For a country that once led the world with so many inventions that we all now take for granted, I fear Scotland, from a government perspective, is now held back by a lack of vision and most importantly: a lack of leadership from government and their officials.

I recently attended a Scottish Digital Office event in Glasgow, where I was inspired by the vision for an Amazon type delivery of public services; a vision that in reality hasn’t changed in more than a decade but has yet to be delivered across Scottish Public Sector, due to dithering by local government officers and civil servants.

Individuals and teams who are either too scared to modernise in fear of their jobs or simply out of their depth, despite digital transformation of the customer journey being a tried and tested pathway to greater efficiency and improved personalisation in the private sector, leaving parts of UK public sector far behind and limiting productivity.

It may be that many of my elected member colleagues, from all party-political backgrounds, add to the likelihood of failure. There is a natural tendency to prioritise responding to those constituents who do not want to move away from face to face engagement on services, probably less than 10% of their constituents. This local appetite for the status quo combines with a lack of clear leadership from the centre.

It ensures that there is a less than laser like focus on delivering modern and efficient digitally enabled public services that solve the problems of the 90%. The great irony is that reaching out very efficiently to the majority would enable government at every level to be able deliver better and more tailored services to all those who need them the most, including the most vulnerable who need intensive face to face or telephone support.

Last year I called out Strathclyde Passenger Transport because for more than a decade they have failed to deliver a joined-up travel card for rail and bus across the West of Scotland, when London and many other UK cities have had theirs for decades! I then look too at my own council and disappointing progress to deliver many digital basics. We are agreed between officers and members that new systems are needed urgently to deliver modern and efficient citizen services.

We know that our service provision is no different to the service provision of other Scottish local authorities, English authorities and wider afield. We can identify successful implementation in many places and yet we fail to execute. I hear daily excuses, data protection issues and secure access to data being blamed particularly for not delivering the technology enabled services our citizens simply expect in 2020 and have expected for more than ten years as their daily lives have become integrated with their highly personalised use of technology. I’ve called out public sector north of the border before for their utter lack of CAN-DO attitude and I do so again.

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However, we don’t have to look far to see public services fit for the 21st century. We hear continuously about the fantastic work being done in Estonia and Ireland, but also south of the border. After the 2010 General Election, councils across England had no option but to modernise if they were to survive and today there are so many fantastic cases studies of English authorities who invested in technology to save public money, while at the same time: improving citizen services.

I’m therefore left asking myself the same question I’ve been asking since I moved to Scotland in the late 90’s: why do our 32 Scottish local authorities and non-departmental public bodies, led by the Scottish Government, think they are so different and why do they continue to spend public money on IT solutions that are rarely ever delivered on time or to budget, when there are fantastic examples of successful public sector IT solutions being delivered elsewhere?

We know too that whilst public sector budgets have been tight across the UK, Scottish Government chose not to cut Scottish local authority budgets as steeply as UK Government chose to cut English local authorities. We also know that either through informed procurement and/or increasingly collaborative procurement, English local authorities have found the resources to deliver transformation programmes with a high return on investment.

It was clear from the Digital Office conference that my frustrations are shared across Scotland. However, it was clear too that there were elected members in the room who prioritise their own very local political agenda. Collaboration is minimal, putting up the usual excuses I’ve heard a thousand times before, putting Scotland’s public services in a straitjacket, doomed to 20th century paper-based processes, while the rest of the world moves on. Government leaders from politicians to council officers and civil servants have got to wake up and modernise if we have any chance of delivering even basic services going forward in a cash & resource strapped world.

In conclusion, I want to quote New York University (B.A.) Alvin Toffler (October 4, 1928 – June 27, 2016); an American writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide who said: “The illiterate of the 21st century aren’t those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and then relearn.”

My fear today is that Scotland’s Public Sector is being held back by a lack of vision and leadership from those who should be taking the world’s best wee country forward, rather than holding it back!