Philippa Elworthy
Director
Year note 2024
Phil is a Director working in our UK public sector and commercial practice. She currently leads our engagements with M&S and UNICEF UK.
When I joined Public Digital in 2021, we were an organisation of no more than 35 people doing high-impact digital transformation work, guided by our positions, from a single office in the UK.
2024 has seen us evolve into a more diverse organisation almost unrecognisable in scale, with the capabilities to deliver greater impact with the work we do.
Our growth has been matched by a higher public profile and international reputation as experts in digital transformation at scale.
Growth with Intent
This year we welcomed more people to our team than ever before, bringing PD’s staff count over 80. We’ve shaken up our teams, and expanded our Network, which now includes more than 250 talented people. We moved to a new London office — and launched a new website. We now operate globally, from Canada as well as from Nigeria.
This expansion has been reflected in a strong financial performance, including growth of 40 percent, with a team focused on building on this success in 2025. Our work this year is a testament to the fact that ours is ‘growth with intent’: we’re continuing to hold our positions at the heart of our practice, ensuring that they shape the kind of organisation we want to become.
The nature of the work we do hasn’t changed. The scale certainly has.
A year of change
This year we were thrilled to announce Emma Gawen as our Managing Director. Emma took the reins from Andrew Greenway, who is now focusing on Public Digital’s global thought leadership.
We saw the growth of our commercial sector, led by our new partner Kerri Houseman; and our health team expanded to encompass health, local government and charities.
A year of influence
In February we published the Radical How, a report setting out the ways of working we believe must be at the heart of a mission-driven government. These core principles – test-and-learn, multidisciplinary teams and being outcome-led – are part of our DNA at Public Digital, but are rarely practised in Whitehall. Jen Pahlka called the report “the most consequential thinking in government today”.
July saw the election of a new UK government which outlined bold steps to prioritise digital, and in December, a senior Cabinet Minister made a speech placing the ideas of the Radical How at the centre of the new government’s approach to public service reform. While that’s an ambitious commitment, it suggests the potential for serious reform to deliver better services for UK citizens. We’re proud to be playing a part in that.
Our Radical How report has inspired other projects, too, such as our work with the Future Governance Forum on mission-driven local government, and our event Town Hall 2030. This autumn we published a Radical How for Canada, which we introduced at FWD50.
Our influence was reflected in a higher public profile in the media, with PD colleagues sought out to provide expert comment on issues such as the CrowdStrike outage, the growing influence of AI, and how public services can be reformed through technology and agile working. PD bylines appeared in the FT; Independent; The Times; and on the airwaves of the BBC, among others.
A look at our work in 2024
Our engagements this year have spanned continents and sectors, from international governments to local councils to multinational businesses. Despite this breadth and diversity, several themes have characterised our work this year.
Transforming the customer experience
We've continued working with the Open University to help them build their digital capabilities towards continually improving the student experience. We've been establishing the role of service owners to create clearer accountabilities, and professions to make sure teams have the skills they need to deliver effectively.
We also worked with Surrey County Council on its customer transformation, creating a new dynamic customer operating model, and working with council staff to test and learn new approaches to delivery. We’ll be talking a lot more about Dynamic Operating Models next year, so stay tuned.
We continued our engagement with UNICEF UK, improving email journeys through establishing a multidisciplinary team that can harness automation and take a continuous improvement approach. Our work is helping to create a better experience for those who support UNICEF UK, with the hope of increasing engagement and donations.
Support during periods of adversity
2024 saw us working with the Government of Kyiv, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, to help them coordinate the people, processes and priorities needed to digitally transform services in the City. This year we’ve been coaching delivery teams to design two new services. The first is a critical service that distributes financial aid to citizens, and the second is a new City website that provides a front door to all public services for residents and businesses in Kyiv.
We also supported the UK Government in establishing the Infected Blood Compensation Authority (IBCA) and helped IBCA design its approach to compensation.
Improving access to critical services
We continued our work with health and care charity, Change Grow Live, helping them resolve pain points in the experiences of people who access drug and alcohol services across the country. User research has been critical to the success of this work, ensuring that the organisation works in support of what the people who are or could be benefitting from Change Grow Live’s services the most.
We announced new work in social care as part of ‘Transforming the Front Door’. This builds on our engagement at the end of 2023 with a multi-agency children’s safeguarding team in Nottinghamshire to improve children and young people’s access to services. We supported them to form a truly multidisciplinary team and safely set them up to adopt a test and learn approach, using prototyping, to transform their service. The result, recognised by Ofsted this year, ensures that children and families receive the right help at the right time.
Building digital centres
In our 2023 year note we wrote about supporting the Edo State Government in Nigeria to establish a new Digital and Data Agency that will build services for all citizens and residents, including the marginalised. The result – the Edo State Digital Governance and Data Management Agency – is now fully operational, and is working on oneEdo: a single digital front door that provides residents and businesses with seamless access to government services and information.
In the UK, we are working with the Local Government Association exploring what a digital centre for local government – one that is radically and relentlessly useful – might look like.
We also worked with the Central Digital and Data Office’s Strategy team to articulate its purpose, role and responsibilities in light of the new government’s fresh approach to digital. With Peter Kyle MP (Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology) holding a new mandate to create a digital centre of government within DSIT, we’ve supported the CDDO to define its role in supporting the digital centre.
Harnessing data
During the year we also worked with the cities of Rochester, New York, and Maipú, Chile through the Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance - a program that provides multi-year operational and technical coaching to select Mayors across the Americas and Caribbean. We helped those cities to develop data services (including Maipú’s data security observatory), establish data service standards and form communities of practice.
Through the What Works Cities certification program, we’ve designed and delivered specialist training and courses to support cities across North, Central and South America to advance their data practices. This year, we supported Dallas and Sugarland in Texas, and Guatemala City in Guatemala to achieve certification for the first time.
We’ve helped the University of Exeter understand how CRM tech and data can support a service model and play a part in a better experience for students.
Our team worked with the Business Services Authority for the first time to develop its approach to data, helping it to form a clear roadmap for its data maturity strategy.
We’ve continued our long-standing engagement with the Government of Nova Scotia, supporting its data strategy work and developing an AI roadmap.
Cultural transformation
We extended our partnership with BT Group into a second year, focusing on fostering a culture of test-and-learn methodologies and transparent collaboration across all levels of the organisation. By guiding the team through small-scale experiments that introduced new engineering and delivery best practices, we achieved productivity improvements. Building on this success, we scaled the approach into a broader program to support BT’s ongoing transformation ambitions.
Building on our work with M&S Clothing & Home last year to define their transformation story, we’ve pivoted to the practical side of transformation, supporting M&S to embed behaviour change and new ways of working. We've taken a visual and story-led approach, speaking the language of a highly creative business to build stronger feedback loops between its business unit teams and its operational teams.
We also helped the UK Parliament form a new community of practice centred on adopting DevOps practices. Thanks to this project, Parliament is now taking multidisciplinary, data-informed approaches to software development that empowers teams to release product improvements incrementally and more frequently. Few other parliaments in the world have reached this level of maturity in relation to the design, engineering and operation of digital technology.
We supported the public safety administrative authority, Ontario One Call, on its journey to become a service-led organisation, where users are at the heart of everything it does. We conducted a digital maturity assessment to identify delivery and capability strengths and gaps, and created a roadmap for sustaining long-term change. Recently, the team successfully launched a new user-centred digital service and enhanced their internal information management systems, marking significant milestones in their journey.
Global thought leadership
In 2024, we continued our work with global affairs think tank ODI as well as the Gates Foundation, focusing on how to drive the use of digital practices in finance ministries. It’s been brilliant seeing the momentum around this topic in finance ministries, and the growing discourse around users and outcomes.
Our engagement with Edo State in Nigeria has informed our existing work on digital public infrastructure (DPI). We attended the Global DPI Summit in October, where we advocated for a sustainable DPI ecosystem and delivered a workshop on the importance of building local capabilities for digital public goods.
These feedback loops between our local and global work have been critical in driving meaningful change for our clients.
Growing our digital community
Outside our client work, the year marked our second time co-hosting the Future of Government Awards with AWS and UNDP, an event designed to celebrate the work of outstanding digital practitioners in the public sector; to encourage discussion, sharing and reuse of that work. Nominations are open for the 2024 awards and close on 20 January.
We also re-homed the Data Bites series, which originated with the Institute for Government. This monthly meet-up showcases interesting data projects in and around the public sector. It’s an incredible opportunity for us to amplify great work, create new connections, and deepen existing relationships. Join us for our next event on 6 February 2025.
We continued to host our PD Sessions events, welcoming a range of distinguished speakers and covering topics like leading inclusive services.
As part of our commitment to working in the open, we’ve been promoting open routemaps and backlogs in the public sector, with several organisations – in the UK and abroad – picking up the practice and adding themselves to a growing list set up by Ross Ferguson. Work like this is fundamental to our company ethos.
Looking ahead
2024 has been big. We’re excited to see what’s next, particularly as we move deeper into the commercial sphere.
2025 will see us cement our cyber offer, which, informed by the growing number of cyber attacks and events like the CrowdStrike outage, we’ve been developing throughout 2024. Cyber ecosystems are fragile. Organisations must be ready for the worst.
Next year will also see us work with the governments of the Netherlands and Barbados for the first time. On top of that, we’ll begin new work with local councils: transforming the front door for children’s social care and building more effective digital teams.
Finally, our newly transformed commercial sector team is looking forward to building on the momentum it has established supporting large corporations with their digital transformation. Areas of focus in 2025 include professional and financial services, telecoms and the retail sector.
At the close of an inspiring and successful year, we find ourselves eagerly anticipating the opportunities ahead. We’d like to thank our friends, partners and clients who have been part of our 2024, and who have enabled us to do impactful work, at such unprecedented scale.
As part of our annual tradition of charitable donations, this year we’re proud to announce we’ve donated to two causes nominated by our PD colleagues: the Good Things Foundation, a UK charity working to eliminate the social inequality of digital exclusion; and Hope Behind Bars, a Nigeria-based human rights organisation closing the justice and inequality gap through the use of legal aid and technology.
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