The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

You know what? GOV.UK used to be an amazing team. I mean, seriously, some top talent and a really productive team. They did a remarkable job of understanding the art of the possible and writing clear guides that ordinary people could understand.

And then the rest of the civil service and the government saw its brand reputation as a resource to be used much the same way that slash and burn farmers view the Amazon. Most of the great teams left. Much of their material is still there, but it's not growing.

So yeah, that's why.

Having been through a few of these public sector transformations as a consultant, there is no "there," from "here."

Strategically, the play for a few successive governments has been to stand up new arms length agencies outside the public service proper that have missions to develop new platforms, with the intent to migrate the public service to them when they arrive.

The successes have been where the stand-alone agencies manage to deliver and maintain their independence. The failures have been where they have become captured by "secondments," where mandarins or "retired" ones leverage their way into governance roles, subordinate them to the old system, and turn them into the same broken and staid institutions they were designed to replace.

The successes were expensive but their success amortizes that cost. The symptoms of the failed ones were visible early on, generally because of Party-connected consulting firms owning the HR contracts for them and using them as patronage factories and slush funds.

Change requires freedom, and that freedom requires independence. The accountability risk is real, and the challenge with oversight was that the overseers simply folded the agencies back into the morass.

If I were running this, I would take a radical approach, where the strategy would be a venture model that micro-funded projects to create useful products that solved for providing future services and applications, and not legacy ones.

Priority one is a set of useful and privacy preserving identity services with varying levels of assurance that meet the needs of regular people, not just public servants, as all public servants are citizens first, so are researchers, academics, police and everyone else. This must be exogenous and adopted willingly, and not forced down as a national identity scheme. Second would be an investment in FHE and other privacy technologies because they can preclude and even obviate the need to stand up new private infrastructure to support data exchange. Third, I would invest in federated and distributed techs (git/BC/OIDC, etc) because interoperability is the ONLY problem government is designed to solve well because fundamentally it is a coordination and interoperability layer for society in everything it does.

While I am not qualified for this job, with a long enough lever, I have no doubt I could move the whole thing.

I can see the issue as a circular trust one given precedent's magnified power in government that it multimillion dollar salaries would wind up proliferating and abused for ones who don't remotely have talent and any metric to try to limit it would get specification gamed to hell and back.

It seems to be a Morton's fork of expertise and stakeholding separation. If they are of the bueracracy they may be tempted to use it to exfiltrate wealth to cronies. If done by a ballot initiative they by definition wouldn't be informed at large about specialist topics (if they were it would fail to be specialist) and would be outside the context.

Being willing to pay a million for proper results would be a good deal but the devil is in the details for how to do it right systemically which is hard even before dealing with people in the system.

Last I heard FAANG pay between 70 and 80 in London for mid-level, no? There is a big difference between US and UK salaries. (Big difference in cost of living and taxes)

Also that they often lack the ability to do it, it's the legislative branch that makes the rules and budgets.