- Digital teams are the cornerstone of building a digital organisation. Supported by effective governance, they are the muscles that enable your organisation to be responsive, open, efficient and agile, and to successfully deliver ever more transformational services.
- Whether an organisation is predominantly building or buying technology, good digital teams are identifiable by three main characteristics: user centred design, agile ways of working and a knowledge of how to build and operate modern internet technologies. Executives need to be as comfortable with these key concepts as their teams.
- Digital teams are not simply a rebrand of your IT department. And responsibility for establishing them can't just be delegated to your board digital lead or chief information officer. They require boards to revisit their operating model to remove traditional silos between IT, clinical and operational teams, and between IT and their wider service improvement capabilities.
- Boards have traditionally faced many barriers when attempting to establish successful digital teams. These include challenges around funding, recruitment and retention, and insufficient headroom to develop new services while maintaining multiple legacy systems.
- Covid-19 created a powerful impetus for change. It has demonstrated how the NHS can use simple technology to rapidly transform service delivery and ways of working. But perhaps its biggest impact is as much about creating the cultural conditions where digital teams can take root: a greater clarity of purpose, freedom to act and focus on delivering minimum viable services in weeks not months.
- As boards seek to embed these changes, there are important lessons to be learnt from across the NHS and other sectors about what good digital teams look like and the role of boards in enabling them to drive digital transformation.
- These lessons include the need to build digital teams that are diverse, while sharing a common 'digital mindset'. They also highlight the importance of establishing senior digital leadership either on the board or working very closely with it.
- To enable these digital teams to flourish, boards will need to review operating norms, including funding arrangements, how assurance is managed, what skills are valued and recruited, and how performance and progress are monitored.