Digital Works Podcast
Talking about all the different things that 'digital' means in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Tales of success and failure, interrogating the shiny new things and looking at what works (or not) and why, Interviews with digital folks working across the sector and beyond, in-house, consultants, funders, and more.
Digital Works Podcast
Neil Williams (BFI) on transforming organisations through digital, comparisons between the civil service and the cultural sector, working in the open, and intentionally not empire-building
A conversation recorded in-person (hurray!) with the BFI's Exec Director of Technology and Digital Transformation, Neil Williams.
Neil writes a regular 'fortnight notes' post on his blog, which you can find here neilojwilliams.net
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. I'm Ash, your host, and each episode we explore how people and organisations in the cultural world and beyond are using digital to create, connect and adapt. And if you need a hand with your own digital work, I'm also a consultant who helps cultural organisations make the most of all this stuff. Today's episode is a conversation with Neil Williams. Neil is Executive Director of Technology and Digital Transformation at the BFI. Neil and I had a really wide-ranging chat back in May this year, 2025, where we covered Neil's journey into digital via a dairy farm in Devon, the world of magazines and the civil service, the comparisons between his time at the Government Digital Service and his work in the cultural sector, the value of working in the open, and loads more. I think Neil has a really brilliant perspective on what digital means, how it can be valuable and what needs to be in place for the good stuff to happen. Enjoy, Hi, Neil. Thank you so much for joining me in sunny Whitechapel this afternoon.
Neil:Hi, Ashi, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. This is my second podcast experience ever, so you're very honoured.
Ash:Oh, that's exciting. I'm excited and I'm going to start, as I always start these conversations with a bit of a. I mean we were just talking before I hit the big red record button with a bit of a. I mean we were just talking before I hit the big red record button, but about your background, your journey from a devonshire dairy farm to where you are now at the bfi, living in london. What does that journey look like?
Neil:not planned. I would start with saying like a preface to this, I guess it's just to say that there was no plan. I'm not a five-year plan kind of kind of guy, but also I guess, as is common with people, that there was no plan. I'm not a five-year plan kind of guy, but also I guess, as is common with people who've worked in digital who are roughly the same age as I am, a lot of the jobs I've ended up doing were not in any 90s career guidebooks or careers guidance counsellors' heads. But yeah, I grew up on a farm and did an English degree, so not a technologist by background either. So it you know, it's a kind of maybe not an obvious route, although actually I've met quite a surprising number of people who work in technology and digital who have English degrees, and I've always been a kind of you know, do something fun and interesting and challenging until it isn't and then find something else kind of career move person, as opposed to like I've got a 10 year vision of where I want to be, so it's a bit haphazard and any kind of sense of narrative thread is probably kind of you know, retrofitted on this really. So where does it start? Like it starts for me with an obsessive making of magazines.
Neil:In my youth I was very obsessed with kind of making, you know, cut and paste and letter set based paper magazines. In fact one of the very earliest ones there's a film reference here, because one of my very earliest ones was about ghostbusters. I'd seen ghostbusters and I was obsessed with it. I was that very christmas. I was like I must get paper even though all the shops are closed on christmas day, because I need to make a magazine about ghostbusters. So I had a love of just making magazines and then, like that took me through school and university, like taking over the kind of um literary magazines of both my school and my university and in both cases effectively I turned them into viz, if I'm honest.
Neil:And then, so you know, with my English degree in hand and my love of magazines, my first job proper was working for a corporate communications agency that did exactly that. They made magazines and they made newspapers. I knew I wanted to be around that. I thought I might want to be a journalist but then kind of got involved in just the production side of it. So I was kind of coordinating the production cycle of about 30 internal staff magazines. They don't do those sorts of things anymore but for the likes of Pfizer and BP and Shell and Railtrack it's a kind of corporate behemoths with their large staff needing a magazine to tell them all the news. And whilst I was working there I got the opportunity to step into web design. That company had realised that they could resell these magazines to their clients as intranet sites and gave me the opportunity to head up the London web division, which I jumped at.
Neil:And it's really that's the moment. That's the kind of pivotal beginning of my love of digital, where the kind of immediacy as compared to like a print magazine, the immediacy of being able to create a product, get it out there, see how people are using it, take that data and insight and make it better and then make it better and then make it better and just how that fundamentally changes the relationship between an organisation and its customers, that you're able to really have a much closer, faster feedback loop relationship. So that's my kind of epiphany and like I guess, ever since, that that's kind of what I've loved about working in digital. So I tell that story. So I did that for a few years private sector and then hopped over into civil service and sort of worked my way up through different Whitehall digital comms teams, so like managing a bit of a website for one of the Whitehall departments and then a bit more of its website, and then going into another department and managing all of its website and then its intranet and so on. And then, you know, moving around those jobs during the years when, like, it was all called new media back then and web 2.0 was the kind of buzzword and started to help whitehall departments to engage with that and like use the internet as a two-way mechanism, not just a broadcast mechanism, and you know, launched some blogs for ministers and wikis and helped get government departments to use twitter, for example, be more human and start to open up. So that's kind of my second sort of thing that I then fell in love with is like how digital can really like open up, democratize, shift power away from these kind of big, you know longstanding institutions towards people and give people a kind of a voice back into the organizations themselves. So I did that for a few years and then I guess that you know, in the spirit of what I was saying earlier about doing something interesting and challenging until it isn't, that became frustrating, I would sort of characterize what it was like. Working in it's like 2010, 2011,.
Neil:Working in digital comms in Whitehall departments then was, we felt, an emerging and growing and maturing profession, that we were sitting on this gold mine of user insight. Like here we were, these little web teams in organizations that didn't really understand us, with all of this stuff that we were trying to show our, you know, senior civil servants and ministers going, look at this, this is like really rich insights about what people want from us as an organization that we're not giving them. You know, we're not fulfilling their, we're not fulfilling their needs. We're not really being heard, not really being understood. And then enter Martha Lane Fox. So I don't know how much people know about the kind of big revolution that happened in UK public service websites, which was the creation of the Government Digital Service and the creation of Govuk. So Martha Lane Fox, formerly of lastminutecom, was asked by the government to review DirectGov, which was the main citizen-facing portal back then I remember DirectGov, yeah, orange.
Neil:Do you remember Suggs on the TV adverts? Yes, all of that stuff. So she reviewed that. But she actually reviewed all of it and she basically said just start again, whitehall, like government, central government, civil service. Tear up all of your existing web estate and bring in these ways of working that have been incubated and matured for about a decade in private sector, in Amazon, in Google, in the likes of those organizations. Focus on user need, bring in user-centered design, bring in agile software development. Start small, iterate, build something new. So I got involved in that.
Neil:Early on I was fortunate enough to kind of be one of the first product managers hired into government digital service. You know I'd never heard those words product management, never heard of agile, learned those things on the job quite quickly. And then, you know, I guess I sort of did a retcon thing there of looking back over everything that I'd done in my career. I've always been a product manager, I think. Think back from making magazines as a kid, like you know, product manager. So, yeah, that was a great opportunity and, like you know, that's there for eight years. That gds, first of all being product manager for a bit of govuk, then more of it and like leading road mapping and then more of it and running it for the last few years running the govuk program not gds just because but there's like a lot of gds in me. I'd say that, like you know, those eight years have completely rewired how I think and then come to be what I now try and do everywhere else I go is like sort of copy, the best of its culture and methods.
Neil:I like to think there's a lot of me in it as well, like in terms of the service manual and the kind of playbook that's been sort of codified from those years of building GDS. So I did that for like eight years and then again, like it sort of felt like it was running its course for me in terms of what I could do there personally and it was getting a bit Brexity, which I wasn't like enjoying massively. Lots of kind of conversations in Whitehall about how can we use Covenant UK to make sense of this. I thought maybe that's a job for somebody else. So I looked around and was looking you know what they might be for me and thinking I probably also need to broaden out a little bit in terms of my experience. Opportunity came up at Croydon Council so I went to local government. That's where I live. I'm in Crystal Palace, which is just at the top of Croydon Borough. There was a new job of chief digital officer for the council.
Neil:Croydon was looking quite exciting at the time, with lots of skyscrapers shooting up and a sort of growing tech sector, growing sort of cluster, and an ambitious leadership in the council that wanted to make their services just like the best they could for its residents. So I hopped over to do that and had three years there. I'd say one and a half good years, one and a half challenging years because Croydon Council went bankrupt while I was there. So you know, I attacked that with some energy coming out of GDS, with the confidence of someone who's helped to make the government service manual and, you know, working in those methods and coming in with quite a lot of energy into a local authority and saying I'm going to show you the way it's done, built a really good team, learned a lot from others who'd already been doing great work in that sector too, and then had to kind of unpick it when the council's finances kind of hit the skids, which is really sad actually, although there's still great people doing great things there and I'm glad that they are, because I live there and I want my bins collected and those things to work smoothly.
Neil:So yeah, three years in local council and then this opportunity came up at the BFI to step into an executive level role, leading digital and Croydon had added the breadth of also running IT alongside digital and web, and similarly. This job is even broader still and an opportunity to take everything that I've learned and apply it in another sector, and I love film. I'm married to a filmmaker. My first date with her was at the BFI. It's a place that I've always loved and admired and, honestly, what a cool place to work. I'm just like so grateful that job exists and I managed to get it, and I'm having a very good time.
Ash:Brilliant and you know there's so much in that journey that I've heard from other conversations I've had on this podcast.
Ash:You know that sort of restless curiosity that seems to be present in so many digital people feels like it has been there in everything you've done and that, as well, you know, your journey through digital roles seems to have mirrored the growth and the profile of digital as a practice and maybe having to explain what this stuff is is a useful, a useful experience to have gone through and sort of demonstrating value and talking about value and establishing working practices. You know that elements of that I experienced in my career that I do think is frustrating at times but also hugely valuable in clarifying your thinking and the description you gave of these sort of little pockets of digital expertise and powerful, valuable user insights existing all over government feels like there are really really strong parallels with a lot of the cultural sector. You know, and trying to unlock those pockets of potential to sort of greatest impact for the organisations where they exist feels like a challenge that loads and loads of digital practitioners and sector throwing themselves at as we speak.
Neil:Yeah, and it's definitely a challenge. I guess you know. So, when GDS first started, the thing that we, you know, said there was that it was a sort of soundbite that was quite persuasive was that, you know, central government is 10 years behind the private sector in terms of, you know, adopting these ways of working. And then I went to local government. It felt like it's another five years behind. And now I've come to the cultural sector where it's another five years behind.
Neil:I've made my life difficult by doing that because I could have gone from GDS to a Spotify or an Amazon or a Google or a Deliveroo or somewhere and gone into a culture where I don't have to do any persuading and explaining and helping people to understand these ways of working as if they're fresh.
Neil:You know, but that's not who I am. I think I'm too much of a public servant and I guess I enjoy that challenge and I've also gone into those places armed with the kind of material and the maturity into that profession behind me. You know like it's been massively helpful every step of the way that there's this stuff codified into frameworks and you know there's the capability framework from the government, digital service service manual, etc. Etc. Went into local authority and there'd just been a sort of thing called the local digital declaration, which was, you know, a kind of mandate really to go in and sort of wave and go look, we've just signed this thing that says we have to work in these ways. Similarly, coming into bfi, you know we're an arm's length body of DCMS, department of Culture, media and Sport, and that comes with, you know, some functional standards that we are supposed to follow, and so you know again, these frameworks exist and the profession exists, so there's a talent pool to recruit from. So I lean on those things fairly heavily.
Ash:I'd say I'm interested in sort of zooming in, I suppose, on your role at the BFI, because you know you've got the words digital and transformation in your job title, which feels like a statement of intent sort of, from the institution that they have created this role and you're not the I believe not the first role holder to have this job title. Is that correct?
Neil:I think it is. I'm trying to think what might. So I'd say predecessor, it wasn't quite the same role. This was a new role that I stepped into, so I'm the first holder of this specific role, and department directorate that was formed under me was newly put together. But I've inherited you know, I'm standing on the shoulders of like a lot of work that had been done previously by a guy called Ed Humphrey who was there previously. But yeah, so I mean, do you want me to talk a little bit about how digital and transformation yes, because it's interesting.
Ash:You know, in one of our pre-chats before today you sort of talked about this strategic aim that the bfi's got to be digital first by is it 2030, 2033, 2033?
Neil:which is our centenary year.
Ash:It's like that random number is not so random yes, it will be 100 years old in 2033 there's a whole bundle of things there that I'd love to unpack. First, sort of what your remit looks like at the BFI. And secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is like organizationally, how does the BFI understand this very stretchy and vague word digital? And what does that mean practically in terms of you priorities, structures, understanding of value at an organization like the bfi, which is complicated in and of itself?
Neil:gosh, that's quite a big question so, uh, you know, should I start with a bit of context about the bfi, maybe? So bfi is complex, definitely so. It's about 750 people in total. The bfi I mean that goes up a bit during seasonal workers around london film festival, and we are sort of three types of organization rolled into 750 people in total. The BFI I mean that goes up a bit during seasonal work around London Film Festival and we are sort of three types of organisation rolled into one.
Neil:We're a lead body for the industry, working with, you know, government, and we are a national lottery distributor, so we give out grant funding to filmmakers and creatives and people trying to grow the film audience and so forth. And we're a charity, a cultural charity, that you know. We promote the enjoyment of moving image culture but we also preserve it. We've got one of the largest moving image archives in the world and we run education activities and so on. As a charity. We're operating across like multiple sites. We've got, you know, seven cinema screens in London, when you count IMAX, all of South Bank and a couple of industry screening rooms, two sites for our archive outside of London. So huge, you know, 750 people sounds like a lot of people, but when you're doing that much breadth, it's like it's not and we're doing a lot with a little.
Neil:So the job of exec director of digital no, I'm going to get it wrong exec director of technology and digital transformation. So that means I've got a director under me and that's about a hundred people it's just shy of a hundred people. So I've got IT that's about 20 people. I've got a streaming video service BFI player it's about another 20 people and digital services and products for everything else that the BFI does. So you know ways of accessing digitally our cinemas, our ticket box office, you know what's on browse experience, ways of accessing the archive online, et cetera. All sit with a digital service and products department of about 25 people. And then the other 30 are projectionists. So, as well as streaming, I have the projectionist team and the cinema technicians who prepare content for showing in our cinemas and for release on physical media. So quite broad.
Neil:And you and the fact that it's an exec level role is fantastic. As I said, I'm very grateful to the foresight of CEO Ben Roberts and the board for creating a role at that level. They're pretty rare, as I understand from talking to you and talking to others in the sector. It's pretty rare to have a foot in the door, be in the room where it happens for digital people. So I do feel privileged. I've got one of those roles. I've got that rare gem of a role and I inherited some groundwork in terms of digital.
Neil:So the phrase digital first isn't mine, that predates me. The GDS equivalent, I guess, was digital by default back in the day, and the definition of the directorate that I've inherited calls us agents for change and we're driving transformational change across the organization. So that was already there. Those definitions I actually really like. I think we can talk a lot, I think, about how digital is vague as a word and unhelpful in all sorts of ways, but the fact that that already existed as a mantra, I'm leaning into it. It helps that that's already established in the minds of the organization, especially an organization that's that sort of busy and thinly spread and it's difficult to get cut through and attention like it's already something that people have in their heads. So I'm kind of running with it for now. That's the kind of vanilla description of what the job entails.
Neil:And then, in terms of what digital and transformation mean, I mean I've come in with, obviously surprisingly, a very GDS flavour of that interpretation of that definition.
Neil:You know the Tom Loosemore classic definition of, you know, applying the I'm going to get this wrong applying the culture, processes, business models and technologies of the internet era to respond to people's raised expectations that might be word for word.
Neil:Actually, you know, I love that definition.
Neil:I think that's the best one we still have currently.
Neil:It's all about the raised expectations and that's the definition that I'm bringing, to kind of build on that digital first mantra and say when we say digital we mean all of this, we mean the world has changed radically, people's expectations of us have changed radically and that requires us to redesign how we meet their needs from the outside in looking at everything and not just looking at websites and apps and not just replacing backend systems and so forth. So that's the definition that I'm bringing, that's the intended meaning. And then you know, there's the strategy content that you know. One of the first jobs this is a new executive team, as well as my role being new, like other roles on this exec board are new, and so we've come together as a new team and written a new strategy for 10 years, which is quite a difficult thing to do in your first six months. Okay, I'm new in this organization, I'm new in this sector, but we're going to write a strategy for 10 years. We'll try and predict the future for 10 years.
Ash:And transform the organization. Guess what? We didn't have much AI in it when I wrote that, in 2020.
Neil:Yeah, so what's enshrined in that is broadly like, briefly speaking, just two major goals. One is transform our services, growing our digital platforms. We called it in the strategy, but effectively, like that's the value that we're trying to deliver, there is growth. It's, you know, more people benefiting from what the BFI does by scaling it up, opening it up, broadening access. But also transforming that experience, like increasing the satisfaction and delight, because that's how you grow. You know, back to being a product guy. You make delightful products. The rest will come. I mean, there's also marketing to do.
Neil:I don't want to belittle the role that other people do, but you know, usability is key. Like you know, people go where their needs are most conveniently met. And being digital first, transforming our organization so that we can stay relevant, we can be efficient, we can adapt quicker. So those are the big aims. And then, how is that understood internally? Does that get perceived the way that I intend it? I mean, I think maybe that's a mixed picture. It's a journey. They're very, very intend it. I mean, I think maybe that's a mixed picture. It's a journey. You know they're very, very slippery words.
Neil:I think that, despite best efforts to kind of use that Tom Leaksmore definition to explain what we mean when we say digital, like it's still often perceived to be like a website or an app or a system change. I feel like we're kind of frequently as digital practitioners, when we go into a part of the business to transform it, like we're forced into a Trojan horse situation and to sort of jump out of this Trojan horse and go surprise, we don't mean just your website, we're actually going to change everything, but it's like it's a Trojan horse that we didn't actually want to get into in the first place. We were outside of. We were going, you know, look, look, we're going to change everything and you've put us in this box and then we've had to jump out of it and surprise you. But we didn't want to. We were trying to radiate that intent all along. You're laughing, I was like let's resonate.
Ash:I think I did a conference presentation using exactly that metaphor. It was like how to use an institutional website project as a trojan horse to change ways of working yeah, right.
Neil:So I think both the things are true. Sometimes it's deliberate, sometimes maybe that's the only way you can get a foothold and you knowingly go into a situation going well, yeah, we're just gonna you know you know that you're dissatisfied, or your users are dissatisfied with this one thing, so let's come and help you with it, and then oh it looks like that's leading us to look at processes and team design, but then other times it's like we're trying to.
Ash:Actually, I think where we're now at as a profession is really trying to not be pigeonholed into that view and to talk more openly and take our organizations on that journey of understanding around service design and what it entails to become digital to the point where you don't need to say digital anymore, which is ultimately the aim absolutely and that you know that you used an interesting term which, as you said, predated your arrival at the bfi, but this idea of being agents of change, and it feels that that is an important idea when it comes to digital practice because, in my observations, the organizations where digital has most productively and interestingly taken root are where the idea of change and the idea of allowing or empowering people to act as agents of change is something that the organization is, to varying degrees, comfortable with.
Ash:You just said you know BFI almost 100 years old, years old, large organization, you know, has a sort of archival role, is a funder. You know a lot of those words are small c, conservative, because they sort of have to be. They have to be stable. Continuity is the important thing. So how is it being in charge of a group of change agents within that sort of structure where maybe people have historically been more used to stability and continuation of some level of business as usual being the priorities? Instead, it feels like that could be quite a head-spinning gear shift for colleagues outside of your immediate orbit.
Neil:Yeah, absolutely. And you know, as well as being a pre-internet organisation by half a century, it's an organisation that represents an industry that is really reeling from digital disruption. You know, the range of attitudes to digital will include people who are completely anti-digital in the organisation. Here we are trying to. You know, progress, a growth of our own streaming platform as one of our aims. So part of the persuading and explaining involves helping people feel comfortable with that and not threatened by it, and understand that there's a symbiosis actually, and we're not here to replace our cinema operation with streaming. We're here to make sure that we're delivering our aims as far and wide and to the greatest number of users as we possibly can, which actually is both of those things together.
Neil:But yeah in terms of the conservative analogue activity. There is, I think, with those areas, maybe a difficulty in people, and this is maybe where the word digital really doesn't help us, because it's's kind of how is that relevant to me? How is that relevant to what I'm doing? So, you know, I guess there's a lot of trying to demonstrate the degree to which every service that we're providing starts with a digital touchpoint, is in some way enabled by or constrained by the technology choices that we've made, and how making those technology choices in isolation creates a disjointed experience for people. And, like you know, trying to unpack with more specificity what we mean when we talk about digital, it is really difficult, I guess, to get cut through and attention as well, because I don't think it's just necessarily about those things being conservative, but being like really kind of finely tuned and practiced and rehearsed over many years to work with a really lean operation and produce some fantastic outputs right.
Neil:So a lot of my job entails trying to change the BFI. I also absolutely love and admire everything that we do, and we do it so well, you know so the output from all of my colleagues across the organization. You come to one of our festivals, you come to one of our screening events you come along to, like the current Tom Cruise season that we're running and they're extraordinary and running that kind of scale of professionally polished outward facing public events on a daily basis is finely tuned and there's risk, therefore, and like danger in trying to change anything and I think you know you've also also working with that and limited time and attention because that's a lot to do with not very many people. So those are among the challenges in explaining what we mean by digital first and how it's relevant to people and what we want from them.
Ash:Yeah, and I think a couple of things you touched on there felt really important. Firstly, around specificity of language, because, as we've sort of alluded to this word digital for some people is their gut reaction to that is not going to be a positive one, whereas if you can be far more specific and say, actually with this catch-all term we mean these things that play these roles for people that you care about, in them finding out about or being able to access the things that you do, you can have a much more constructive conversation with people rather than them worrying that you mean something that you don't yeah and I think also and this is why I think in-house expertise and in-house capacity around this stuff is so important is a deep understanding of what your organization does, why it does it, who it does it for and where the value lies feels really essential when you are looking to catalyse change, because you don't want to end up burning the whole house down just because you're cooking an adventurous meal in the kitchen.
Ash:And so it was really interesting to use that word, sort of fine-tuned, because I think a version of that exists in so many parts of the cultural sector. You know whether that's how a museum or art gallery operates or how a theater or opera company operates. You know there are these honed areas of practice that work the way they do for years and years and years and many, many, many very good reasons, and actually digital probably does have a really useful role to play in that. But you have to understand the finely tuned specificity of those situations sorry, I forced you to say specificity on microphone, so uh yes and, like you know, the slippery language extends to almost anything else you try and say, doesn't it?
Neil:so, like you know, digital doesn't work as a thing to get cut through and get understanding, but sort of service doesn't either. Necessarily. People don't necessarily in the culture sector, see what they're doing as services and similarly agile. You know. The natural response is but we're already flexible. You know, we work from home or we we adapt to change quickly because people do, because people do, yeah, and we're already user-centered and we care about our customers, of course, of course.
Neil:So it becomes quite abstract, it becomes quite evangelical, and so you either get perceived as a technologist who's talking gobbledygook, or a sort of you know preacher who's, you know, waving your hands around and talking about trying to correct people's understanding of commonly used English words. So you know, I don't feel like I've nailed yet how to do that, but where you do get cut through and benefit is piece by piece and osmosis and project by project or user research, by user research, you know. So demonstrating by doing that's. You know again a GDS mantra. You'll hear me saying quite a lot of them, probably, but it feels like the way to go, like. So, as we go along. We are making as much noise as we can. That's what I'm encouraging my team to do all the time, like don't just do the work, talk about the work all the time. That's part of the job, you know. Blog about it, show and tell, send people PowerPoint decks that they can watch in their own time, with embedded videos of user research. You know, let's just be as noisy as we can to take as many people as we can with us as we go along, both internally and externally, communicating as much as possible. And then I think it's a kind of, you know, brownian motion as we're going around the organisation, sort of taking individual people with us but then coupling that with a kind of pan-organisational communication.
Neil:So I've just launched in the BFI I'm three years into the job now I've just published a kind of unpacking of what we mean by digital first sort of five or six pages on our intranet. That says the Tom Loosmore definition, that says what we mean to, you know, universal silence. I must say, like again, like the challenge of cut through is real. But it's there now, it's a repository and it's something to build on. I'm going to present that so that it's not just a passive piece of information for people to come and find, but I'm presenting an upcoming all staff meeting very soon about it to draw attention to it, and then we'll keep building from there.
Neil:So you know, I think that one of the things we haven't yet done but I'm keen to do is pick one of the digital maturity frameworks, start to measure where we are, start to use some kind of formal, kind of you know, process and categorization of the ways in which you can be digital and like check ourselves against them, and couple that with some learning and development for everybody. We've recently been doing some really good work at the bfi on anti-racism and that model that we used for that was to take our sort of most senior level of staff through a kind of very intensive in-person training experience and everyone else through a kind of e-learning experience. So you get the kind of broad and you get the deep. I think that kind of model is what we need to do for digital between now and 2033. I've got time, but if we're going to become digital first and for that to mean something by 2033, and ideally no longer need to say it, then we're going to need to ramp that up a bit from year four of our strategy next year.
Ash:And I think you know you touched on a few things there that have been mentioned previously on the podcast and that idea of showing and telling and that idea of sharing the real experience that users are actually having across your digital touchpoints, whatever they might be, is simple but also hugely powerful for at least being able to start a conversation with colleagues who, as you say, are busy with their own stuff that at the minute, probably doesn't directly cross over with the work you're doing, and being willing to explain and being willing to answer questions, and being willing to probably be challenged maybe or have people misunderstand you a few times before they get. It feels like they're important steps that you have to go through on the journey to something that's more mature and more embedded.
Neil:Yeah, and that's quite a vulnerable space to be in, isn't?
Neil:it Absolutely, just try and be persuading colleagues around to a different way of thinking whilst also running operational live stuff. It's a juggling act all the time. A good 70%, 80% of capacity is actually taken up with running stuff, and part of that challenge we've got, of course, is that we need to be running fewer things and we need those things to be more joined up than they are, and so I guess telling that story as well. So I guess that's another thing I'm really conscious of that we haven't yet talked about is the investment right. So digital is not cheap. All of this investment in digital and technology and cybersecurity is a sort of you know new and growing field where you kind of just have to spend money on that In an organization that is so finely tuned and that is trying to have a big cultural impact with, you know challenging investment. Challenging funding can feel to people who are maybe a bit suspicious of digital that like why is all the money sort of diverting over there? I've lost my thread. What was I? How did I get onto this?
Ash:We were talking about the need for people sort of, I suppose, leading the conversation around transformation to have quite difficult conversations. You know that is a vulnerable space that you put yourself into.
Neil:Oh, yes, I guess what I was building to was the kind of in order for us to not require an ever-growing digital and technology department A, we need to consolidate what we've got and be more focused with it. Rather than you know, we've got a sort of like long list of things that have been created through projects and not then looked after sustainably. That can be brought together and reduced. That's one thing, and the second thing is like to become a digital first organization isn't just a matter of us becoming a bigger and bigger technology team. It's about all of us in the organization understanding those ways of working, working together on improving over time our services from a user-centric practice, so that, I think, is part of the cell as well.
Neil:It's not an empire. I'm not trying to become bigger and bigger. There's no digital for its own sake. We're only here to deliver better outcomes for the things that we're all trying to do. So that has to happen in so much high collaboration, deep and sustained and long running high collaboration in multidisciplinary teams where we all come together and we have a more common language and more shared understanding of what it is that that looks like. That's what I'm trying to build, but, yeah, that's vulnerable, it's difficult. Not all jobs require that level of trying to make people change, and that's, I think, what is hard about what we do. It's really hard yeah.
Ash:And I think maybe until recently, certainly in the cultural sector, maybe it was more apparent in other places and spaces you've worked, but that change-making chunk of unspoken responsibilities really does now seem that it's attached to any digital role above a certain level of seniority. Notably whether it's in your job description or not. There is a level of advocacy and explaining and buy-in that you are needing to do as part of your role. Alongside the long list of other things.
Neil:Right, well, exactly, yeah, so mine isn't the only change initiative. We're sort of communicating to the same people with quite a few change initiatives all the time, and you know so, whilst digital is a product. Back to the question you asked several questions ago maybe, which is, you know, how does this manifest at the BFI? What does digital transformation look like at the BFI? Like you know, it's in our strategy. There's an executive level role, which I'm in, so you know I've got the ear of my colleagues on the executive board. It sort of couldn't be better.
Neil:In many ways it's. You know, we've got two sections of the strategy that explicitly commit us to doing all of this stuff. It's a priority, but guess what got a lot of those, got a lot of priorities, and quite a lot of those priorities involve asking the same people to change how they're working in all sorts of different ways at the same time as all of those precarious outward facing, you know, services that we run and events that we put on. So, like you know, that's a challenge that I think, from talking to you and talking to a few other people in the cultural sector, most of my network is still whitehall and local gov, but from those that I've managed to get around to and speak to.
Ash:it seems like that's fairly common, that prioritization is a challenge in arts and culture sector, would you say that's true, 100%, and I was going to sort of quote back to you something that you wrote, possibly in emails that we're exchanging.
Ash:But you said when comparing the culture sector to government in the various forms you've experienced it that the culture sector on the whole is weaker on prioritization. There are fewer of the basics in place and generally the focus is on external output over internal culture, and that feels like what you've just described there, but also that feels like a scenario in which the sector is spinning its wheels or sort of trying to force too much to happen simultaneously or not focusing on the areas that might achieve a sort of flywheel or longer-term impact.
Neil:You know, yes, this is a challenge that I and my exec colleagues discuss often, you know when we've been trying to make sure that we can live within our means and that we can deliver.
Neil:All of our aims is actually, you know, in our charitable objects, right in our reasons to exist. There isn't anything that we can stop doing, and actually it all supports each other and comes together in a way that means that you can't sort of easily lob a bit off and do less, right Like it all matters. And so, yeah, there is a challenge of how to prioritise. An organisation that exists has a remit to do a lot of things.
Neil:So, regarding that bit that you quoted from our email, so you know, I've only got the BFI to go on, so I can't speak for all of the culture sector.
Ash:But certainly when I read that it rang true broadly as a sweeping generalisation, but it felt more true than not.
Neil:So it felt to me the thing that from my own career, I can compare it to is early GDS, right so, which is startup mode, like an organization that's a startup, I think will often because it's got a certain amount of runway and it's got to hit some delivery milestones and some growth targets, will focus on output and start small. And it's a small organization of like a founder and a couple of people and like it doesn't need to worry about HR processes and cybersecurity and you know a prioritization matrix and a PMO and all these. You don't need any of that when you're starting out and then you grow, and then you grow, and then you grow, and then you like get to this point of like, oh we haven't got these things that are foundational and all organizations need of a certain size and maturity and age, and it feels a bit like that. I've come into this organization which is 92 years old now 89 when I joined. I'm surprised by the degree to which some of the things that you might expect you know that I kind of maybe took for granted in the civil service and even in my small private sector company that I worked in my early career like maybe aren't at the level of maturity that you might expect them to be. My diagnosis of that is just that because we're doing so much and because it's so outward facing and because we're trying to, you know, put the money on screen effectively, like we're here to deliver cultural benefit, and we're that's where the focus has been.
Neil:So, you know, I guess a lot of people doing slightly more than they can for a long time results in maybe some of those things being given less attention. But you know, we're making all of better and I don't want to overstate it either, because I'd say it's a fantastic place to work. It's just we're giving those things attention at the moment as a sort of new executive team to go well, let's fix things like the complaints process and our ability to handle customer inquiries and how we prioritize, how we allocate funding, how we manage projects, all of these foundational things. One of the early things that my director has delivered since my time, there is a new intranet, which is often one of those things that is like the Cobbler's children kind of metaphor of like well, it's easy to ignore.
Neil:There are always more pressing things to prioritize, but I prioritize that one because it's quite a good place to start with the digital transformation journey of trying to teach people or show people. So teach sounds pretty patronizing. Demonstrate to people like what different looks like, what a user centered design can achieve at scale in your organization. Do an internet project, do that one, because a lot of people will see that and start benefiting from it. And it's been great. Actually, we've gotten, you know, we now have a bit of a culture of people blogging in the organization on our intranet. It has connected people and joined us up in ways that I think you know probably get taken for granted, because you just you know you. That's the new normal, then, or that's true of you know, the work of an it team as well.
Neil:I don't know whether many of your other kind of interviews have talked about it, but like you know that can be, by its nature, like people only notice when it doesn't work and they quickly sort of forget and move on from the big achievements that you make.
Neil:You know so my department completed a m365 rollout just over a year ago. That just instantly becomes your new normal. And then you instantly got a new set of things that you're like angry about as users going, oh, this doesn't work, it's like no's just, it's considerably better than where we were. You know, and it's a constant journey of improving things. But I mean, I speak for myself too. You get angry quite quickly when something doesn't work. You know something that's stopping you and slowing you down in your work in any way.
Ash:Yeah, there's a sort of especially with digital tools of almost road rage style escalation.
Ash:Yeah, really disproportionate rage at not being able to buy a ticket to something instantaneously. Don't necessarily care about that stuff until it goes wrong. Leaders in an organisation might want to focus on more visible initiatives and specifically around cybersecurity. The British Library relatively recently suffered a big cybersecurity attack. I've spoken to a number of technology leaders in cultural organisations saying suddenly their boards wanted to know what their position was on cyber security. How have you found starting conversations around? I mean, you know you've done an intranet project, but around some of those other infrastructure things, you know internal infrastructure things and organization, as you say that it runs lean is public facing probably wouldn't choose to spend time, money or attention on those things if given a list.
Neil:Oh, 100%. So yeah, and that's actually another thing that is new to me in stepping into this role, into a charity, is that we fundraise against a lot of what we're trying to do and that lends itself obviously either grant funding or philanthropic trust funding or whatever it may be does of course, lend itself to some kind of tangible output. And it's also often finite money and that's the least helpful money for addressing a lot of what we need to address in terms of unmet user needs, legacy technology, technical debt, content debt, design debt. Those things are not glamorous and, by the way, I hasten to add that actually we have managed to do that well. We have managed to match the opportunity of fundraising with tangible outputs and philanthropic benefits, and that's one of the ways that we're funding BFI Player as a program of work other than it becomes sort of self-funding. So we kind of seed funding fundraising kind of approach to that. But, yeah, a lot of what we need to get money for, we need that money forever rather than once, and some of it is just capability and infrastructure. So on cyber specifically, like I would actually say so you've talked a fair bit about, like how covid was this sort of um catalyst for digital teams, for technology teams, to kind of all of a sudden, the world kind of understood how important our digital channels are. There was that big shift, and you know, both in terms of the IT and everyone shifting overnight to some form of video chat and collaborating online through things like Teams and Slack. And you know, theaters moving online, cinema moving online. I kind of feel like cyber is the new COVID. That's where I'm going with this. Like you know, the people that you might be asking for money from for investment in cyber are almost certainly M&S customers and they will have had some emails recently.
Neil:The generosity of the British Library in sharing the report about their experience and what they've learned from it. I mean so grateful to them for that. That definitely had the same effect as the one you've just spoken about on our board, but that coincided for us with we had actually already done some investment. So let me rewind a bit. I arrived with a team that had actually been making the case internally for some time, saying we need to do more on cyber. All I did was back to that and helped take that case.
Neil:So we got some investment and that was finite money, that was one-off money to do a consultant review. So we had an expert come in and do a gap analysis, and that then coincided with the British Library's incident, and so the combined effect of a gap analysis and the British Library's experience meant that my board and my colleagues in the exec were very much sitting up and wanting to know what we're going to do about cyber, which opened the door, opened the door to us to make a case. But even making that case was, of course, still hard, like it's a difficult sell in any organisation. But in an organisation where, like you know, you are trying to juggle a lot of demand, there's a lot of things vying for investment, and the difficulty of selling cyber as a thing to invest in is that it's sort of a doesn't deliver you any new output, but b it also doesn't guarantee you anything the worst investment ever, right?
Neil:I mean, it's like you know but can I have all of this money? Oh great, well, will we be safe when, if I spend that?
Neil:much no no, you said you'll be better able to respond, it'll be safer, but I can't guarantee that we will never be attacked. And indeed you, you know. So we have had that investment. I've managed to kind of persuade people and I said, you know what, I'm not going to over-claim my persuasive powers. Like you know, I was leaning on an open door of very high level of interest from our board and from our executive team, but there was a lot of work that had to be done in terms of, like, let's gather, benchmarking, let's, you know, help explain the risk that this mitigates and what other people are spending, why this spend. You know there was a lot of work, but we did get agreement to invest significantly.
Neil:I've got five roles I've added to various teams in the organization, specifically on cybersecurity and investment in tools, and that is, you know, early stage and will mature over time. And you know so we've got these tools in place and we're configuring them, starting to use them. We've got some of those five roles hired, some not, and developed our incident response procedures and so on. And then, you know, in spite of all of that and unrelated to all of that, we have had a cyber incident recently, and it's also, I hasten to add, unrelated to M&S and the co-op. I hasten to add that because it is a shop.
Neil:So the BFI's online shop has recently suffered a we discovered in early April had a fake payment page inserted into the site, so that's now been offline for a couple of months and, you know, became all consuming for me and about a dozen people for a month. We're still working on recovering and there's more that I'll share down the road. We'll probably publish a blog post in the sort of spirit of what the British Library did to share with others. But you know, what that does underline is that if you're in any doubt about the need to invest in cyber, you know you really need to take that step. It is a when, not if, and I'm so glad of the investment we made for how we've been able to respond to it.
Ash:And would you say you're sort of better placed Because, as you say, you weren't making these changes and making these additions to the team in response to a specific incident. It's just they happen to coincide. Would you say that you're better placed, because of some of the new people that have come into the organisation and their expertise to deal with this incident?
Neil:Well, fun story is that one of the roles that I've created and hired into is a head of cybersecurity, and that person, Jia Fu, started three days into the incident. It's like you know that induction plan. Let's just put that to one side.
Neil:That's this situation You're coming to twice daily meetings about an incident and but I mean so, thank God. I mean thank God, her expertise was just so helpful. But I mean so, thank God. I mean thank God, her expertise was just so helpful. So you know, this incident occurred on a bit of our technology estate. That actually isn't where we've invested, but we would be getting to.
Neil:So you know, one of the things we will obviously be looking at as we sort of broaden and mature our cyber approach is our third party systems. You know things that we've outsourced and we hadn't yet got to this one, but you know. So one of the things that I'd emphasize to everybody is look at all of your vendors, look at all of your third parties. Make sure that you've got a sort of a good approach to standards assurance across the whole organization. You're only as strong as your you know weakest entry point. All of these things are obvious, but that requires dedicated time and attention. You know, up until investment, it had been sort of a shared responsibility, part of various people's roles. That's the big change that we've made is it needs full-time attention and it needs tooling. It needs dashboards and people to look at the dashboards.
Ash:And to understand what the dashboards are telling you. Right, yeah, totally.
Neil:I'm happy to talk to people offline if they sort of need any help gaining traction with it. The offline if they sort of need any help gaining traction with it. The other thing I think, sort of parroting what my head of cybersecurity has said to me, is like it's don't just think of it as an overhead. You know, it's not just money that you're sinking into sort of insurance policy, it's the safety belts and the dashboards that enable you to innovate and drive the car fast. You know you can't be making changes confidently to your technology if you don't have those things in place.
Ash:Yeah, internally, and also there's a sort brand reputation thing. You know, by trying to be more capable in this area, you are maybe not stopping these things from happening, but when they do happen you're able to respond much more coherently and it will be less everyone running around like their hair's on fire, which you know your audiences, your customers, whoever your external stakeholders are, will feel and see to varying degrees of understanding yeah, and actually that's just reminded me to say that you know, well-being is like such a core part of it and you know, if you have read the British Library Report or anything else, anyone else who's been going through a sort of long and difficult cyber incident it can be extremely draining and extremely demoralising.
Neil:So you know how you lead through. That is really really important to creating this psychological safety for people to talk about what's gone wrong in ways that don't come with any recrimination or blame, but like are just a learning opportunity. It is a learning opportunity and, like you know, don't waste a crisis. There's an upside, there's a silver lining when something goes wrong like this and it's like there's some renewal, there's some refresh, there's an opportunity to look at this part of the business and go well, let's start again and build that back better. So you know it's not all downside and the learning that you get from it is fascinating. The personal sort of resilience that I've got from it has been really beneficial. Feel like you know you need to have one or two of these under your belt, probably as a sort of digital leader these days, because this is a relatively small one for us, and I'll feel better equipped when or if I mean it's when something else may occur in this job or a future job.
Ash:And maybe in the last sort of five minutes we've got, I'd love to talk a bit about this idea of working in the open you mentioned. You published a blog post recently talking about what digital transformation means at the bfi. You know, in we're just talking about cyber. You talked about the report that the british library published, which was a sort of post-mortem on what had happened with their incident, how it had happened, how they dealt with it, the lessons they learned, the recommendations they'd make to others.
Ash:It feels like this culture of sharing reflections and sharing learnings and learning in the open is relatively well established in government. Digital practice, however, it is very much not the norm in the cultural sector A bit of it in museums and galleries world, less of it in the performing arts. Personally, I would love to see much more of it and it seems like you're trying to establish a bit of a practice of that at the performing arts. Personally, I would love to see much more of it and it seems like you're trying to establish a bit of a practice of that at the bfi. What is your perspective on the benefits of working in this way?
Neil:so I'm definitely trying, I'm really trying. I think I'm sort of a little bit surprised that it isn't the norm and, you know, I guess that does explain some of the resistance I've encountered. But uh, yeah, I mean I've been blogging in some form since like 2008, on a personal capacity but like sort of semi-work, really blurring those lines of personal and professional in the way that people are sort of familiar with from Twitter, you know, back in the day, like obviously Twitter's not what it once was, but talking both about your whole person, bringing your whole person, your whole self, to work, and then also talking about your whole self externally has been a big part of how I've worked since 2008. So I've, you know, blogged on my own domain. And then I blogged when I went to GDS I was blogging sort of in a professional capacity there and then set up as part of building a blog platform for the whole of Whitehall to blog freely, really advocated for it my whole career. So I actually owe some of my career to blogging. I'll say so that journey that I made from working in Whitehall departments and feeling frustrated about the way that, you know, government hadn't really woken up to what digital was At the time when Martha Lynn Fox wrote her report and you know that became GDS. It was because I blogged about that and said what I thought about it that I came to the attention of Tom Loosemore and then had a chat with him and then was kind of in in terms of being able to apply for that job as soon as it came up and get in as one of the first product managers. And here I am. That was a really sort of massive part of my career path.
Neil:So why do I love it? I love it because I love it personally as a sort of tool for reflecting, ordering my thoughts, personally as a sort of tool for reflecting, ordering my thoughts. But by writing stuff down and putting it out in public, all sorts of benefits happen that you couldn't possibly predict in terms of people reaching out to you, sharing their stories and their learning back with you, serendipity, all sorts of things where like and actually it's a really great recruitment tool. It's actually really great for your teams as individuals to be writing in public about what they're doing and create their own profile. It's great for their careers. There's the obvious, which is, you know, sharing learning in the way the British Library did, whether it's about success or failure. It's hugely beneficial to lots of other people. You know, in a community across digital professionals across various sectors sharing how they're working, different practices, what works.
Neil:It's like all of the things we've talked about in this podcast, about how tough it is and how much it takes from you in terms of personal resilience and energy to try and take an organisation on a change journey. Like it's so helpful to share that stuff and to not be alone in it and to communicate about it openly. I personally find it therapeutic as well as directly helpful. You know, I read other people's blog posts and it helps inform and gives me confidence, and you know, vice versa. Then there's the whole thing about sort of radiating the intent as well. Like you know, not being the Trojan horse. Like we're not a Trojan horse, we're literally saying all the time like this is what we're trying to achieve.
Neil:You know, by blogging internally, by blogging externally and as well as blogging, I keep saying blog a lot. I'm saying blog a lot, but as well as blogging, show and tells, demonstrations. You know writing notes and sending them out. You know writing open sort of shared documents in M365 or Google, whatever your kind of collaboration suite is like just being vocal, being transparent about the work that you're doing. I thoroughly recommend if you haven't already read it a book by my former colleague, giles Turnbull.
Neil:That's called the Agile Comms Handbook, and he talks in that about poking windows in the silos or cutting windows in the silos between teams that, like, not everybody has to read everybody's blog posts or sprint notes or week notes, but by the very fact of them existing, it means you can the organization silos start to blur away because people can peer into these windows, into other teams and see what their culture is, see what their concerns are, understand their colleagues a little better, understand what they're trying to do and go. Maybe go. Oh, I didn't know you were doing that and that's related to a thing that I'm doing.
Neil:You know, let's bring those projects together, let's have those conversations. So, yeah, I'm encouraging my teams to do that, with some people really leaning into it, getting enthusiastic, some people being a bit like what's the point of this? But, um, I'm not going to give up until everybody's doing it.
Ash:basically, you know I could talk to you for another hour, neil. This has been absolutely fascinating but we are out of time and I think that is a hopeful and optimistic and pragmatic note to end on.
Ash:You know, it's something that I try and do with these conversations is sort of flush out the experiences and flush out the learnings and share them in a way that people might not be going through exactly the same things that you've gone through at the bfi, but there will be aspects of your experience that will be inspiring or reassuring, or directive, and the more of us that can be sharing this stuff that just feels like the value is going to be. Accretive, I believe, is the word. And so you know this is a door I will continue to throw myself against, because it does feel like the culture sector is full of generous, kind people and if we could find some more sort of structured ways for them to share that generosity, the sector is going to benefit from that.
Neil:Amen to that, Fully agree. I'm off to Google accretive. Thanks Ash, Thanks Neil.
Ash:Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to hear more, you can find all episodes of the podcast on thedigitalworks, and if your organisation needs help making sense of digital, you can get in touch with me via my website at ashmanco. That's man with two N's. See you next time.
