The UK’s new digital strategy (UKDS) looks to harness digital transformation and build a more inclusive, competitive and innovative digital economy. It is a cross-government strategy, which articulates the government’s agenda for digital policy.
The six areas it covers include building on our digital foundations, powering new ideas and IP in our innovation ecosystem, strengthening digital skills and talent, financing digital growth, spreading prosperity across the UK, and enhancing the UK’s place in the world as a science and technology superpower.
Like the 10 Tech Priorities before, a previous set of targets looked to “shape a new golden age for tech in the UK”, Dell Technologies’ work in the UK allows us to support each of these goals as they hopefully develop from strategy into more specific policy.
Securing our national digital infrastructure
The UKDS is looking to facilitate free flow of data between countries as part of international trade agreements, and create a digital trust framework, which aims to develop a way to validate a person’s identity that would inform online transactions, making them easier and safer, and more resistant to fraud. It also aims to promote cyber resilience not only on the national security level, but for SMEs.
To support this ambition, it is important that the public sector takes a ‘secure by design’ approach to cyber resilience, built on zero trust architecture. This means building infrastructure that at its very foundations, is resilient, intelligent, and automated to a point that all users and devices must authenticate themselves when accessing sensitive data and applications.
The digital era has disrupted the types of careers people both aspire to and want to create for themselves.
If we build security into an entire ecosystem, from endpoints to cloud deployments, we can better prepare the national infrastructure for growing threats.
To achieve this, there should be international co-operation around a universal set of regulations that mean this can be adopted by organisations in multiple geographies, so that their security requirements are scalable across their operations.
As part of the UKDS, the Government has established a joint UK/US Prize Challenge to accelerate the development of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, which can enable data to be analysed and shared without compromising on the privacy of data subjects. Dell Technologies has the tools and endpoint security solutions to support this international innovation.
Empowering innovation through data
Government funding for R&D spending is set to rise to £20bn per year by 2024/25 as part of a recent spending review. This opens the door to opportunities for Dell Technologies to work with UK Research and Innovation to facilitate and drive investment in R&D in business and academia, including in AI and quantum technologies.
Successful AI implementations require rethinking people, processes and technology to capture and process volumes of diverse data using machine learning and deep learning models integrated into processes and applications.
What the UK’s digital strategy ultimately comes down to is securing and improving the UK’s private innovation ecosystem, alongside its public services.
Dell can help organisations do that by aligning business and IT with a data first culture, putting data to work across private, public, edge and hybrid clouds – whatever an organisation requires – and utilising our partnerships and flexible IT consumption options to scale digital transformation.
We also see significant opportunities for innovation in new immersive realities, with an even greater decentralisation of data and the need for compute that happens in real-time across workloads that combine visual data, AI and machine learning. We are investing in the technology ecosystem of the future, to deliver the innovation and technology breakthroughs that accelerate this digital opportunity.
The next era of data empowers organisations to innovate in ways that create new opportunities for value; making customer experiences more personalised and integrated, products smarter and more connected, and organisations better placed to transform for the digital age.
Supporting the next generation of digital skills
The UKDS aims to raise digital and STEM proficiency from within schools, including by improving access to computing equipment and curricula which will raise digital skills. The Department for Education is committing to investing an additional £750 million over the next three years to support high quality teaching and facilities in higher education, including in science and engineering.
The Government also wants to increase collaboration with private and third sector on digital skills, expanding existing initiatives and using schemes such as Help to Grow to give more people access to innovation skills.
This is a crucial commitment. The digital era has disrupted the types of careers people both aspire to and want to create for themselves. Organisations and indeed, countries, hoping to keep up with this change must adapt and encourage their talent to explore entrepreneurial creativity in abundance.
Dell Technologies is supporting schools with technology equipment that will help to upskill young people across the UK. The aim is not only to bring the most talented young people into our own organisation, so that we can continue thriving, but to nurture a technologically-minded generation who could perhaps create the next Dell.
We have supported government and worked with partners, including Laptops for Kids, Asda and Code First Girls, to provide access to technology equipment and skills during the pandemic. It is something we will continue to commit to as the UKDS develops, as well as supporting an inclusive 5G rollout that connects people everywhere and levels up the country’s digital talent.
Making Progress
What the UK’s digital strategy ultimately comes down to is securing and improving the UK’s private innovation ecosystem, alongside its public services. We saw during Covid that when we must act urgently, innovation can increase at scale. That is the reason behind a digital acceleration since 2020 that would otherwise have taken much longer.
But it is something that cannot stall as we move into the next decade, particularly as we move towards net zero. In order to make the UKDS and the country’s digital economy more broadly a success, as a large enterprise with skills and expertise across the technology landscape, we hope to see further engagement from government and our public services, with companies like Dell Technologies.
It is by working in partnership that we drive human progress through technology. The UKDS is a vision of progress we hope to support becoming a reality.
For more Thought Leadership content, please visit the Making Progress website.
