Exclusive: Behind the scenes of DWP's ambitious tech transformation

Modernising Europe’s biggest IT estate

Under new leadership, the Department for Work and Pensions is transforming its IT infrastructure, adopting agile methods and AI integration to eliminate tech debt and boost efficiency.

The Department for Work and Pensions is the largest IT function in the UK government, and has even been called "the biggest IT estate in Europe," where almost 5,000 staff serve 20 million customers.

Richard Corbridge, chief digital information officer & director general for DWP Digital, faces both the technical challenges every IT leader has to address - at a scale most don't deal with - and extra pressure only present in his organisation:

"If you build a new thing on a retail app and it goes live and two hours later it doesn't work, you turn it off. If you do a new thing on a benefit line and it doesn't work, you may have just not paid 20 million people what they needed to be paid today to survive."

Richard joined DWP Digital last year, after four years as CIO at Boots - where he won CIO of the Year at the UK IT Awards 2022 - and several decades in the healthcare sector.

"It became clear for me that whilst I'd enjoyed that private sector retail experience, getting back into a role with the mission, to do good for citizens in the UK, felt like the right thing to do."

Stepping over the long tail of legacy

Most large, established organisations have technical debt, and the DWP was no exception when Richard joined last April, but modernisation is a priority. That starts with ensuring the tail of debt can't grow any further:

"If we want to change something now from a policy point of view, the business case of moving to the new policy has to also take on board the remediation of the tech debt and turning off the old thing that exists."

It's not just about cleaning up an ageing estate; any changes have to be for the good of the citizens DWP serves.

One example is the payments system, which was running on "mid-'80s tin - stuff that just worked and was glued together," and has since been updated. Another is the data warehouse remediation programme: originally "lots of on-prem, disassociated capability to store data," by mid-March it will be entirely cloud-based.

"[It will] actually join data up appropriately, with the right governance and the right measures, so that when a citizen is going through a benefit claim journey we can help them not have to keep repeating themselves about different things that have happened to them in their lives."

Making IT reusable

Another part of Richard's modernisation plan has been moving DWP from a monolithic architecture to one based on microservices, which has helped deliver the second pillar: reusable components.

Reusing software is part of DWP's Strategic Reference Architecture. SRA teams built 90 reusable features last year, both helping to avoid duplicated effort and speeding delivery.

Examples include a conversational platform built for the Universal Credit system, and a generative AI system scanning the physical mail coming into DWP, aiming to spot vulnerabilities. Both can now be reused in other areas of the organisation.

"It's brilliant, that reusable capability to deploy that elsewhere in the business," Richard says of the AI tool. "That's a core principle now at the centre of that."

Doubling down on data

Data - which DWP holds plenty of - is just as important there as any other organisation, and forms the third pillar of its modernisation strategy.

At "the back end of last year," the Department approved a new strategy stating that "no decision should be made at DWP without the data being in front of the person that's making the decision." It has made "a big difference," but also raised questions around how to get that data in front of people "in a controlled, governed, careful way."

The first step has been getting data in "a place where it can be accessed." The second is setting up a "data access layer, as we're calling it, where with the legitimate relationship in place, the right person can go and find out that information."

To help, DWP is exploring AI capabilities around summarisation. Richard describes an example:

"A Universal Credit Journal is a very long and lengthy piece of information about a citizen who needs help because they're vulnerable. How do we summarise that info so a worker in a job centre can see at a glance...the things that have been talked about before with that citizen, so they can dive into better help and support?"

The priority is to surface the most important pieces of information first, so work coaches can help citizens in front of them faster.

Safely accelerating AI, and what it can bring to DWP's work, is "really, really exciting," says Richard - we'll cover more of the organisation's work with the tech in a separate article.

Reusable, agile, modern IT is at the heart of DWP's transformation: from a behemoth dragging a heavy tail of tech debt to a sleek, lean estate. It's not wholly there yet, but work is progressing.

"The target in 2024/2025 is 15% of the current tech debt will be remediated, and three years from now we shouldn't have a tail of tech debt."

He admits the idea is "really, really ambitious." It's also key to moving away from the concept of slow, expensive IT that, were this a private firm, would certainly cause a conversation between CIO and CFO.

"Let's get rid of that [long tail of tech debt] and therefore become much more agile and capable at reacting to business need."