 Good morning, and welcome to the 17th meeting of the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee in 2019. Can I ask everyone in the gallery to please switch off your mobile devices or turn them to silent? Item number 1 is decision on taking business in private. Did members agree to take items 3, 4 and 7 in private this morning? I agree. Thank you. Item number 2 is the section 23 report enabling digital government. I'd like to welcome Does the Scottish Government's progress in delivering its digital strategy and enabling a digital government? Put simply, digital government is modern government. It involves bringing the public, private and voluntary sectors together, and it involves bringing the public, private and voluntary sectors together, and it involves providing services to the public and the public, providing services to the private and voluntary sectors together with citizens to design services that meet users' needs and deliver better outcomes, making best use of technology and innovation. Building a digital government is difficult and takes time, and Governments around the world find it challenging. The Scottish Government published an ambitious digital strategy for Scotland in March 2017. There are signs of good early progress, with a number of initiatives starting to change the way organisations design and deliver services. The technical assurance framework and the support offered by the transformation division are adding value, but the Scottish Government has not had the capacity to share lessons learned or to fully evaluate which services are adding the most value in the short term and the longer term. The Government needs to take a more strategic role and bring people from different sectors together to develop a shared understanding of roles, priorities and progress. This will require an understanding of the overall investment needed to achieve the strategy, which is not currently in place. Major digital programmes across the public sector are putting pressure on the system, and the shortage of digital skills remains a barrier to progress. The Government has introduced a number of initiatives to try and address this, such as the Digital Skills Academy. The digital fellowship scheme aims to bring commercial expertise into the Scottish Government, but it is small in scale. There is no quick solution to the shortage of skills in the market, and Audit Scotland's future work programme includes an audit of the Scottish Government's wider skills planning. To transform services and make a real difference to the people of Scotland, the public sector needs to collaborate and innovate. Programmes such as SIFTEC are helping with that. The Government needs to take a more systematic approach to assessing the opportunities and risks associated with emerging technologies and share its knowledge and plans more widely. Innovation inevitably involves taking risks that need to be managed well. There is no risk-free option, since the risks of not embracing new technology are likely to be even greater. Convener, the committee will be aware that earlier this week I published a report on the Scottish Public Pensions Agency failed IT programme. That has inevitably attracted a lot of attention and criticism, and I expect to be briefing the committee on that after the recess. However, it is worth noting that the programme started back in 2013. Today's report aims to provide an up-to-date picture of the Government's current arrangements for enabling digital government. As always, we are happy to answer the committee's questions. I will ask Colin Beattie to open questioning for the committee. Your report, paragraph 35, suggests that, in 2018, the Scottish Government recognised that its governance structures for overseeing the digital transformation were not really operating effectively. We have been through this before, and they put in all sorts of layers, both for helping people to give guidance to people for managing the projects and for overseeing the whole thing, and we commented previously about the multiplicity of those layers. So just a couple of things. Have they actually de-layered any of that and made it simpler, or are we just simply adding more layers again? What is the impact of the changes or the new approach, from what no better word, that the Government is taking? What is the impact of that being in the immediate term? I will ask Gemma to come in in a moment, but my short answer would be to say that they simplified it without necessarily de-layering it. The biggest change that we have seen is to separate the structures that are in place for support, for collaboration, for providing advice from those that are put in place to provide assurance so that they can be more independent and apply challenge more directly, more easily. So there has been that separation rather than necessarily de-layering it. In some ways it is too early to see what the impact of that is, but we do highlight in the report some of the risks associated with it, as well as some of the advantages. Gemma, would you like to expand on that? Absolutely. Exhibit 4. We have set out the Government structure at the moment, but we point out in paragraph 36 that it remains a confusing structure. There are quite a number of boards in place. We also highlight that none of those boards have a role in which they can pull people together across the public sector and focus solely on digital. There is not a board in place at the moment for doing that, and that is certainly a recommendation that we have put in place, that they should consider having such a cross-sectional forum that can do that, though the boards touch on digital, that bring people together but do not have that sole focus, and we think that that is something that is required at the moment. The main changes are to try and refocus the central government transformation board to give that a clearer role and a clearer responsibility for the overall strategy. The Auditor General said that it is quite early days for us to see that, and we think that its remit needs to be more clearly articulated to state that. At the moment, it is not clear that which board has the main responsibility for the delivery of the strategy. Are we heading in the right direction? What we say in the report is that there are good signs of progress, so we can see that individual projects are starting to make a difference. For example, the Scottish Approach to Service design, the CivTech initiative and really great initiatives to try and change the culture of the public sector in the way that it does things. However, those are quite small in scale, and what we need is something that pulls the learning from those together so that we can understand if they work, why they work, can we do that in another place, what is the impact of that to make certainly the best of all those individual actions? It would be the accountable officer responsible for pulling it all together. Is there one accountable officer? Absolutely. It is the director general for organizational development and operations in the Scottish Government. You talked previously about getting people with the skills, about the shortages of skills and so forth. What is the Scottish Government doing to try to address that? How are we going to get assurance that there is progress on that? It is key to the future project. Your right is absolutely key to being able to do this. There are, as the report says, some initiatives that are positive. The Digital Academy is one of them, aiming to focus on developing the right skills, not just purely IT technical skills, but also programme management and project management. The digital fellowship scheme, which aims to bring in people with the right skills from the commercial sector to work with government for a period of time, is also a good initiative, but they are all quite small-scale. On their own, they are not going to be able to address the need for those skills across the public sector, let alone in the wider economy. As I said in my opening remarks, we will be looking at that in due course. I know that it is something that a number of members have raised questions about previously, but it does feel to us that that is potentially one of the most significant barriers to being able to make progress against the strategy that the Government has set out on the timescale that it expects to. Given the high profile of the lack of skills or individuals with the right skills in the right place, has enough been done? Is there someone looking at the big picture within the Government? Is there somebody pulling this together? It is a team to come in in just a moment, but one of the things that we say in the report is that the Government needs to have a clearer picture of the programme of development across the public sector. At the moment, there is a real risk that some of the big developments are competing against each other for the same skills. We show in the report the number of major investment projects over the next 10 years or so. There are some very big ones in there around the Social Security programme, Police Scotland and the national record census project. Nobody has got a picture of when the peaks of demand are going to be in there and what that will require in terms of skills or money. Having that picture feels to us a really important step for being able to prioritise who works where and to plan which skills need to be developed over that period. Maureen Watt, do you want to add to that? I would add that the people who are directed within the Scottish Government are obviously looking at the wider workforce plan for the Scottish Government and across the central Government. As part of that, it looked at some of the skills that the directors were struggling to get in programme management and commercial skills and leadership skills and specific IT skills came out of that. It has put a number of things in place that we have seen over the last year, for example looking to try and shorten recruitment processes to try and get people in quicker and adapting the candidate assessment process to be more aligned to what is out there in the private sector, so asking for CVs and things like that rather than the standard civil service approach. They are starting to look at doing things differently and that is a kind of continuing work in progress. As the Auditor General says, what we recommend is that there needs to be a wider view across the Scottish public sector to assess when what major programmes are going on and look to the future to see where the pinch points might be and to put plans in place to try and help to address that. I will take you to key message 3. For the benefit of those watching, I hope that the committee will indulge me if I just read this out, the Scottish Government does not have a complete picture of what has been achieved across the public sector so far, including which actions have had the most impact and where there are gaps in progress, and it does not know how much public money is being invested across the public sector to achieve the strategies actions or what is needed to deliver on its ambition. I will come back to that, but just looking backwards, we took evidence from the Scottish Government back in October 2017 on your report, Principles for a Digital Future, lessons learned from public sector ICT projects. We pointed out at the time that this was the third report that you had produced in five years, and we had also recently looked at I6 and the common agricultural policy payments. We saw assurances at the time that the Scottish Government and public sector bodies understood that there had been some failures and that lessons were being learned, but it does not appear that there have been. Would you like to comment on that, please? I think that the Government has made some real steps in getting a clearer understanding of the central Government investment in and priorities for digital investment, so the Scottish Government itself and the agencies and non-departmental public bodies that are close to it. I think that there is now the register of major capital projects, which includes the digital infrastructure investment. There is a board looking at that element of investment. That is progress. There is still work to be done, but there has been progress there. The point that we are trying to draw out in this report is that the Scottish Government is well placed and is indeed the only body that can be taking that view across public services as a whole, so the NHS and local government getting a sense of where there is scope to be developing common platforms for things like identity verification, which are key for a number of public services or payments to and from public services and making sure that that investment is being done in a way that can be built on by public bodies right across the public sector, that investment is being prioritised well and that lessons are being learned across the piece. It has been a conversation that I have been having with the Government for a while about what Government is actually accountable for. In narrow terms, clearly the Government is not accountable for what 32 local authorities across Scotland do. Equally, in a Government that is taking a very partnership approach to the way that it leads Scotland with an outcomes approach and with the intention of improving services by working very closely with people right across the public sector and more widely, I think that it has to play that role and indeed it is implicit in the digital strategy. It is that next step of saying that we are not talking just about central Government bodies, we are talking about health and local government and we have got that really shared understanding of purpose, priorities and where the investment will make the biggest difference that this report is homing in on. Thank you for that. Sticking with—you mentioned the investment several times there—there is a specific section in your report on investment in which it indicates that the Scottish Government does not know how much money is currently being invested across the public sector and that there was no baseline assessment when all of this was put together. This is not the first time that we have read reports in which you have brought those issues forward. One is particularly concerned, the committee where the children and young people's mental health issues and early learning and childcare. Is there any evidence that things are changing and that across the piece things will change, or is that not going to happen? You are right that this is another report where we think that the strategy itself is a positive step forward and where there are gaps in what is needed to make that strategy into a reality. Having a picture by now of what the investment that is needed to deliver the digital strategy seems to us to be a really important part of being able to make it happen. I think that we are seeing progress and we are also still seeing gaps that are barriers to making a reality of the ambitions that the Government has set itself. Gemma, do you want to say a bit more about the investment question? Absolutely right that there was no baseline at the time that the strategy was made in terms of what would be needed to be delivered. With digital technology, it is quite difficult sometimes to identify where the money is going. What we have explained is that what there needs to be an understanding of is where the money is being invested in terms of how much is being spent in terms of keeping current systems going, keeping the lights on at the moment and how much resource is available to make that state change to invest in the more innovative and the new parts of technology and the new way of service delivery to allow some of the ambitions of that digital strategy to happen. That understanding is not there across the public sector at the moment. Final thought from me—I am just going to be a little blunt here—I read this report and it feels like a kind of rights-ed-fred Government. I have a great idea. Let's do it. What about the planning? We haven't done that. That seems to come back to this committee time and time again. We talked about the lessons being learned, but is that approach going to change? Instead of having a great idea and just running with it, we are going to see some proper planning so that the outcomes that we all want will be achieved? We are genuinely seeing some steps in the right direction in relation to digital and more widely. I think that there is a recognition that putting in place a strategy is an important first step, but it is only a first step and beyond that you need to have all of the building blocks coming into line to make a reality of it. We say in the report that we are seeing some of those building blocks here, but they have been slow. The strategy is two years old now. The prize of getting this right is very significant and the risk of not getting it right. I don't want to be reporting another large IT failure to this committee over the next 12 months. The risk is that the lessons are not being learned and the priorities are not being set in the right way if all of those things are not in place, not to say that some of them are not, but that they need to all be there. I wanted to pick up on a question that Colin Beattie asked. You rightly said that digital government is modern government. If there is to be a government priority, who has ministerial responsibility for the oversight of the digital strategy and IT projects? At cabinet level, it is the cabinet secretary for finance. There is a new ministerial post for digital. I can't remember the exact title just for public finance and digital. Thank you. Ms Forbes, we think again that that is a positive step forward in there being a focus for this within government, a relatively new ministerial post. I absolutely agree. I want to ask some general questions. Why are we so poor at IT projects? When I say we, Scotland, the UK, the public sector and the UK, the private sector and the UK in Scotland, why are we so poor? You are right that it is a problem that goes much more widely than just the Scottish Government. I think that there is also a factor that government IT projects tend to get much more scrutiny than private sector IT projects do necessarily unless they cause a breakdown in services to the public, as we have seen in the banking sector. Part of the reason is simply that technology is moving so fast that people tend to be learning as they go every time. Partly it is that, as a UK wide, we do not have the skills needed in the numbers needed to be able to deliver what is required. One of the interesting things for the team here who has been focusing on digital for a while is that whenever we look at an IT system that has gone wrong, it is often the same fairly simple, fairly basic things right at the beginning that were not got right. That is why we published the report that Mr Kerr referred to earlier principles for a digital future, which aims to set out exactly what people need to be thinking about it from the get-go in order to minimise the risks of things going wrong. You said that there is a lack of skills at a strategic level in terms of decision making, oversight or the lack of skills at the bottom in terms of the mechanics of building a good IT project or is it a combination of both and everything in between? I think that it is a combination of both. Do you want to expand? Absolutely. What we have seen is that leadership plays a really important role in the success of an IT project. It really matters to have that tone set at the top about how important it is and that it is not a separate thing for IT. It is part of the main business, and that makes a difference. We also see that there is not necessarily the right skills to do some of the build itself. Equally, we also see at board level that there is not necessarily the right skills on a board and non-executive members to be able to effectively scrutinise some of those big decisions as they are happening. It is something that absolutely is right throughout it. However, there are expertise across the UK in building successful IT projects. Do you think that part of it is that we are just not turning to the right people for the right advice, guidance and support? If the skills do not exist in the UK, are there places outside of the UK that we should be turning to for that skills and that advice? It is a really difficult question. One of the things that we looked at when we did the principles for a digital future document was that it was actually quite difficult sometimes for people to recognise what skills they actually need if they do not have the skills themselves. That is where some of the initiatives that the Scottish Government has brought in are really useful for that. For example, the digital leaders programme, which is about trying to get leaders across the public sector more aware of what the digital changes are and are more embedded in that way of thinking so that they can understand what skills they might not have within the organisation and how best they can get them in, and programmes such as the Digital Fellowship programme to try to bring some of that commercial expertise into senior positions within the Government to bring in that expertise and exposure to different ways of doing things. Equally, we also do say in the report that the Government should consider how it can regularly get access to some of that expertise. For example, models such as the Council of Economic Advisers might be a model that they would like to consider for ensuring that they are consistently getting the most up-to-date knowledge and experience and skills to help them to enable digital government. Do you think that part of the issue is a clunkiness in terms of the public sector, in terms of Government, in terms of the mechanics of Government, in terms of either processes or be self-critical men in suits, sitting making decisions about things that do not relate to everyday advances in technology? When you speak to experts in so many fields, they say that you guys are a completely different planet about what is happening on the ground and what is happening in reality, and there is a disconnect between what we think works in terms of Government tick boxes and what actually works on the ground. Is that that disconnect and how do we break it? I think that that is probably an element of that. If you look at some of the local companies that have been global successes such as Fanjol and Sky Scanner, they are able to move quicker than Government can. For good reason, I think, with Government money, you are inevitably taking risks with this sort of investment, but the risk appetite should be lower, there should be more oversight, more governance structures in place than if you are working with private investors and venture capital money at an early stage startup. There are differences there. We are talking in the report about some of the ways that Government is getting more agile, both in recognising what the needs are, initiatives such as CivTech that bring in some of those skills to find small-scale solutions that can be scaled up, recruiting people more swiftly rather than the traditional public sector recruitment. It is a fine balance, but, as Gemma said, getting more of that expertise and leadership all the way through Government and public bodies is a really important way of starting to balance that out a bit while not sweeping away the sorts of checks that we will always expect to see around public investment. I know that I said final question, but final questions here. Do you think that we should do more of buying things off the shelf rather than trying to build them from scratch? There are lots of great pieces of technology and IT projects out there that would be phenomenal in the public sector if we took them on, but I think that so often we try to rebuild or do it ourselves. If we did some of that, would that help? I think that the answer, honestly, is that it depends. I think that the public sector people leading projects like this in the past have not been good enough at saying what is the right approach. Should we buy something, should we build it ourselves, should we be collaborating with other public bodies to put in place something that is much more widely usable? Absolutely. It is a key part of the digital strategy to look elsewhere to see if there is something that can be used before we build a motto. That is in place in the digital strategy. What we are saying in the report is that it is a more strategic view. The Government now has quite a lot of information around the projects that are taking place, particularly across central Government. It needs to use that information better to look and say, next year, have we got for public bodies who are looking to buy or to do something around a better case management workflow? Can they collaborate together to do that together? I think that we have seen quite often in the public sector that the processes are quite complex, but when you look at it, there are some very common workflows across public bodies in terms of finance systems, customer relationship management systems, case management systems, that there can be more collaboration and a strategic approach to that that we do not see at the moment. Willie Coffey Thank you very much, convener, and good morning. Just on that point, we are from Anas, about should we buy things off the shelf? The I6 project was basically a buy off the shelf Spanish. Sophie and I did new work at all for us, but there are lessons to be learned and whether you do one or the other. The real key to understanding what it is that you actually want at the outset in trying to get a solution based on needs and requirements and so on, but that is another story there. The other point about why do IT projects fail more often than not, there is a clear disparity between the public and private sector in terms of IT skills. There is no doubt about that, and it is not just Scotland that faces challenges there. You have mentioned the CivTech programme a few times, and Auditor General wanted to highlight that. That is a Scottish Government programme. It tries to bring the public and private sector together to deliver solutions, and it is having some success that I note from your report, and it is indeed being copied, I think, by one of the Australian provinces in Queensland or somewhere like that. There are good messages here about that. Could you just give us a little flavour of what is happening internationally on the digital public services agenda? I am more familiar with the Estonian case, because they were over in the Parliament recently visiting us and telling us about their digital public services agenda, but could you just give us a little flavour of what is happening elsewhere and give us a few pointers about where Scotland could be following their good practice? The team has done a lot of work looking at what good practice we can find internationally. Gemma, do you want to kick on? Absolutely. We published an international supplement alongside the report to try to bring some of that to life a little bit, because it is true that every Government around the world is tackling the same issues. We see that some Governments are having more success in some areas than others, so it was interesting for us to have a look and to see where we could see interesting things happening across the world. You write Estonia as an example that people point to many times. Estonia had a slightly different starting position and its ID cards essentially unlock a lot of access to common public services. We quite often look over to Australia. What is interesting for us is that there has been quite a lot of similarity in projects having difficulties in Australia and that kind of reporting of high-profile project difficulties. They have a very similar approach to assurance that the Scottish Government has taken as well. We have put in the international supplement a snapshot of the information that one of the Australian Governments puts out around their major projects, which allow much more transparency of what all the projects are, where they are at, where the money is being spent, whether they are in progress. That is really great to see exactly what is happening and for other public bodies to be able to go and see what other projects are going on across the public sector and equally for the public to go and see what is happening. We thought that that was a really interesting example and something that is a very common approach to Scotland. There is also the Ontario Government, which has just put out very recently legislation in place that takes its digital strategy and puts it into legislation. That kind of puts into legislation initiatives like tell the Government once, so if you tell us information, then we will share that across the public sector and we will not make you tell us it over and over again and provide that documentation. It also cements in place some of the leadership roles, so it cements in place a chief digital officer role within Government and it sets, it requires public bodies to follow the standards that they are putting in place. Again, that is a slightly different approach in the Scottish Government, but it shows what different Governments are doing around the world. Can you see any evidence in those approaches that ultimately lead to successful IT project delivery that members have mentioned over a number of years at this committee? Are those approaches in their digital strategy leading to those kinds of benefits where they are seeing successful IT delivery more often than not? It is quite a difficult question to answer and I think it is one of those, again, some of these initiatives are quite new, so time will tell. We are keeping a close eye on some of the Australian ones because that is just essentially a couple of years ahead of where the Scottish Government is, so we should be able to see the impact of that coming through. You mentioned the Estonian experience, convener, that they use a digital ID card, which I think a lot of people in Scotland and probably the UK would have issues with, but they did start from a different place, as you say. For example, a child benefit is paid automatically by the Estonian Government and the people get a text to tell them that it is in their bank account, but imagine that here, that would be wonderful. However, the price to have that is to have the ID card in your possession and to allow that to happen, but there are protections around that too, so there are some lessons that we can probably learn from that. What do you see in the digital public services agenda that you have presented with here, Caroline, will lead to us delivering better IT projects in the future? Is it all about skills or is it about management? What are the areas that we need to improve on to allow us to deliver IT projects more successfully? We have talked about leadership and skills, and they are clearly key, as Gemma has outlined for you. Just building on the point that you raised about Estonia and the ID card, one of the reasons why we think that a common platform for ID verification here in Scotland is so important is because it would unlock the potential to do similar things. Social Security Scotland would be able to make payments much more quickly and easily without the checks that they have to go through just now properly if there was a straightforward cross-public sector where verifying that you are who you say you are when you make a claim. If you ring your GP, that would enable them to have access to other records within the health service and with other public services, access to social housing, all of those kinds of things become much more easy and joined up if you can get those sorts of common platforms in place. The same is true with a common payments platform. Payments to and from government makes all of that much smoother without going into the sort of slightly speculative realms of blockchain and bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. You can verify people's identity and receive and make payments very quickly. That could make a huge difference if we can get it right, and it has to be across the public sector, not just in central government or the NHS or local government. Is the software project delivery down to skills? I think that it probably primarily is, more actually. I think that the skills is a huge issue, as we have said many times. I think that the leadership around that as well. Fundamentally, it comes down to the skills. I will make a come back in later, convener. Alex Neil Your report this week, Auditor General on the Scottish Public Pensions Agency, shows that this is an on-going problem, and no doubt we will deal with that in more detail after the summer recess. I burrow down a wee bit in relation to the skills, because skills are absolutely key to that. You have made the point that there have been initiatives such as the digital academy, but the scale of those initiatives are nowhere near where they need to be. To what extent now does it need all scaled up in terms of the skills? Is there not two broadsets of skills required? One is IT skills, software development, all that kind of stuff, but also project management skills? It seems to me that there is an even more dire shortage of IT skills than there is of IT skills. There is a very dire shortage of IT skills. The answer is yes. We think that it needs to be scaled up. As the convener has said, some of those initiatives are showing their value, but they are quite small scale. The exhibit on page 13 gives you a sense of how many really big projects are happening in quite a short period that all need the same skills. You are right that it is the direct technical skills, but also programme and project management and commercial expertise to be able to contract well in different ways, whether it is a short, sharp, civtech type initiative or a £190 million social security programme over time. You need to be doing that effectively and making sure that you are both getting the benefits that you want, but also managing the risks effectively with public money. I had a third thing in my head that has entirely flown out of it, so I will ask Gimmer and Morag if he would like to come in. As well as the skills, I think that what we see is that there is very much a change of culture that is needed about this, that moves from it being a kind of, oh, actually, this is something for the IT department and this is all about the IT skills, to actually, this is just a way of running businesses, this is how we do business in the modern age, this is modern government. I think that we are seeing that culture change happening, but it is at a slow rate and that is really for us where the leadership comes in to be able to set that tone to say that this is part of how we do businesses, this is just how we now deliver services, to make sure that then all across the public sector everybody is thinking this way and not thinking that it is just an IT problem when actually it is just about how do we design services in the way that users would expect with putting their needs first. So, again, as well as the skills, it is very much that cultural change that we see that needs to, again, just to be accelerated to get this to be part of government. Do we not need to now pin down this in terms of numbers? I mean, it's estimated generally that there's a short, we haven't given it, 5,000 IT graduates in Scotland every year. We need 12,500, so we're 7,500 short across the piece every year. Across Europe, there's a shortage of 300,000 people with the relevant IT skills, so is it not time, in terms of the Scottish government, in terms of planning the future that it actually started to say, right, to do this, we need x number of people, additional people with IT skills, x number with project management skills, and then put the programmes in place to do that? You're right, and actually that's the third point that I lost. I think this isn't just about, thank you. It's not just about the immediate skills we need this year or in the next three or five years. We need to be looking right back to when children start school, thinking about technical digital education all the way through dealing with the gender gaps, that we know there are still big gaps in the number of girls and young women going and studying STEM subjects, which would have benefits for the gender pay gap, as well as for the number of skills coming through, thinking about what our further and higher education system needs to be doing, so you've got the whole pipeline. That's not going to fix it in our times in these jobs, but it will, it's the only way we're going to address the sort of gaps that you're talking about, and that's what the work that we're doing on skills will start to look at over the next 12 months. Is there not another problem, particularly amongst younger people, and that is the differential between the attractiveness of the private sector and the public sector? Having worked in digital equipment corporation programmes around many years ago, both in the States and in Europe, working in the private sector, quite frankly, was much more exciting, not just in terms of the money was much better, but the scope for innovation, the scope for foreign travel, the scope for promotion, career progression, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, was just a much better place to be. So is the reality, as well as looking at the numbers, do we not really need to do something to make, if you like, working in the public sector sexier? I think you're right. I think the private sector probably is a more attractive place for lots of young IT graduates, IT workers now, and I don't think it needs to be. That's part of what the digital fellowship scheme is trying to address, and it's part of some of the other things that the Government is trying to do more, I think, and I can just tell you a bit more about that. So as we highlight in Exhibit 6, we do make that point that we think there's more that the Scottish Government could do to sell the benefits of working in the public sector, for example, the range of projects and the value that that can add to the people of Scotland. And also the flexible working arrangements that are in place across the public sector. I think that the Scottish Government recognises this, and it's considering how it can do that, to try and promote those things as well. Obviously, bringing in the DDAP profession and the IT supplement will help as well, because it's setting a clear career path for people as well, so that in part will help with retaining the staff that are there, because they can see a clear path for themselves, but also to attract people from the outside as well. Resuberally, in relation to the project management skills, we need people who are a bit more experienced by definition, who have run big projects and know how to manage them. So we do not need to do a lot of urgent head-hunting around the world to get the right people to do that, because if you get the right project management, that's a key part to achieving all those other objectives. It's one of the skills that we highlight as being critically important and where there's a shortage. It's one of the skills that often there can be value in bringing in from outside for a short-term, well-planned piece of work. Government recognises that, but I think that where we see projects go wrong, often either that programme management expertise hasn't been there at all, or it's been brought in to fill a very immediate gap without any thoughts on how the skills and the experience can be spread more widely, so people involved in the project can learn from it and can then go on to use that for another project or another programme. So there's something about being smarter on all of this that would all incrementally help. That all comes back to the top management in the civil service. My final question is, do we have the right expertise at the right level in the civil service to make this happen? We talked at the start of this session about the changes being made to the digital directorate and the assurance parts of the process. That's still, to an extent, a work in progress. We've got some really good skills coming in there. Gemma mentioned earlier the Scottish approach to service design. I think where we see that working well, it's having a real impact. We also say in the report though that the planning for the retirel of the chief information officer started too late and is still not complete. There are some really key posts in here that I think the Government needs to be very clear about what the role is, how it connects to the rest of the architecture in Government and how they attract the right people with not just the technical skills but, as Gemma has said, the cultural approach to working that can lift the whole boat on the investment that's being made and there's still work to do on that. Do we need to inject a bit more urgency to getting all of that done at that level much sooner? It seems to have taken an age. Even the name information officer is reminiscent of the 40s rather than the 2020s. There are other plans under way, Gemma? Absolutely. Instead of replacing the chief information officer with another chief information officer, the Government is looking at bringing in a chief technology officer. They've now got an interim chief technology officer in place whose role is, over the next few months, to scope out what would that role look like on a permanent basis and then the Government will need to recruit into that post. They are considering what they need now. However, as the other general has set out, they didn't plan for that well enough in advance when they knew about the retirement of the chief information officer. How do they expect to be able to recruit people to those posts when, as Alex Neil says, there are so few graduates coming out with the requisite skills? Morag has touched on some of the things that they are doing, both to bring skills in through the digital fellowship scheme and through the digital academy. There are initiatives there, but our view is that they need to be doing that and scaling it up and looking back along the pipeline, given the centrality of this to Government. If you want a digital Government, you need digital skills better and more of them than we currently have. To be honest, is there a culture of being able to be honest about hesitating to use the word failures perhaps a bit too negative but challenges through those projects? It takes me back in my head to when we took evidence from the triple SC, the Scottish Social Services Council and the £4.2 million that they spent on an IT project. Then we got the Government-sponsored department in and we discovered that the Government sponsoring department of that project had never set foot in the building of the triple SC. When Gemma Diamond talked about leadership and having the correct leadership, I was interested to know whether you mean the chief executive of that organisation. I do not suppose that you can expect the chief executive of every organisation to have the appropriate IT skills to be able to lead that project with the level of detail that they need. Is there enough skills at the Government sponsorship department? Should they not be going through the doors of those organisations if they are leading big projects? Is there a culture of openness that they can then say that things have gone wrong and share those experiences? It is a really interesting question. What we bring out in this report is the role of the Scottish Government in more strategic leadership. We say that it has the unique role of being able to do that to bring everybody across. As I was talking before about culture, what a chief executive of a public body can do is to set that tone at the top to say that it is important to us as an organisation and that it matters. We want to be a modern organisation, we want to use modern technology, we want to provide the best services that we can to users and we want to use new approaches such as the Scottish Approach to Service It is not about the chief executive having all the detail skills but setting the tone about the importance of that. That is our expectation. That is what programmes such as the digital leaders programme is about, is trying to get leaders more switched on to what it takes to be a modern organisation and what their role is in that. Would you expect, would Audit Scotland expect as you do quality assurance on that, that you have a Government sponsoring body or person of a project? Would you at least expect that it will go and visit the organisation that is undertaking an IT project and forge those relationships and forge that culture of openness? Or is it okay that they just never set foot through the door? I will pick that up, if I may convene it. As you know, the question of sponsorship has come up in a number of the reports that the committee has considered over the past year or so. It is something that we are taking forward with the Scottish Government. From our perspective, the sponsorship arrangements can work very well and in some cases they really do not. We see a lot of variation in the way that they are carried out, the seniority of the people in government who are asked to carry out that role, the relationship that they have with the body, the amount of contact, the extent to which they see themselves as supporters or critical friends, all of that varies. It is something that we will continue to work with Governments on and may report back to the committee in due course. This time, most of the questions that have been on my list have probably been answered. When I look at your report, the key messages are to the point. Even when you are being helpful to the Government, your comment ends with a but. There is something else still to do, and it is with some exasperation. I do not know if you feel it when you read it that we are reading it again. Can you clarify who is responsible? You use the generic term a lot in the Scottish Government, but who in the Scottish Government is desk with this lie on? The director general for organisational development and operations is the accountable officer for digital within government. That is a very clear accountability. More widely, the DG for health and social care, for example, has got a responsibility for the way in which digital in health is being developed. There is a clear line of accountability, but there is also shared leadership responsibilities. That is not totally clear in that sense. The person who you are saying the direct line to is that, where is that in the organogram of the Scottish Government? The director general will report directly to the permanent secretary. It is a senior post. Is that the individual that you are referring to in item 3, where you say that it does not know how much public money is being invested across the public sector? Within that group of directorates is where we would expect that knowledge and that work to be carried out, yes. Within that group of directorates, which group is that? Each director general is responsible for a group of directorates. There is a digital directorate who would carry out that work on behalf of the DG, and that is the line of accountability for it. Which person should know the actual total then? The DG for organisational development and operations. You asked them what the total was. I do not know what she does. Absolutely. We had that discussion with the director general and the director of digital as well in terms of whether they knew what the level of investment was when the strategy went out, whether that baseline was in place, whether they knew or had the right level of investment themselves to be able to undertake that role. Was there an awkwardness that they did not know on their part? As part of the conversation, we acknowledged how difficult that was. From our side, we are not saying that that is a really easy thing to do because it is absolutely not. Identifying IT spend on wider digital activity is not easy to do. Otherwise, we would have been able to figure ourselves out. That is not something that we can do. We do recognise that it is not easy. Again, we explain to the Government that we are not expecting a big spreadsheet that adds up to one exact number, but we want to see an understanding of the overall level of investment that is required and whether the resources are there at the moment or whether they are tied up in simply keeping systems running and whether there is that investment available to be able to really push on some of the ambitions that are there in the strategy. Without getting too technical, you used the term investment. To me, that is something that adds value and goes on to your balance sheet as an asset. Do you mean that or do you just mean spending money to keep things going? Again, it can mean both. It can mean that money that is being spent to keep the lights on. It is important to understand how much of the IT and digital spending is on that, but it also means absolutely that investment in new things that create value. We do not have that split in terms of what is adding value and what is just keeping it. No, we do not. We do not know if it is a cheap model or an expensive model. We think that to make a reality of the Government's digital strategy, that information is needed. Do members have any further questions for Audit Scotland on this report this morning? I thank you very much indeed for your evidence. I now close the public part of this meeting as we move into private.