2024 wrapped: revisit Global Government Forum’s top podcasts
From remembering the heyday of the UK Digital Academy to looking ahead at the hurdles public service leaders face in 2025, here’s our pick of the best podcasts from this year.
A retrospective of the UK Digital Academy
Early in the year, the Global Government Forum podcast team took a train from London to Leeds to join a reunion of one of the UK government’s most innovative digital projects – the Digital Academy.
On the episode, we delve into the story behind the academy and how it was initially set up in the Department for Work and Pensions before transferring to the Government Digital Service. Through the accounts of those who came together to make it a reality, this episode unpacks the academy’s aim of giving people the skills to close the gap between government bureaucracies and the kinds of services citizens have grown accustomed to in an online world.
A regular guest on the Government Transformed series and creator of the academy, Kevin Cunnington, was joined by those who ran the academy – and those who went through it – to mark 10 years since its establishment.
Though it officially closed in 2022, the roundtable of participants looked back fondly at the academy’s eight-year lifespan.
This episode is worth a listen back to for a timeless reminder of how a small group of dynamic individuals can make a big difference to government services in the digital age. Our biggest takeaway was that digital technology leads to transformation only when people combine to form a mission-driven culture.
How Healthcare.gov’s shaky start put digital transformation on the US agenda
The US government website ‘healthcare.gov’ was launched in 2013. Its purpose was to help Americans find health insurance but on the first day of its launch, the website crashed, attracting ridicule in the press.
The site was revived of course, but the government did more than fix the original problem. It took a different approach to getting the system working, and then spread the lessons across the US federal government.
In this episode of Government Transformed, published in July, we spoke to Aaron Snow, a faculty fellow at Georgetown University in the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation.
Drawing on Snow’s work in helping to turn healthcare.gov around, the discussion covers the true meaning of digital transformation, and the role the idea of the ‘public good’ plays in this for governments.
How to empower civil servants to deliver government missions
Since its election victory this year, the UK Labour government has pledged to deliver on five key missions and work is underway to restructure government operations to prioritise these objectives related to economic growth, clean energy, public safety, better healthcare and breaking down barriers to opportunity.
That’s why we called upon Dr Dan Honig, a professor of public policy at University College London and Georgetown University, to talk to us about his new book on just this topic. Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empowering People To Help Government Do Better argues that many public sector organisations are too focused on compliance.
In other words, measures created to protect organisations from those who might do them harm are inadvertently stopping others from doing good. As Honig explains on this episode, such an approach wears down public servants, leaving those who are driven to make a difference frustrated by the obstacles and compliance rules they face.
Dr Honig explains how governments can empower public servants through allowing autonomy, cultivating competence, and creating connection to peers and purpose.
Leading Questions LIVE: Canada’s path to digital transformation
In the run-up to Global Government Forum’s annual AccelerateGOV conference in Ottawa, Canada, we held a livestreamed chat with Dominic Rochon, Canada’s chief information officer.
The episode was part of our new Leading Questions LIVE series, which invites public servants to join conversations with leaders and pose questions of their own to them.
Rochon discussed his broad mandate, which includes service delivery, security and privacy, as well as his current priorities.
He touched upon Canada’s past technological failures and controversies. He also stressed the role of collaboration, both within the Canadian government and the country’s provincial governments, as well as the private sector. He spoke about this in relation to the need for public services that are fit for the era of human-centred design.
This conversation also covered the need to professionalise the digital workforce and implement more agile procurement practices to keep pace with technological advancements.
How Government Works: A four-part miniseries
We capped the year off with a four-part miniseries offering listeners a guided tour of the corridors of power in the UK.
How Government Works provides you with detailed explainers on everything from governance and regulation of the public sector to how policy is made, and how Labour is rewiring Whitehall to deliver its mission-based approach.
Voices on the series include Leading Questions’ regular host Siobhan Benita; Richard Johnstone, Global Government Forum’s executive editor; James Humphreys, Global Government Forum associate policy trainer; and Patrick Diamond, professor in public policy, Queen Mary University of London.
How Government Works: demystifying the structures and responsibilities in Whitehall, Westminster and beyond
How Government Works: governance, regulation and culture in Whitehall and Westminster
How Government Works: operations, activity and processes in policy development and delivery – in Whitehall and beyond
How Government Works: how Labour is changing the way Whitehall works to focus on mission delivery
Subscribe to Global Government Forum’s podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode: Leading Questions and Government Transformed.
About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
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