Digital transformation and AI at the Department for Work and Pensions

There are a lot of moving parts underpinning the functionality of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), making it ripe for digital transformation. Here, Helen takes us through the exciting projects currently underway and offers her advice to professionals working in the current tech landscape.

Why don’t you introduce yourself and your role at the DWP?

I'm Helen Wylie and I’m Director General for Digital and Transformation Group at DWP. We are the department that helps people get employment, helps state pensioners look after themselves, and I suppose we are the safety net — we help people who need support through hard times, and we do it with a happy heart.

Talk to us about your transformation priorities as a leader.

It's a really exciting time for us as a department. There's so much potential out there for us to do things differently. We are trying to transform the way that people interact with us as a department, such as the ability to do things easily via an app or online and doing that more often. We also want to make sure that we're freeing up our staff from administration so they can be more on hand to provide advice with a personal touch to those that need it.

The approach is to really fall in love with the problem; understand what it is we're trying to do and then go about experimenting with solutions, working with the people that we are there to serve along the way. User-centred design means using user insights to design services that work for them, and for us agility and working nimbly means responding to those insights. We get confidence from doing rather than saying.

Where do you see artificial intelligence fitting into this journey?

So far we’ve been using AI to improve existing processes, such as smoothing communication pathways for people whose first language isn’t English, and we’re also looking at summarisation. So the focus is currently on capabilities. We’re not yet fundamentally changing what we do — the possibilities of those smaller scale improvements are vast so we’re just grabbing onto those and getting the value out of them whilst we answer bigger questions along the way.

We've got two things that are out in the wild — neither of them citizen facing. One, which is out across Wales right now, is a tool that summarises extensive information for work coaches to enable them to give the people that are sat in front of them the best advice they can immediately. We’re then asking the coaches ‘did this thing surface what you would have said?’ We always have the link to the source information as well, so it’s possible to check that the advice is absolutely accurate.

Another small scale summarisation tool we’re looking at works with people’s descriptions of their conditions, disabilities or circumstances. The tool uses AI to build bullet point versions and pull key examples for staff to enable them to have an empathetic conversation with the person in front of them. Again, we’re then asking staff whether it’s doing it well.

So it's very much about augmenting your team members to do their jobs without worrying about the administrative burden?

Yes. Providing digital services with a human touch is a tagline that I think we may have repeated from other organisations, but it's really resonated — we’re looking at tools that enable us to free up our colleagues, who are experts in helping people, from a whole load of administration. If we can make that admin feel like less of a burden than it does at times today, then they can apply more of their time to actually helping and offering expertise to citizens.

Within that process of experimentation, how do you choose the problems where you might deploy AI?

So it’s definitely a value led approach, not an AI led approach, and I must attribute a lot of that to some of my previous colleagues. We’re a 90,000 person strong organisation, and in the generative AI explosion a couple of years ago everyone was excited and all these suggested use cases were coming through. 

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The response from our department was the Lighthouse Programme, which was a way to surface all of it and say right, we have about 17 billion ideas — how do we select the top five? It was about value and about variety; we wanted to avoid doing lots of similar use cases at that experimental stage. Our department has different groups of experts — finance, policy, HR, digital change — who come together around a problem, and what we’re trying to ensure is that each of those groups has AI as part of their toolbox so it doesn’t become something ‘over there’, but something that everyone can draw upon to support problem solving. ‘Follow the value’ is the maxim.

How do you avoid the ‘IT team silo’ and get customers and staff involved in the process of transformation?

I can’t help smiling at that because the idea of our teams being quiet anywhere is absolutely hilarious — there's a whole energy around this way of working. ‘Multidisciplinary’ can be a bit of an obscure word, but what it means for us is that we try to get people that understand different bits of a thing to share, so that the sum is greater than the equal of its parts.

If you can get the person who is designing a policy to speak to the individuals who are going to go and deliver it, for example, you can shape it into something that works for both sides right at the beginning and then build on that with the people it serves along the way. I've said it a million times, and I think it is well known across industry, but it is hard to make that happen everywhere all the time. Being determined about that is really important.

Which skills do you see as being in the highest demand at the moment?

The formal version of hot skills, if you like, has been cyber DevOps and data analytics. But I’d say the really important skill is understanding the constituent parts of what you’re doing. It might sound obvious, but if you are experimenting, for example with an AI technique, personally I think you should understand a lot about the underpinning. Our profession is called information technology — but we obsess a bit about the technology part. What about the information? How much do you trust it? Where did it come from? Have you adapted it in some way by how you've used it? It’s very important to understand all the pieces of what you’re putting together, so the more curious you can be, the better.

What advice would you give an IT professional looking to move their career forward in this landscape of transformation?

I have two pieces of advice. The first is don't rush. Falling in love with the bit of your career that you're in means that you will wring as much as possible out of it before you move on. The second is to be curious and try to learn all you can — ask, have you really got everything? What else is around you? What might you complement your skill set with? What are other organisations doing? How do third parties play a part? How is the person next to you doing the job differently to you? So don't rush, be curious, and really make sure you're making the best of each moment.

Looking back across your career, what advice would you give to yourself?

My slightly cheesy answer would definitely be join public service sooner. I've been here seven years, and I'm no spring chicken. I would have got much more into a very purposeful world like this earlier in my career. I also think if I was living my time again, I'd be more curious about how my technical skills have evolved — I’d say don't hold on too much to what you learned 20 years ago. Find a way to keep it fresh, because the people around you absolutely will be living in a different world. We move so fast; grab on to that and enjoy it.