Putting transparency and accountability at the heart of government
When you set out a project what are two things that it absolutely needs to have from the outset?
If you’d say that a budget and a timescale are non-negotiable, you’ll be pleased to hear that Boley Smillie, the States of Guernsey’s Chief Executive & Head of the Public Service, agrees with you.
Joining us to be interviewed by moderator John Fernandez at Chamber Lunch, Boley set out a simple pledge to restore faith and trust in the public sector:
“It’s just about doing what we promise, more often.”
Easier said than done, as anyone who has tried to deliver organisational change will tell you, but Boley’s intention for our island’s public services is clear: he wants to deliver great outcomes on time and on budget, be accountable for their successes and failures, and be transparent about progress.
One year in a new direction
June’s Chamber Lunch was just over a year since Boley took up the most senior post in Guernsey’s civil service. While John invited him to reflect, Boley is far more interested in looking forward.
“When I took the job I made myself a promise,” he said. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t look back, that I would look forward and focus on the challenges ahead.”
Nevertheless, the year has been a challenging one. As Boley himself said, “there are some elephants in the room”, and he couldn’t help but look back briefly to the widely reported failure of the MyGov digital transformation project.
Crucially for Boley, who has been extremely open about the ways that project missed the mark, it is the level of learning that makes the difference to what comes next.
This is part of his mission, with his colleagues, to build a new culture within the States of Guernsey, one that comes back to those key watchwords of transparency and accountability.
Aiming for closer alignment
One of Boley’s key aims, which he has wholehearted buy-in to achieve, is to bring the civil service and the government closer together.
The sell-out audience heard how the structure of the civil service doesn’t replicate government functions and committees closely enough, and that is contributing to a sense that the excellent work of front-line staff isn’t being felt further up the organisation, or at a political level.
Part of Boley’s solution is to introduce a ‘chief officer’ role for each department that corresponds to the government committee, with an interim chief officer to be in place for health & social care in the next couple of weeks.
The chief officers’ main responsibility, Boley said, is “to galvanise the front-line staff in their departments so that they are empowered to be at the forefront of change.”
Empowerment is of course allied to accountability; Boley believes the latter can only be engendered when people experience the former.
He was extremely clear that those who are the public face of the civil service – those whom islanders deal with to deliver the services we all use – are best placed to deliver meaningful change. They are the ones who see how things work day-to-day, spot flaws and inefficiencies, and develop innovative ways to solve problems.
“Our success rate will improve the more power we give to people who understand what they’re doing and how things work. That’s our front line and those are the colleagues we have to empower,” he said.
A privilege to lead the change
So change is in the air at the States of Guernsey, and Boley set out some of the ways he and his team are on the right path.
They are on track to deliver £4m of savings.
He made no apology for targeting contractors for the bulk of this. Acknowledging that external expertise will always be needed in specific circumstances, he feels there is better value to be had in investing in the training and development of the people who are already there.
Boley’s objectives will be published at the end of this month too, and he gave the audience a sneak peek in revealing that improving the performance of major capital projects is one of them. “The return we are getting on our investment is not where it should be,” he said.
His ask of our audience was a simple one: offers of help are always welcome, so come forward.
When asked a question on closer cross-island working, something we at Chamber are constantly pursuing, he said that there is already some great shared work going on, including on external relations.
The spirit of collaboration clearly has a place in Boley’s version of the States of Guernsey, and it’s an organisation he is proud to lead:
“This job is a privilege,” he concluded.
“There’s so much that goes well and it’s an amazing organisation with some really, really good people.”
