Government

MainStreet worked with Sopra Steria on a project with the Digital Ecosystem Unit (DEU) of the Scottish Government. The brief was to advise on the creation of an Organisation Design & Development (OD&D) practice within the unit, an advisory function for designing, building, running and scaling digital transformation initiatives for Scottish public services.

The project involved establishing an Outline Business Case (OBC), using HMT’s Five Case Model, for the OD&D practice, as well as associated roles, priorities and a roadmap to set up an effective practice. The work also included outlining processes, profiles and analysis criteria for assessing, establishing and moving to relevant organisational structures, and ensuring all guidance was aligned with the new Scottish Government 2017 digital strategy.

Building on previous work we did on the production of a Business Case on the Digital Evidence Sharing Capability project, the Scottish Government commissioned MainStreet to support its CJS Transformation Mapping project. This is one of several tools designed to better facilitate collaborative working and strategic planning across the whole criminal justice system.

This has meant working closely with colleagues from Scottish Government’s Justice Digital and Strategy Unit, the key delivery partners represented on the national Justice Board, with relevant parts of the voluntary sector, and with other stakeholders such as the Law Society of Scotland.

Our work has involved:

• Analysis of all CJS partners’ digital transformation strategies
• Facilitating cross-CJS workshop sessions on transformation planning
• Development of a single Transformation Roadmap for the sector, including identifying priority initiatives for the sector
• Presenting recommendations on planning, resourcing and governance of shared CJS priorities to the national Justice Board and other groups.

A MainStreet team supported the Scottish Government by developing a HM Treasury Five Case Outline Business Case (OBC) for the DIS programme and specifically the Online Identity Assurance, to establish a new initiative for the way people in Scotland could prove their identity when they access public services.  Our work over an 8-week period included production of an OBC document, development of a cost benefit analysis for the recommended ‘Common Approach’ solution, and identification of what is required across multiple partners to support costs of operation and delivery of savings.  The OBC followed the prescribed format of HMT Green Book guidelines.

We also prepared several other outputs, including the underpinning Financial Model, as summarised and presented to the Programme Board, and set out guidance on the detail required for the subsequent FBC.

The Scottish Government (SG) commissioned MainStreet to develop the Outline Business Case (OBC) and Full Business Case (FBC) for a new arms length organisation Research Data Scotland (RDS).  The purpose of RDS is to improve the economic, social and environmental wellbeing in Scotland by enabling access to and linkage of data about people, places and businesses for research in the public good.

Working as an integral part of SG’s RDS team led by Roger Halliday, the Chief Statistician, we worked across a wide range of partner organisations including Public Health Scotland, eDRIS, National Records of Scotland (NRS), ADR Scotland, and the University of Edinburgh to map the organisational interdependencies and the existing financial situation was modelled in detail to show the likely future deficit position as legacy funding ended.

These findings were presented to the RDS Transition Board and used to further develop the OBC, which was presented to Ministers and helped secure £25m of funding from the Health and Social Care Directorate.  The OBC followed standard HMT Guidance and was aligned to both the Green Book and the “5 Cases” model.  It was published in summer 2021 and can be found here:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/outline-business-case-research-data-scotland/pages/1/

Following this, our work focussed on developing the FBC, which was approved by Ministers and can be found here:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/research-data-scotland-full-business-case/