Interview: Ivan McKee, Scottish innovation minister

Changing the culture

Scotland’s previous digital strategy was published four years ago, when the country faced different challenges and a different economic environment. The new strategy has a “much more solid foundation in terms of ethics, inclusion and skills”, says McKee.

“Covid has brought things into sharp focus, and accelerated stuff that was going to happen anyway, and it’s really impressed the need to move that forward,” he says.

McKee adds that one of the interesting parts of the strategy is about the transformation of public services, especially around the things the government has been able to do, and the services created during the pandemic that were previously thought impossible.

“It has been a very good springboard to look at government services and accelerate that transformation to be able to provide a broader range of services more efficiently, more quickly, to more people and to organise ourselves using digital tools to be able to do that more effectively as well,” he says.

However, a digital government requires a huge culture change, which is not always easy to achieve. McKee says it is also about “digital thinking” and “agile, connected team working” with a fast-response approach to tackling problems.

As part of the strategy, the government aims to make its Scottish Digital Academy the skills provider of choice for Scotland’s public sector. The plan is for the academy to offer skills in areas such as cyber security, cloud and service design.

McKee says work is currently taking place on how to take the transformation agenda forward within government.

“What do we need to do at a leadership level to embed that kind of thinking?” he says. “What kind of training do we need to support that kind of thinking throughout the organisation? Because if we’re going to do things differently and break down organisational barriers and think more in terms of the processes we’re trying to configure and the outcomes we’re trying to deliver, then the ways people work will be different in terms of how they interact in the organisation.

“That’s another hugely exciting piece of work that has come off the back of our digital strategy.”

A different world

But it’s not just the pandemic that has changed the landscape in Scotland. The UK’s decision to leave the European Union (EU) and the fallout from Brexit has also had an impact, as Scotland needs to find new ways to ensure it remains an attractive destination for talent and investment.

In October 2020, the Scottish government launched its inward investment plan, which set out how the government will focus on nine key sectors where the country has global strengths that can offer significant future prospects. This includes technology such as software and IT, digital business services, healthtech and fintech.

“We have a very clear strategy on what we think we’re good at in Scotland, who we want to attract and how we’re going to do that,” says McKee.

The government is also about to launch a global capital investment plan, focusing on how the country can attract investors to support Scottish businesses to grow. However, Scotland is also keen to attract the right talent to the country and its businesses.

“On the talent side, we’d obviously love to have more control over immigration policy in Scotland, which is something we don’t have and we ask for all the time,” says McKee. “So we’re very much at the mercy of the UK government’s very restrictive and unhelpful attitude to immigration.

“We do what we can there. We obviously want to work hard to maintain our links across the EU, but wider than that as well. But we are also focused on how to attract talent from the rest of the UK to come to Scotland. How do we do that? What would people want to see to come to Scotland, what are the advantages we’ve got? And how do we position those to attract talent?”

Ahead of writing the strategy, the Scottish government, together with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, launched a public consultation, seeking to ensure the strategy represents the country and its stakeholders as a whole. McKee says the number of responses received helped “fine tune” the direction of the strategy.