Interview: Reflections on tech revolutions and silos

The silos that curb digital transformations

Minahan has worked both in the public sector and private sector. What both sectors share, in his experience, is the difficulty in driving digital transformation in organisations that are naturally siloed.

“When I worked at Lambeth Council, for example, every department and every directorate – children’s social care, adult social care, housing, waste and recycling, environmental service – had its own IT department,” he says. “The silos arose as a result due to the vertical ways of working. They were not working towards any kind of horizontal vision or organisational agenda.”

The silos exist in the private sector, but for different reasons. Minahan says: “When I worked in the private sector many years ago, competitiveness in some private sector organisations would drive a silo. Often people are less willing to share, less willing to collaborate – output and outcome is driven by reward, which is often personal rather than team-based.”

He believes this drives different types of incentive, “a more Machiavellian approach to types of behaviour in an organisation where trust and the type of trust you need to collaborate well to deliver digital transformation doesn’t manifest”.

While workers in the private sector can be aligned to an executive vision, he says: “Alignment to a vision is one thing; siloed working is something slightly different.”

Building a new foundation

Prior to joining Young Lives vs Cancer, Minahan was CIO of Goldsmith’s College, University of London. In his current role, Minahan leads the digital transformation team which, among other things, involves updating a 30-year-old finance system and 25-year-old customer relationship management (CRM) system.

“The CRM system didn’t let you delete information, so I was really knocking on an open door. The organisation realised that unless we change this, we can’t meet our own organisational ambitions,” he adds.

“The challenge is getting the right solutions and strategy to allow the board to understand where we’re going, what that vision looks like and what the end state might look like. This has to be a bit iterative because the technology world changes every night.”

Young Lives vs Cancer’s focus is to provide support for young people diagnosed and being treated for cancer and their families. Minahan says: “There isn’t another organisation in the country that has the same direct contact with that many young people with cancer.”

This puts Young Lives vs Cancer with an opportunity, which Minaham hopes to leverage to provide more direct support for the young people who connect to the charity. He says: “We’ve got quite a unique data set, which we’ve never quite leveraged in the right way.”

“The challenge is getting the right solutions and strategy to allow the board to understand where we’re going”

David Minahan, Young Lives vs Cancer

Minahan’s goal is to have an app that uses this data and is powered by AI: “If we have people tell their stories to us, we can use that information to train a model that can then support other young people, based on the real experience, talking their age-appropriate language.”

He says Young Lives vs Cancer is getting the data foundations right and is looking to capture different types of data, along with the unique dataset it can train the model on: “You could get every child that wants to tell their story, document it and write it, and you could feed that back into the model, which could then be used to help another child.”

The end goal is to have an app that Young People vs Cancer can deploy to all its users as soon as they are introduced to the charity. He says the app would provide all of the information they need and the services available to them.

Minahan sees a massive opportunity in the proliferation of  low-code/no-code tooling, citizen developers, and AI and digital skills outside of IT. “If you get your platform decisions right and you get your IT architecture decisions right, then you can empower your whole organisation to be developers, which means you can do whatever you want [with digital technology] without needing third parties anymore,” he adds. 

Nevertheless,while the barrier to entry for software development is lowered, people may not actually feel a desire to develop software themselves. Minahan is concerned that young people seem less interested in understanding what is driving the technology they interact with or how it is built.

“I’ve grown up understanding how to build things and make things work, but my kids don’t care about that – they’re not interested in computer science in the way that I was, they just want it to work and do what they tell it to do,” he says.

While today there is more choice than ever before, Minahan believes there is definitely a difference in what now motivates young people. He says: “Do you want to buy vinyl, a CD or use Spotify? It’s a really exciting time, but I’m not sure that this generation will understand how to build things and make things work.”