Why a people-first approach is key to digital transformation: Ed Garcez interview

Garcez – who will be part of a panel on digital transformation in local government at Room151’s Technology, Data and Finance Forum 2026 in October – says it is vital to start by “understanding the demand, and understanding the need”, when it comes to using technology to respond to rising service demand and increasingly constrained resources.

Speaking to Room151, he asks: “What do people need? What are the problems we’re trying to fix? And [once we understand that] we can look at what the tools are we can use to fix those problems.”

Those tools must then be “really easy to use [and] meet those specific problems”.

Garcez adds: “A lot of those are not actually about fancy stuff like AI. They’re really about making things simple, making them intuitive and easy, and making them available to everyone in a way that they can use them. And a lot of that is about technology – making clear the things that we already do and making it accessible to people.”

User research

One of the things that can hold councils back is that often senior professionals “fall into a trap” where they assume they know what people need or want, based on their potentially extensive experience, when in fact it might not be completely accurate.  

This is where user research should come to the fore, Garcez says, with councils working with people to understand what they need. “The reality is that the people who really know are the people who have the need and sometimes they cannot always explain it and confuse what they need with what they want,” he says.

But once a council understands how it can better meet the “wants and needs” of users, and which ones they can’t, “we’re able to better serve”.

This will lead to more data, both in quantity and value, and “if we do that right, we build a whole library of data about people’s wants, people’s needs and the different circumstances in which those needs arise, but it also allows us to start to build a library of patterns – ways of doing things or tools that can meet those needs.”

Optimisation and simplification

At its simplest, technology can enable a council to offer people the same service in different ways.

With widespread local government reorganisation (LGR) and devolution taking place, there is an opportunity to do things differently, Garcez thinks.

The key to success will be taking the more difficult approach of optimising and improving services, rather than simply “taking what we do today and doing it somewhere else, but essentially doing the same thing”.

The latter approach is low risk and will comply with ‘safe and legal’ responsibilities, but “doesn’t necessarily add much value”.

“To my mind, we need to look at the opportunities to do better,” Garcez says. “And that doesn’t mean not being safe and it doesn’t mean not being legal, but it does mean do better. And I think a lot of that is about looking at end-to-end services.

“If we stop thinking about the council and our internal structure and we start thinking about the individual users, then we can be in a better place to provide multiple services – such as when somebody is moving house – while collecting details just once and populating multiple different forms, and then putting that in all our different systems.

“If we put people first, then the process, then the technology, I think we stand a really good chance of getting it right.”

But within the context of LGR and devolution, Garcez acknowledges that tight timeframes and the amount of work involved makes this “really hard”.

“Councils have got lots of systems that they want to bring together. And so very often the focus goes on taking what they have and transitioning it to the new rather than on optimisation, which could actually simplify what we transition as well. So it’s about having a managed approach,” he says.

Lessons from the private sector

Looking at this, as well as the wider context of digital transformation, Garcez thinks there are lessons that can be learnt from the private sector.

“There is an idea that you can strip back, you can simplify, and you just need to remember what actually matters, what’s important here. In local government, it is about finding a way of really stripping back some of the complexity and making things as simple as possible while still achieving what councils need to do. That’s a big thing we can learn from the private sector,” he says.

Another big learning from the private sector is understanding the value of data, Garcez thinks.

“We’re not very good at that in local government,” he says. “Very often, if you talk to people, the problem is data and it’s because we’ve devalued data to such a degree, and because we work in silos.”

A key consideration should therefore be using data to add value and to offer connections, he adds.

Good enough, not perfect

There are also a few other ways councils can effectively use technology without necessarily spending big sums of money.

AI is one area – although Garcez cautions that it is more a solution for specific things rather than a catch-all panacea. On top of that, he says local government is not always using AI “very effectively” currently.

He gives the example of translation and completing forms – AI can translate a library registration form into any language without difficulty, at least to the point of doing the job intended.

“If we are willing to go for good enough rather than best, you can do it off the shelf. Things like that can make a massive difference,” he says.

In the example of turning forms into text and loading the information onto systems, searchable data is also generated. “Sometimes good enough is all you need,” he says.

Finally, Garcez emphasises the importance of councils putting in the time to showing people how to use the technology being implemented.

“That’s at least as important as the technology,” he says. “A whole load of fancy tech that no one knows how to use is not very valuable. A whole load of simple tech that anyone can use makes a massive difference.

“Some of that is just giving people confidence, and investing in that confidence and the support to use the technology would be a massive improvement.”

Ed Garcez will be part of a panel on digital transformation in local government at Room151’s Technology, Data and Finance Forum 2026, taking place in London on 14 October. For more information and to register for the event, please click here.