The 311 Podcast

S2 E4 - Digital Government: a 2025 reality check with Vijay K Luthra

• Vijay K Luthra • Season 2 • Episode 4

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What Digital Transformation for Government Means in 2025

Today, my guest is Vijay Luthra. Vijay is the managing partner of CEVA Global in the UK, and he works to help government organizations in the UK and UAE to develop digital transformation strategies.

 Given the pace of change, particularly in the US, it's hard to say how long our conversation will remain relevant. It's hard to talk about the political side of government without taking sides, but we did our best to avoid that

Vijay is, in his words, a former public servant and a recovering politician. He works in social enterprise and has deep expertise in healthcare and transformation. Today we decided to talk about what digital transformation for government means in the chaos that is early 2025.

Resource Links:

Vijay K Luthra LinkedIn

CEVA Global Website | LinkedIn

VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity Harvard Busness Review | Wikipedia

The National Programme for Information Technology ( NPfIT )

Marshall McLuhan

Dan Honig -  Mission Driven Bureaucrats | Amazon CA

Demis Hassabis
Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

Recorded: Feb, 2025

This is a show about the people that make digital public service work. If you'd like to find out more, visit northern.co/311-podcast/

We're going to keep having conversations like this. If you've got ideas of guests we should speak to, send us an email to the311@northern.co.

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Paul:

This is the 311 Podcast. I'm your host, Paul Bellows. This is a show about the people that make digital government work for the public service. If you'd like to find out more, visit Northern. co. Today, my guest is Vijay Luthra. Vijay is the managing partner of CEVA Global in the UK, and he works to help government organizations in the UK and UAE to develop digital transformation strategies. Vijay is, in his words, a former public servant and a recovering politician. He works in social enterprise and has deep expertise in healthcare and transformation. When I met Vijay first, I knew we'd have a good conversation. Today we decided to talk about what digital transformation for government means in the chaos that is early 2025. We spoke in February of 2025 and talked about the headwinds facing government at this moment in time. Given the pace of change, particularly in the US, it's hard to say how long our conversation will remain relevant. It's hard to talk about the political side of government without taking sides, but we did our best to avoid that. We talked about institutional trust and what it means when the entrepreneurial forces of big tech come for the scale and pace of government. Vijay and I both believe that publicly funded and operated services are essential for a just society. And I hope that wherever you fall on the political spectrum, that that's something we can agree on. Here's my conversation with Vijay Luthra.

Vijay K Luthra:

Hi Paul. I'm Vijay, Vijay Kay Luther. I am the managing partner at CEVA. We are a boutique consultancy and we work with government and public services on, principally, on delivery and implementation challenges. So we are particularly focused on transformation; transformation that perhaps has got a little stuck. But because we do a lot of work where transformation has got stuck we also do a lot of work with people who know, who want to know, how to set up transformation to succeed from the outset.

Paul:

So Vijay, we were gonna talk with today is why is digital government hard in 2025? And what are the strategies for finding success in 2025 in our current let's call it political, social and media conditions, which is all of these things. As we go in, I don't wanna dive too deep into the conspiracy theory of what folks in certain parts of certain political camps are doing. But it does, seem like in the U.S Election and where money is getting spent, and what kinds of messages are getting socialized, and the funny little lens that I think is interesting is, as a Canadian, I've been watching Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively and their media spat they're having around this film that they did. Where both groups appear to be buying media and positioning stories and statements, and they're actually hiring firms to do reputation management. There's a bit of an undercurrent of is the story we hear a reliable story. There's sort of the media angle, do we need a little bit more critical listening ability, you know, critical skills to to look at stories we're seeing online. What is true, what is not, how do you find truth? I think it doesn't hurt to remind people that Media literacy is more important now than maybe it's ever been, in terms of how stories get to us and what we need to pay attention to and where reality is in terms of digital government.

Vijay K Luthra:

Yeah, very much and I think disinformation is becoming more and more of an issue. So my mom is 75, right? And she's of that generation where she's not what you would call a digital native. So she uses Facebook. She she texts, she WhatsApps all of those different things. But I would say she, she's not necessarily digitally savvy in the way lots of people in her generation are not and the ability of people to be able to sift, not necessarily truth from fiction because it's more fundamental than that, but opinion from facts. And and this is, I think one of the things that's interesting about the way in which opinion and facts have become blended is. as things which 10 or 20 years ago, we would not have considered contestable, I'll give you an example, Vaccines for example,

Paul:

For example. Yeah.

Vijay K Luthra:

yeah things like that principles, which we would concepts, which we would not have considered contestable in any serious way. Are becoming contestable. And one of the reasons they've become contestable is because of the way social media has reshaped narrative and social media has put pressure on mainstream media to reshape narrative. So what we've had is this convergence of, not facts versus opinion, but this blending of facts and opinions or just opinions presented as facts. And if you look at the logical progression of where, that goes. Well, I mean, look, we're seeing it. We've now got a a vaccine efficacy denier as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the US government. Where does that take us? Some people say we're in a post-truth world, I tend to think that term is a little trite but I understand the, you know, what they're trying to get at, which is that the absolute objective truth is no longer enough because everything is contestable.

Paul:

Yes to everything you said. And, the dichotomy appears to be, something that just comes down to, our, I think our evolution as a species and the fact that we've been launched into a global era without the cognitive skills to cope with a global era. In the seventies, the 1900 and seventies, when I was a child, we had local news. That's primarily what you consumed. And they would talk about the city zoo and city hall and the bus strike or the garbage collection. There were issues that were local and then towards the end of that broadcast, we'd have some national news and then a little bit of international news. And that was storytelling. That was news. That was the media. It was very local. It was very cognitively accessible. I could understand it. It was related to me. Today, news is all existential, global, and so removed from my day-to-day reality, I'm not even sure what's happening in my city anymore, unless I find an independent news source or, a blogger. I think part of that has led us to a point where we do not trust institutions anymore. The institutional information, institutional news, institutional press releases, information coming from governments becomes intrinsically less trustworthy than the thing I can cognitively understand, which is people I know, people I have a trust relationship with, people I've met, or people I've connected with online. Or at least, people I perceive that I've connected with online. And so our news has become a social, our truth has become social.

Vijay K Luthra:

Yes.

Paul:

Ironically, I didn't mean to put those two words together given the US president's personal social media platform, but, there's an irony there that the truth is social today Versus, factual, institutional, authoritative, we've lost all of those things. So, we're ungrounded in terms of our truth and reality in this moment in a way that I don't think as a society and as a species we've really been prepared for in the past.

Vijay K Luthra:

No. I guess the other thing I would add to that is that the pace of news and media has changed radically. So when I was growing up, we- so I'm in the UK, right? I'm in Surrey in the UK not the Surrey in British Columbia. But both very fine places. In the UK, when I was growing up, we used to have, you'd have news bulletins at fixed times. There'd be a news at 6:00 PM in the evening. There'd be a news at 9:00 PM in the evening. Be a news at night at 10:00 PM in the evening. And I remember, the 10:00 PM news bulletin was pretty much the last thing my dad used to watch before he went to bed. But now, we have news on tap 24 hours a day. But alongside that, going back to, what's contestable, a lot of that news now comes, more so in the US but increasingly in the UK and Europe, comes with an ideological bias attached to it. It's a model that's been pioneered by Fox News. We've now also got GB News in the UK. It's quite troubling because again, it's contributing to this idea that Everything is contestable but as you allude to the, where, how we consume information and where we consume information from has changed quite radically. So that trust piece that you mentioned you're absolutely right. Trust has been eroded in governments, in Public institutions, but I would also say in the media. If you look at, and I don't have the figures to hand, but if you look at the BBC and its reputation, look, let's look at this in the round. The BBC news, in particular, still pushes out pretty high quality, objective news content. Has it changed? Yes. But is it still, trusted by many, many people? Yes. Is it as trusted by many people, as many people as it was 20 years ago? No. Even a news source, you know, CNN for example, equally high quality news output. So even those sources of news, which have always had a high degree of fidelity and trust attached to them. They're the level of trust and fidelity is being eroded. If I look at some of the reasons why it's being eroded we see a great deal of polarization in society. Where I think we are seeing less of that and I'm contemplating this point from a place where I can't really go and check whether my hypothesis is true. We live in, in a democratic world, but there are parts of the world that are not democratic. So my.limited understanding of, what the information and news landscape in Russia is, for example, is that it is not as diverse and contested as it is in, say, the UK and Canada because essentially, everything is controlled by the government. And there are other places where you could, you know Iran, might be another example. Those are not democratic nation states. And therefore the information landscape is not contested in the same way as it is in the democratic world. Now I'm not for a second, suggesting that we should move away from democracy. But I definitely think that there is a challenge for democratic governments, the world over as to how you protect that democracy. Europe, and other places in the world are slipping towards populism, Italy, France the US, but populism is on the rise. So it, it's only a short step from populism. Vladimir Putin is a populist, right? Let's make no bones about it. Potentially it's a very short step, for, say, France or Italy, to go from where they are now to a, sort of, trumpesque situation where you have a populist elected to office who, seeks to then radically remake, the sort of the government and public services landscape. And we've already seen that Trump is moving at pace to do that.

Paul:

I think you can say, it's hard to speak about what happens in a society, but you can certainly say people who disagree with Putin tend to have a disproportionate amount of tumbles out of hotel windows.

Vijay K Luthra:

Yes.

Paul:

You only need more than one of those instances would indicate there's some sort of a pattern there of maybe things are not above board in Russia. I think that's safe to say. We've got a living case study in Canada though right now where I sit, in Edmonton, Alberta and we are under attack by the US It is a trade war that is remarkably like an actual war in that our sovereignty is being threatened. But I will say the creation of an enemy has changed the political dynamic, regardless of what size of the political spectrum you're on. Polling has swung by 20 points in Canada in a matter of weeks. And I can't think of a time in my living memory where I saw that type of a swing in political opinion in this particular nation, quite this quickly. And, towards towards one party that was really plummeting in the polls. There's been a pivot. So we're looking into new leadership, et cetera. And I don't mean to say that to make any political point about Canada, but to identify the creation of an enemy is an interesting strategy. And I think this is one where an enemy has created itself for Canada, or at least an opponent, and, one off the things that's true about populism the generative act of creating opponents, be that a political side, a economic posture, whatever that thing is; the personality of a particular leader, the age of a leader, all of these things can be weaponized to create opponents, and people respond remarkably well to an opponent. Once you have opposition, now you've created community. Now you've created solidarity. Now you've created alignment and that it is one of the tools. It's a legitimate tools. I don't mean to say that the presence of an opponent, should intrinsically be suspicious, but definitely the pattern of populism is to identify opponents, be that opponent, the country of UKraine or, what, whatever that might be. Once create these opponents, suddenly we can rally people, we can get alignment, we can get buy-in. And so the creation of opponents should, we should be skeptical, at the very least, of that. But what's interesting, in the US context in particular right now, is the government itself has been made the opponent, the institution, the concept of, oh, there's a deep state and that deep state is against your interests and also against my interest as a leader. I'm, putting words in the mouth of particular US leadership right now but that is the playbook that's being followed right now. And would we stop being able to trust what government says. These are the people we've hired and elected and commissioned to take our tax dollars and build our roads and teach our children and operate our healthcare and run our military. And if we intrinsically can't trust them, how do we get anything done? We're, this point of it's impossible now to accomplish anything.

Vijay K Luthra:

Yeah. This is the logical endpoint of a narrative that has been around for, 50 or 60 years. In the UK we saw it in Thatcherism, where you have a drive for for a small state because the ideological platform is that a small state is more efficient, that government should not spend money, government should not interfere where the private sector can take a role et cetera, et cetera. Margaret Thatcher famously talked about rolling back the frontiers of the state. And we've seen really a sort of worldwide trend, you know what some people might call neo neoliberalism, and it is that to an extent,. In government itself, you've had this culture of of Managerialism, which really emerged properly in the eighties again, in the UK, New Zealand, and in Australia where you know that you have this philosophical approach to government where it's efficiency driven. it's about metrics. It's the idea that you can manage you can manage to targets. And I, think some of what we're seeing at the moment is it's almost the the ideological endpoint of that, which is that government is actually the enemy. It stands in our way, stops us from getting stuff done which of course is not the purpose of government. I'm reminded, there's an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote I like paying taxes. It buys me civilization. And of course, what he was talking about was the order that governments bring and services and, the sort of the, there's some very basic things that, that I believe should be the role of government policing and national security for example. Would I want our police forces to be privatized? Well, no, because then in whose interests do they do they operate? Do no doubt some of your listeners would point to the fact that the police are already not operating in the interest of citizens in many places. But let's let's park that.

Paul:

Yeah.

Vijay K Luthra:

Yeah the concept of policing and policing by consent as we have in the UK is it, I would say it's a pretty fundamental part of of being a civilized country. I might also argue that I in many respects, healthcare is best provided by the government, or at least some healthcare is best provided by the government. We have the NHS in the UK, it's very much considered the jewel in the crown of our public services. I might also argue that education, or at least most education is best off provided by the state. Again, in the UK, we have a largely state run education system. It's same in Canada. In Finland, they have a wholly state run education system. Finland, in fact, gets very good educational outcomes. So I would say, that there there is definitively a role for government But I would, point to the role of civil servants, public servants has become harder and harder, I think over the last 30, 40, 50, 50 years. And I'm not just talking about in the UK, I'm talking about globally. If we think about the landscape and, in fact, I say this as someone who used to be a civil servant in the UK. So I've lived some of this, and when I first became a civil servant, we had very significant resources at our disposal. The funds were there to deliver big programs. I first became civil servant just before Tony Blair left And still, felt like a very upbeat time, even though, we'd had the involvement in the Iraq war and all that brought with it. But still, overall we had a sense of positivity. But since then, I think things have got harder and harder. As we've discussed the environment has become more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, vuca, to steal the west point term. And that has manifested itself in fewer resources, unstable political leadership. And for civil servants, unstable political leadership is one of the worst things because, it may be you are ordered to go in one direction today and then in another direction to tomorrow. We've seen a lot of that in the UK. We have Prime Minister after Prime Minister, it seemed and although all from the same party, many of them might have logically very very different. We even had one Prime Minister who didn't last as long as a, as a decomposing lettuce. It's a time of extreme instability. And I think, that narrative that government, bad private sector, good, or in this case oligarchy good. If we look at the example of the US, it's dangerous, but it's simple. And going back to your point about, our humanity's ability to engage with things that are cognitively complex and to leverage our cognitive abilities. Simple ideas, simple answers are very alluring. We like simple answers, particularly when there's a complex problems, because it means we don't have to think so hard. So when you have someone like Donald Trump come along and say, join the swamp, that's, a very seductive idea for a lot of people.

Paul:

There is a really interesting thing happening right now to just build on exactly what you've just said, which is we have this interesting moment where, you know, you and I sit in this moment where we've both been within the public service. We both provide services to the public service today, and so we're in inside outside a little bit. So we A, we have some freedom to talk, in that none of our, none of the people we report up to are elected, so maybe there's a little more freedom just to dialogue about this. But we have a moment where you and I both come from a position of there are, the, there's this digital future, there's the potential; and I don't wanna use the word efficient'cause that tends to mean smaller and less government which may be an outcome or may not be an outcome, that it's, what,are the services we wish to provide to people? What is the cost of those services? That's really what the conversation should be versus anyone who works for government must be lazy or overpaid or, avoiding a real job. There, there's definitely an attitude because we've all seen waste exist in in organizations. But we have this idea of more effective government could potentially happen if we manage to digitize the right things in the right way, if we make the right choices, if we follow the right path for how to build good, effective software, how to follow the practices of user experience and accessibility and security and privacy, and all of these important practices, on the other side. Now, at this moment in time, we have two things that are happening. One in the US, which is a really interesting case study for a lot of what we're talking about. And unfortunately, it's also a reality for a lot of human beings. People are gonna be harmed by some of what's happening right now, but have this interesting moment where the tools that potentially you and I would advocate are being, really taken at scale. And we now have, the US' largest technologist, the most wealthy technologist most ardent advocate for technology as a transformational force in society and for our species is now taking that lens to the US Government. In a way that, that it's really hard to understand what might be on the other side of this, you take this massive institution of the US government, that moves so much water every day, carries so much weight, delivers so many services, and we're really putting a hand grenade into it, and saying, we're just gonna blow this thing up, that we're gonna see what's left on the other side, appears to be the mindset that's being taken. Which is a very tech mindset, Uber did that to taxis, and to food delivery and Airbnb did that to the hotel industry. But these are the metaphors we use to laud tech, to to praise tech for the potential outcomes to take legacy industries. And now as we're bringing that to government, is government something we wish to disrupt in this kind of way or to this kind of degree, what could the outcomes be because government is different from a commercial entity. We don't follow the same rules. Government should move more slowly. It, we should be more cautious. It's the commons, it doesn't belong to an entrepreneur, it belongs to all. In theory, in a democracy, it should belong to the people and it serve the people. So you have this interesting moment where all the things that were my tools, as a entrepreneur and an advocate for good government and, digitization are being brought in a way that, and a scale and a velocity. And I'm curious, how you see this in the UK. And I also want to, there's also been a narrative emerging of maybe the UK spent too much money on digital transformation. Maybe this hasn't worked out. I've seen this narrative start to emerge in media as well, and again, suspicious of that. So there's sort of two questions building here, and I'd love to hear both, both as a technologist supporting and working alongside government and advocating for government, and advocating for technology within government, how do you perceive the US. And then also, as a UK citizen, hearing a new critique of maybe we have too many digital people working in the UK government right now. Maybe there's too much. Are we getting the value we were promised? There's sort of two sides of this and sort to throw two questions at the same time, but I love to hear your thoughts on both of those, because I think they start to converge in an interesting place.

Vijay K Luthra:

Yeah. And look, my my starting point for all of this is my, my, my view is we need a new paradigm for why we do digital transformation in government. I would also say, more more or less transformation is now more or less all digital these days. We also in in UK circles when we talk about reform, by which we generally mean the same thing, we mean transformation. We also have a political party called reform, but let's not talk about them. And certainly, you alluded to the the world's richest man is now ripping apart the UK, the US government. And we've had. similar similar posturing in the UK. Musk is not posturing. He's actually ripping apart the US government. Thankfully we haven't had that happen here. Although we've had people offer to do that. My view of those kind of offers is if you look at the way that Musk is operating, it's really, it's a nihilistic approach to the state. As in, I dislike the state, think partly because they don't understand the state. Slightly controversial perspective from me, but, as someone who has grown up, I'm a kidney transplanter, grew up with a a chronic kidney condition. So I'm only here because of the efforts of the NHS. I spent a very short part of my life on welfare. I'm state educated in the UK, so I have had huge benefit from public services. I value them hugely. I'm a critical friend that, I like to think that I can see where the issues are, but I'm by and large an advocate for public services. I look at people like Musk and I see people who have never had to make use of those services. They don't understand them. They don't value them, and they don't see the contribution those services make to civilization to go back to the Oliver Wendell Homes quotes, And I, my sense of the, the sort of the Musk or the equivalent in the UK might be be the gentleman called Tom Blomfield, who. Is one of founders of Monzo Bank. And relatively recently put a contentious statement out on Twitter[now known as X]. I feel like with a small team in two to three years, proven tech founders could automate huge chunks of the government. I would sign up for a tour of duty in the UK. It would need a lot of political air cover. I have no desire to fight massive bureaucracy. I think that view is naive and it's wrongheaded. It's pretty much the same view that Musk seems to be taking, but my sense is it's driven from a place of small state, good lower taxes, good private sector best. And in my view, none of these things are true. In a in a balanced world, you need both government and the private sector to work hand in hand to create stable societies. It's not a zero sum game. But as I say, if you've never had to make use of those services, then you probably resent that you pay lots of taxes, which go towards funding those services. But I would say that we need a different paradigm and my view on all of this is that, we are, we're in a new era, a new era that is different to any that's come before. Some people try and compare it to say the industrial Revolution, but I think it's even more it's even more, revolutionary and fundamental than that I've taken to calling it the fifth industrial revolution. I know some people already refer to a fourth industrial revolution. I I've chosen fifth industrial revolution because there's a distinction between the sort of the fourth industrial revolution, which is the emergence of big tech. The fifth industrial revolution is not just about the emergence of AI, but it's also about the change in the human condition that we see. Alongside that. Going back to your point about judgment and critical thinking, in a world that is powered by AI the thing that is left for humanity is judgment and critical thinking. And so the way I advocate for approaching government and public service reform is it's any paradigm that's based around we're gonna save X amount of money or drive X amount of efficiency is going to put you on a course where you are bound to fail because it's gonna be about numbers. It's gonna be about the lowest common denominator and invariably, I think, you are always gonna over promise and under deliver. My renewed paradigm. What I would encourage listeners to think about is what's the human benefit That we are going to get from implementing this technology. We need a, what I would call a human centered future. So where we are digitizing services, how does that make life better for people? CEVA, my company, we do a lot of work in health. One of the things I'm always at pains to stress is. Where is the benefit for the people who are in health systems? And that is not just clinicians it's also the administrators who work with clinicians. It's very definitely the patients, but it's also the carers who have to look after the patients. So if we are doing things that benefit of those groups of people, then why are we doing it? And I think that's the fundamental shift that we need when we think about digital transformation in government. What's the human what is the human outcome that we want? And the answer to that should be, it should be better services, but better services that deliver to outcomes. Delivering to outcomes, what do I mean by that? Let's take education. What, do we want from education? We want happy, well-rounded citizens who are able to go out into the workforce and prosper. That is the purpose of education. If we're gonna start digitizing elements of how education is delivered, then does it contribute towards that end goal? No, if it doesn't, then take a good look at whether it's worth doing or not healthcare, local government. You can always make a case for transaction processing to be more efficient, to be much quicker. But let's be frank in large parts of the world, some of those transactional processes that are currently done by hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are providing employment opportunities to communities that would otherwise be decimated. So you are gonna say, let's digitize all of that, all of that, tra that transaction processing over there, what happens to all of those jobs? Again, it comes back to what's the what's the human outcome?

Paul:

I love this piece and I want to pull back around to one piece. There's a tiny anecdote that I, that is, that sprung into my mind as you were talking, which was at one point in my career at, when I was the CEO of a company and had a leadership team. We were having interesting conversation about a person on our team, not within our leadership team, but who was key employee in our company, who was quite clearly having a mental health moment, just a moment where they were not at their best. There was probably something happening outside of work that was impacting the performance at work. And where we were having a conversation on what should we do here to support this person? Because they are key to our business and to our success as a business. And we are discussing, mental health outcomes and one of the people on my leadership team said we can't be having this conversation. This is not our problem. We are a business and they threw out the, we are a business, trump card. I said, I don't think that phrase of, the Milton Friedman view of we are, profit is the only purpose for business. I said I don't, I just don't think it's a get out of jail free card for still being a part of society.

Vijay K Luthra:

Not t'all.

Paul:

Being a business doesn't excuse you from still being a human being, employing humans, being a function within society. And I do think whether we're in the public service side, I don't think government gets to have a get out of jail card from efficiency and effectiveness either, like, on both sides, I think it cuts both ways, but just this idea that business is somehow immune from the messiness of humanity. I don't think that is, I don't think that's an acceptable posture to take, but the fact that government doesn't also have to perform and deliver value, also, but at the bottom line, we want multiple things from government. We would like good policy. We would like enforcement where those policies are contravened, where the law is contrave, We want policy, but then the other major arm of government in most democracies in the world is service delivery. They are a service delivery arm. They take on the services like in Canada in the UK, healthcare, education. Those aren't universally considered government services, but I think, you and I grew up in a world where we can't even imagine a world in which. The basics of healthcare, the basics are provided to all people, regardless of do you come to, do you arrive here on a boat, in a state of desperation, did you walk across a border. We wanna eliminate suffering for the other members of our species. So we ask government to do those things that don't really fit into a business model. A business would never take those things on. Those are not profitable businesses. Those are not effective businesses. Those are not scalable businesses. That's not really the space that business wants to live in. So we ask government to do those things for us. And we all contribute out of our income, to, to that pot that, that we. Then hand back to government. So with that mindset, here we are where that, these concepts are under attack, we're, and yet we still need to operate. So you and I sit as advisors to government today, for the most part. So I'd love to hear, what are you saying, given this impossible moment, we're in where we've stopped trusting institutions. We, we, know, government is under attack. Truth itself is. personal, rather than normalized in society, and an objective, and yet, we still would like government to exist. I think most people would not want government to disappear. They might say it, they might even vote for it, but if you sit and think about the implications of the roads crumble the military evaporates, our borders actually become fully porous. We don't want these things to go away. We want better than they are, for the most part. How do you advise your customers? What are the mindsets for those within government who are dealing with this moment where they are distrusted; they're under attack; the rules are changing; the sands are shifting; how do you operate today? I know that's a challenging question just to throw, but I think that's what we're trying to get to here.

Vijay K Luthra:

Yeah, it's a really difficult one. I try and encourage everybody to adopt a positive mindset, which is difficult. Because if you're constantly under attack, then, It can be incredibly, it's winding, to be constantly under attack by the person, and by political leaders. I do think there is an inherent virtue in public service. I think for example Dan Honig professor, University College London in the UK and at Georgetown in the US, Dan's book, Mission Driven Bureaucrats. At the center of that is that most people get into public service out of an intrinsic sense of duty and commitment. And I think that's true. That is largely why I became a civil servant is also largely why I still work in public services. I have more agency now that I'm not. inside public services, but, I still have a passion and an interest in seeing our state become strong, agile, resilient in the way it needs to be to, to weather the, the challenges that we've discussed. And those are the kind of things that, that I try and encourage in, clients is, to try and stay upbeat, which is easier said than done. Again, pretty much everybody I talk to is in their role because they fundamentally believe that public services are an important part of creating successful nation states. And so I ask people to, to keep that front and center. And then I think also, I always try and encourage people to think more, more broadly. We've dwelt a great deal on, how changed the world is. I think it's important to always locate yourself in that context and to think very carefully about what do we need from public services in this renewed world. It is still, it is clear that there are still a great many people who do need public services. And again, I think that's quite a powerful idea that, as a civil servant or a public servant, you are at the center of creating a future that is vitally important to the nation that you serve and vitally important to thousands, millions of individuals within that nation. And so I think, that sort of mindset is quite important. As I say, it's, difficult to stay positive all the time. But I also encourage people, going back to this idea of human centeredness, is to consider technology as an enabler, because it is an enabler. It is not about technology versus human. It's about human and technology, but the human always has to come first. So where we are putting in place a piece of software or, perhaps we're AI as is the flavor of the moment everywhere, including in, in government and public services. But how are we meaningfully making use? Of, of AI, where we are deploying it, how are we preparing our workforce to be able to exploit these new tools that we put at their disposal. I'm conscious I didn't answer your question about, the success of digital transformation initiatives in the UK and I think this goes back to the mindsets piece in that, in the past we, we've often approached the big initiatives. There's a really famous example in the UK NPfIT, The National Program for IT, which was a, an attempt to digitize the NHS at national level, which which eventually ended. The contract was terminated. It was, a huge piece of work over, billions, not millions of pounds and it, it failed. There were some, there were one or two legacy elements, which are still in use, by and large the project failed. I would say it goes back to the paradigm that the, that program was about efficiency, it was driven from a place of let's save money, it wasn't driven from a place of let's improve outcomes. Let's, use this program to drive better patient outcomes, to help clinicians do a better job. It wasn't driven from that place. It was driven from a place of, we're gonna spend, 2 billion pounds to save 10 billion pounds. I'd maintain that taking that approach is generally going to lead to failure.

Paul:

I love this for two reasons. There's a crisis moment we're at for those of us who sit in and surrounding public service, but also in and surrounding technology. Which is, technology will never tell us why, it will only tell us how it's just, it's tools. It's software. It's how something happens. yet also as a Canadian, I gotta quote Marshall McLuhan, the medium being the message. It also contains with it a set of values, technology brings values along with it. Even though it is not itself generative of those values, the people who create technology, where. here in Canada, in the UK, in the US to pick the three companies that you and I can see most clearly. From where we sit we have a technologist questioning the validity of public service itself. We have a moment in the UK where there's a bit of a reckoning. We have a moment in Canada where the nation is under threat, there is this crisis occurring. And I think this is a moment where we all need to sit back and say, what do we wish to have on the other side of this? What are the things that we choose to value still? What are those core values that we have of, yeah, we want a social safety net. There is a floor below which we don't want our neighbors to sink. Those who live in our community and around us, there's some minimum standards that we wish to have exist. I would like a road that is paved to come by my house. Should I need to call a police officer if I'm in danger, I would like them to have a paved road to drive on to get to my house in a city. I would like that police service to exist and to be effective. I would like a hospital to be open and willing to see my child should my child become ill in the middle of the night. These are things I wish to have exist. And I still deeply believe in technology. I also don't want this moment in the US to destroy our faith in technology as an enabler of good government as well. I think that's another danger that we're facing here of, the tech bros may put us off our willingness to even engage. As much as I probably to some degree am a tech bro, in that I'm male, I'm in tech. There's this moment, where I just hope you don't lose the possibilities. I talked to somebody who was on Obama's digital team at one point, and I said what's the US strategy? He said We just look at the UK and see what works and what doesn't, and copy the good stuff. That's what we're doing. And it was like, a lot of us watched the UK for a long time as an early mover in digital government as a leader. And in, I'm in tech, not everything goes well. Not everything produces the outcome we promised at the beginning, but I don't think that means that it's not worth trying. So I am still hopeful. I I still believe that there, there's possibility here. What so I guess to a closing question, Vijay, we've talked about some existential issues here. We've talked about some, some Armageddon, like outcomes, potentially here, glanced around these things, authoritarianism, the populism, the end of all government, who knows the end of society, like, glance around these, what has you hopeful right now? What are you hopeful for in, in the next year?

Vijay K Luthra:

Uh, that, that is a really, really good question. I and I'm tempted to say I'm tempted to say there's nothing to hope for but I, obviously, I don't believe that. Otherwise I wouldn't be here. I I think we're in an inflection point. The world is very often at inflection points, bigger or smaller but I think we're, on the edge of a big inflection point around technology if we look at the rate of progression of AI, for example it's clear that AI is going to become a foundational technology for humanity going forward. And my, my hope is that we have some very powerful tools at our disposal that will help us solve some existential problems. Will it help us solve climate change? Maybe. A, a great example is, great British technologists Demis Hassabis recently awarded a Nobel Prize for protein analysis using AI. Dennis is obviously it's, founder and CEO of DeepMind, now Google DeepMind. Without the power of DeepMind, it would've taken us a great deal longer to have, broken this challenge around protein folding and the scientific applications, particularly in, disease are very significant. My sense is that as technology accelerates our ability to solve problems, Should also accelerate. And I think as long as we can keep that technology in the right hands, that being the operative challenge, I see a potentially a very bright future for humanity. In partnership with these technologies. It goes back to the point we were just discussing technology is the how it's an enabler, it is not the end. It is the means. But I think as long as we keep that up front of mind, then, you know we potentially have a very bright future ahead of us as a species. On the flip side, it could all go probably wrong and, we could end up destroying civilization in, in the next 24 months but who knows really.

Paul:

I am deeply aware that we've talked about current events in this show and in a podcast that won't be coming out later today or tomorrow, but hopefully later this month and we'll see what continues to be true that we have discussed by the time that anyone listens to this particular conversation. Vijayay, thank you for your time. This was a bit of a ramble. As we said, we would probably have when we started this. We're gonna ramble along through this thing. We'll see where we get. But I think we touched on some essential questions that I hope on any side of the political spectrum, people are asking themselves of what do we actually wish to have for humans on the other side of all of these moments that we're in and what role can technology play in the betterment of the government, which must continue to exist in some format. We will have government. We will have organization. We will have society is just is it a society that benefits the most humans or the fewest humans. I think it's probably a good lens to bring to it. Really grateful for your tide[time] today here, sir. Thank you for the conversation.

Vijay K Luthra:

Thank you so much, Paul. I've enjoyed it immensely.

Paul:

Thanks so much for joining us today. Vijay and I are going to stay in touch and look for more points of collaboration between the UK and Canada. Some of the themes in our conversation that I've found interesting included that the change in our media ecosystem and our information diet mean that many of us have very different information and narratives about government. Big tech brings with it a belief system that isn't always congruent with the mindset of government. Human centric design and policy are essential to be sure that we get the best outcomes from disruptive technology like AI. And we're cautiously optimistic for the future. It's important for government to find a healthy relationship with technology. That's what digital transformation is all about. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Vijay Luthra. Please do subscribe and follow the many conversations we're going to be releasing throughout the year. I'd like to thank my colleagues who worked with me on this podcast. Kathy Watton is our show producer and editor. Frederick Brummer and Ahmed Khalil created our theme music and intro. I'm going to keep having conversations like this. Thanks for tuning in. If you've got ideas for the guests we should speak to, send us an email to the311@northern. co. The public service is about all of us, and when it's done right, digital can be a key ingredient for a better world. This has been the 311 Podcast, and I'm your host, Paul Bellows.