’s strategy is simply to deliver, he says. “Even the best strategy is useless unless it’s executed, so we are learning by doing, and our strategy is simply to deliver. That is our fundamental cultural change across the organisation,” he says.

“We have to reimagine the culture in the organisation in order to implement our agile, iterative, transformation strategy as we are learning by doing. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

These changes include moving services such as UC into the cloud, freeing up enough physical empty space “to park two 747s”, says Prakash. 

“We are driving innovation into multi-channel user experience,” he says. “We have replaced our datacentres with hyper-cloud, creating the ability to deploy into an elastic cloud. Most large enterprises are still only planning this.”

The DWP’s ambition is to “simply be the best at what we do”, says Prakash. That means looking outwards to the private sector, other industries and countries to see what others are doing and how to learn from that.

The department is also in the process of a huge recruitment drive, aiming to hire more than 1,000 new digital specialists in the next 18 months.

“We want to attract the best talent in the country, and we want to make a real difference,” says Prakash, adding that diversity is hugely important and the department is working to increasingly attract female and BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) talent.

“We don’t just want to attract the best talent, but create a culture that encourages people to explore their potential rather than be told to do something,” he says.

New technologies

By looking outward, the DWP always has an eye on technological developments, and has experimented with distributed ledgers and smart contracts. Last year, it trialled blockchain technology to enable benefits claimants to use a mobile app to track their welfare payments. 

“We continue to do experiments around distributed ledgers, and we think smart contracting is still very early on in its development, so it’ll take a few years for these technologies to mature to a point where they can be deployed safely, securely and at scale for a large enterprise like us across the country,” says Prakash. He adds that although these technologies are not quite ready yet, “they certainly have got enough value for us to explore their potential and we are looking at enterprise implementations of distributed ledger technology”.

But Prakash is more sceptical about artificial intelligence (AI), saying the department is careful to “separate the hype from the reality”. However, the DWP is working with small businesses and startups, as well as large enterprises, to gain insight into the full potential of AI.

Neural networks and machine learning are being actively deployed at the DWP because they are mature enough, says Prakash, but beyond pattern recognition, “the rest is still a bit of a hype with AI”.

Be a business leader

Being in charge of digital at such a large organisation is no easy feat. So what advice does Prakash have to give to his peers across industries?

“I would encourage colleagues to raise their ambition and aspiration to be the best at what they do rather than just do what they’re asked to do,” he says. “Let’s up our game.” He adds that technology leaders need to act like business leaders and “remove the ‘and’ in business and technology”, because most businesses are technology businesses now. That requires tech leaders to act as business leaders.”