The UK government has no shortage of digital ideas. The harder task is turning successful initiatives into capabilities that work across departments, authorities and public services.

That question sat at the center of a closed-door roundtable at Parliament, hosted by HCLTech and The Entrepreneurs Network. 

Opening remarks were provided by James Tallentire, Delivery Manager – Stakeholder Engagement, West Midlands Combined Authority, Lynda Rawsthorne, Government Head of the Property Profession; Director, Property Capability, Sponsorship and Standards, Cabinet Office and Shaf Dawood, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Department for Education.

The discussion showed that scaling digital transformation across government depends on common foundations, closer alignment between technology and the business and structures that allow successful approaches to be reused rather than repeatedly rebuilt.

Give pilots somewhere to go

Pilot programs create space for experimentation, but their value is limited when there is no clear path into wider deployment.

“There’s no shortage of use cases or success stories from small-scale transformation,” said Paul Montgomery, Vice President - Head of Public Services, Aerospace and Defense Europe, HCLTech, during the roundtable.

One regional approach discussed at the roundtable combined skills development, local AI champions and a pipeline of experimental use cases with the intention of scaling the strongest ideas across multiple authorities. Shared governance was central to the model, giving individual organizations room to innovate while creating a common structure for successful approaches to spread. 

This type of model addresses a recurring problem in transformation programs: organizations often prove that something works locally without establishing how it will move beyond the initial environment.

Scale needs to be designed into the program from the beginning. That includes common standards, governance, implementation models and clarity over who is responsible for taking a proven idea further.

Balance standards with distributed innovation

Centralization provides consistency, but excessive control creates bottlenecks.

The discussion pointed toward a model built around strong central standards and governance assurance, with departments and teams retaining the freedom to develop use cases within those boundaries. Such an approach also reduces duplication by making successful work visible and reusable across the organization. 

The UK government has already experienced the consequences of different organizations solving similar digital problems independently. AI risks accelerating that pattern unless teams deliberately reuse and repurpose approaches that already work.

That requires greater visibility across initiatives and stronger technical interoperability. Organizations need to know what has already been built, what evidence supports it and where it can be adapted, reducing duplication and giving successful approaches a clearer route across government.

Transformation needs business ownership

Technology teams cannot carry this agenda alone.

Several themes in the discussion pointed to a gap between the people building technology and those responsible for policy, operations and service delivery. At scale, digital transformation requires people who understand both sides well enough to translate between them.

Business leaders also need to own the outcomes. Digital teams provide expertise, platforms and delivery capability, but operational leaders understand the processes, constraints and user needs that determine whether a transformation succeeds.

That relationship becomes particularly important when AI is expected to deliver productivity gains. Headcount targets or efficiency requirements cannot simply be handed to technology functions. The wider organization must redesign the work and decide how the capacity created through automation will be used. 

Multidisciplinary teams provide one practical route forward. By bringing operational specialists, process owners and technologists together early, organizations can understand the current service, establish its cost and redesign it before deciding where technology belongs.

Reuse is a scaling strategy

A recurring concern was the tendency to create new programs rather than build on existing capability.

Reuse reduces implementation time, limits duplication and gives organizations a stronger evidence base for investment. It also creates more consistency across services, making governance and maintenance easier over time.

The same principle applies to legacy transformation. New services are often easier to design because they carry less organizational and technical baggage. The larger opportunity sits within older processes, where transformation must address existing systems, established workflows and the people who rely on them.

Progress in these environments should be measured through evidence: whether the intervention works, what return it produces and whether it improves value for money. The conversation consistently favored tangible outcomes over assumptions about what digital technology should deliver. 

Design scale around the user

Government-wide transformation also has to account for significant differences in digital maturity and access.

A service that works for one department, council or user group may need a different delivery model elsewhere. Connectivity, affordability, skills and accessibility all shape whether citizens can benefit from digital public services.

That variation makes consistency at the core and flexibility at the point of delivery essential. Common technology, standards and governance provide a shared foundation, while service design should reflect the people and organizations using it.

The goal is to make public services easier to navigate across organizational boundaries. Achieving that depends on the less visible work of establishing clear ownership, common governance, resilient infrastructure and repeatable ways of turning successful experiments into shared capability.