Our priorities

Agility is not simply about following agile methods in delivery, it is about being truly agile in the way that we work. We operate in a constantly changing environment, whether it be emerging technologies, changes in customer expectations, new threats to our cyber security or changes to our country's leadership.

This level of change is not going to go away but rather, with the exponential growth in the technology arena, the future will bring with it increased levels of change. We therefore need to move from being reactive to responsive, positioning ourselves to be able to flex and adapt to change.

For us, change fatigue cannot be an option so we will focus our efforts on how we can establish the culture and processes that enable us not only to manage change, but to welcome and be energised by it.

In line with our ambition to work in the open, we are committed to ensuring that our work is visible both within our directorate and beyond, enabling customers and colleagues alike to understand what we do and how we do it. This will start with the development of a DDaT roadmap of activities and the communication of this strategy to ensure that all DDaT colleagues understand our overarching purpose and vision. Even in a changing world our destination will not change but what we do to get there might, and that is ok.

We also need to enhance our understanding of our people, their skills, capabilities and the work they are assigned to, so that we can pivot the right people at the right time when priorities change. In the longer term this also supports us in ensuring we develop our workforce in the right way to meet the challenges of the future. In line with the NHSBSA strategy we will develop and embed an effective workforce plan.

We will continue to enhance our agility by maintaining and managing relationships with strategic delivery partners enabling us to rapidly increase our delivery capacity at short notice and to supplement our existing teams with individuals who bring specific skills and capabilities.

As a provider of DDaT services and products, stability is central to delivering for our customers and users. For us though, stability goes beyond just ensuring our services are available to people when they need them.

In order to adapt quickly to change we need reliable, steady foundations that help us to grow and evolve in a safe and secure environment. Stability for DDaT does not mean standing still, it’s creating consistent conditions to encourage innovation and creativity.

We strive to provide a safe and secure environment for our colleagues where they feel empowered to fail fast, learn from it and share that learning with others, enabling them to get it right first time.

By embedding consistent delivery and governance frameworks across our directorate as well as ensuring we have clear standards, processes, and principles in place we will ensure that everything we do is done to the same high standards, supporting us to deliver great customer experience. This level of consistency will also minimise the change when colleagues need to move from supporting one service to another, enabling such moves to happen seamlessly.

Monitoring and managing systems debt is also critical to our stability. Unmanaged systems debt can have far reaching consequences including:

• leaving systems vulnerable to threat
• increasing the number of issues and outages which draw colleagues focus and drive down customer experience
• make it harder to attract and retain colleagues with the required skills and experience
• perpetuate inefficient processes and ways of working.

We will support the organisation to reduce systems debt and ensure our own processes support this aim.

Working with and assuring the performance of our strategic suppliers is critical to us delivering stability across our services. The management of these relationships, including arrangements such as service level agreements and performance targets, enable us to ensure that our infrastructure is operational, secure, and performant, supporting stability across our services.

As part of a publicly funded organisation it is paramount that we deliver efficiently. This is not just about making cost savings or cuts but finding ways to do more, more quickly and with less. By minimising waste and optimising our processes we will be able to divert resources (and funding) to be able to deliver greater value.

We play a pivotal role in ensuring that colleagues across the organisation have the tools and technologies they need to do their jobs well. As part of this we strive to recognise and prioritise the needs of our internal customers alongside our external ones ensuring that we deliver great customer experience and meet our users’ needs in a way that enables them to work efficiently every day. We also regularly review the DDaT tooling we have in place to ensure it meets the needs of the organisation and that tools are retired or replaced when appropriate. We've recently established a DDaT service catalogue to support this and will continue to maintain this moving forwards.

Emerging technologies provide further opportunities for us to deliver efficiencies across the organisation and the wider system. In 2023 we committed to exploring the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand where it can best be deployed to deliver value for money efficiencies. As we look to the future we will focus our innovation efforts on areas that can deliver efficiencies and will continue to deploy automation where it can deliver both cost and time efficiencies. We’ve already demonstrated the value of technologies such as APIs in enabling more efficient service delivery. Moving forwards, we will also seek to deliver social value through technologies and service design, working with stakeholders to make it easier for our customers by implementing proactive entitlement (digital first) for our help with health costs services, enabling customers to gain automatic entitlement to exemption services.

Our recently established Financial Operations (FinOps) capability enables us to better understand the costs and cost drivers of deploying modern technologies. Delivering efficiently can also help ensure we progress towards being an environmentally sustainable organisation as it can reduce the emissions produced by the technologies we rely on.

Moving forwards, we will continue to mature our FinOps capability and expand to cover Green Operations (GreenOps) so that we can deliver financial efficiencies at scale as well as minimising our impact on the environment.

Being efficient also means doing what we can to protect our services from fraud and loss. We will continue to collaborate with colleagues in our Fraud and Loss team to build services which reduce these risks, act where vulnerabilities are identified and support work to recover losses where appropriate.

In addition, we recognise that to be successful here we need to increase our focus on our use of data and measures across the directorate, continuously improving our financial and performance measurements enabling us to better identify opportunities to deliver efficiencies and to quantify the benefits when we deliver them.