Alexia Tonnel
Digital, Information and Technology Directorate (DIT)
"This strategy is a great gift - the gift of focus and clarity."
What does your role involve? Help staff to understand a bit more about what you do day-to-day.
Alexia Tonnel, director of the Digital, Information and Technology Directorate
I lead a fantastic team of digital, information and technology professionals. My role is to make sure the resource, knowledge and capabilities available across the directorate are deployed most effectively for the benefit of our users, staff and wider stakeholders.
On a day-to-day basis, I do not typically get involved much with the running of our live services, unless an issue arises that needs escalating.
Most of my time is spent understanding the digital and IT needs of the organisation. Supporting my teams to engage with their peers in the business to facilitate investment decisions across our portfolio of work. There is much demand for digital and IT resources across the organisation, and a thirst for change. In addition, partners, researchers and suppliers regularly bring new opportunities to our attention.
All of this needs to be orchestrated to ensure we address the urgent needs of NICE, while adding longer-term value and building technology solutions that are adaptable, scalable and secure.
What does your directorate do? Give us an elevator pitch.
My directorate maintains and develops our suite of externally facing digital services, including our website, which we work on jointly with colleagues from the Communications Directorate. We also look after our internal guidance production and publishing systems, working closely with the publishing team. We manage the IT network and infrastructure and provide an IT helpdesk.
What makes you proud to lead your directorate?
I work with a highly qualified, creative and experienced group of staff. They decided to work for NICE because they believe in what the organisation stands for, and the greater good it delivers for this country. The IT and digital professionals in my team could work in any sector of the economy, and they chose us. They are excited and passionate, want to deliver value, and are determined to make a difference!
Looking back over the years, I'm very proud of the innovation that our directorate has brought into NICE. Demonstrating new ways of working which are now becoming common currency: the multi-disciplinary teams, the agile working mantra, the daily stand ups and ‘show and tells’, the focus on user needs and user-centric design. It's been a slow, sometimes difficult, process to embed these new approaches. But the effort is paying off, and the whole organisation is now becoming familiar with these concepts. This is a great achievement for a team that did not quite fit the NICE mould a few years back!
Alexia Tonnel, director of the Digital, Information and Technology Directorate
Alexia Tonnel, director of the Digital, Information and Technology Directorate
Why do you think it’s important that NICE has a new strategy right now?
The world around NICE is changing rapidly, and the new strategy provides an ambitious and focused response to the challenges that face us.
It's fair to say we've not had a formal strategy like this one for a long time. Articulating our goals as an organisation means we'll all be on the same page, whichever directorate we belong to, whatever our responsibilities, whether we joined NICE yesterday or 10 years ago. The new strategy, alongside our new NICE values, will be a great unifying tool for the organisation. Something to empower our teams and enthuse all the stakeholders that give so much to NICE. This is going to be especially important as we all emerge from this dreadful pandemic, and must continue to find great purpose and satisfaction in our work.
How will the strategy improve the way your directorate works?
Looking at it from the perspective of my directorate, this strategy is a great gift - the gift of focus and clarity. As I’m sure everyone is aware, there is more demand for my directorate's services than we can possibly provide.
Every team across NICE wants their user facing service to look better, and they want better tools to do their work. We can do a lot. But we cannot do it all. So what we crave in DIT is clear business objectives and priorities. So we know where to focus our resources in the short, medium and long term.
The new strategy means we have a framework to work with colleagues across NICE, to build a technology roadmap and to agree a delivery plan to achieve it.
Alexia enjoying a day out in the village of Wotton in the Surrey hills
Alexia enjoying a day out in the village of Wotton in the Surrey hills
Looking at the strategy content, what will be the top 3 priorities that your directorate will support with?
Alexia enjoying a day out in the village of Wotton in the Surrey hills
- Underpinning the strategy is a fundamental digital transformation of the organisation. Most objectives in the strategy require some level of digital or IT implementation to deliver them. Our DIT teams cannot deliver all these changes alone. External partners, contractors, agencies will also be involved, but DIT will need to govern the technology decisions to ensure our evolving system architecture is coherent, future-proof and secure. This is my first priority as a recently unified Digital, Information and Technology Directorate!
- Looking at individual priorities, my second priority will be internally facing: the implementation of a new digital workplace for the organisation. Teams across NICE are desperate for new tools to help them collaborate, share information and automate their most repetitive tasks. If we do it well, the digital workplace programme has the potential to improve productivity and job satisfaction for many of us. In doing so, it will create capacity for change. Staff will have the time and headspace to engage in transformation activities and personal development.
- My third priority has to be the development of a new guideline development platform, which will see the emergence of a new generation of NICE recommendations which are easier to understand, access and implement. This is exciting work for DIT, with implications for the entire content production pipeline of NICE.
How will you measure the success of the strategy within your directorate?
First and foremost, I would like to see regular progress against the technology delivery roadmap aligned to the strategy. This means seeing projects visibly move through their delivery stages and seeing de-prioritised services decommissioned.
I want to see all digital and IT initiatives strongly integrated into the transformation roadmap of the organisation. I would like more staff to feel a connection with our technology strategy, and engage with the technology implications of their ambitions.
I would like to see DIT staff work as part of strong, empowered, NICE-wide multidisciplinary teams. These teams would have clear goals for their work and build solutions incrementally - delivering value to their users quickly, and incorporating user feedback in their continuing work. I would like to see increased organisational interest in collecting user needs and analytics, and embedding the insights into digital service development.
I want to see an improvement in staff satisfaction with the digital tools and IT services they have access to. I want them to embrace the new tools, champion them, and be ready for more innovation.
And finally, I really want to retain a happy, engaged team across DIT. A team that continues to be committed to investing in their ongoing development.
Enjoy this article?
Get in touch and let us know.
Built with Shorthand