Digital Services at the Border
This report examines the Digital Services at the Border programme to assess whether it has delivered value for money.
9 Dec 2020
Central government and departments now believe that delivering public services digitally could save billions of pounds annually and make the services better and more flexible for customers. 'Delivering services digitally' means much more than using websites to access services. Each step of the service process needs to take advantage of ways technology can replace manual processes, and information from various sources can be used to inform decision-making. Government needs to be able to get and make use of more comprehensive information, organisations need to work together, and systems have to be able to respond to changes in the needs and behaviours of both customers and staff, and ever changing technologies.
As well as all the wider issues to be addressed when transforming public services, delivering services digitally means managing specific challenges and risks, from integrating legacy IT systems to protecting service continuity and avoiding cyber crime. Achieving such a scale of change takes new skills and new ways of thinking, leadership, careful governance and risk management, and an ability to share lessons across government.
Key NAO publications:
This report examines the Digital Services at the Border programme to assess whether it has delivered value for money.
This report considers what the Superfast Broadband Programme has delivered and the lessons for government’s roll-out of nationwide gigabit broadband.
This report considers the readiness of the government to deliver its ambitions for digital transformation in the NHS in England.
Outlining cloud services and their use in government, this guide suggests questions to ask at planning, implementation and management stages.
An investigation into Verify, the government’s identity verification platform. It examines its performance, costs and benefits.
Transformation programmes can be highly complicated and risky. This guidance assists those overseeing them by setting out questions committees should ask during set-up, delivery and live-running phases.
The report examines whether to inform decisions across the BBC, the Corporation efficiently, effectively and economically understands how people use and respond to the full range of its services.
This report investigates the NHS’s response to the cyber attack that affected it in May 2017 and the impact on health services.
Audit committees should be scrutinising cyber security arrangements. To aid them, this guidance complements government advice by setting out high-level questions and issues for audit committees to consider.
Digital transformation has a mixed track record across government. It has not yet provided a level of change that will allow government to further reduce costs while still meeting people’s needs.