Public sector digital transformation: do more with less

Government organisations face formidable challenges – from talent shortages, to mounting technical debt, manual processes, and data silos.

This complexity, combined with shrinking budgets, puts increased pressure on your department to cut costs and do more with less. At the same time, digital public services must meet high standards, be easy to use, and provide ongoing value to citizens. 

We’re here to translate this complexity into opportunity. We prime your public sector digital transformation to succeed. Our teams close the gaps between strategy, technical implementation, and operational excellence, helping you drive efficiencies, increase time to value, and deliver user-centric citizen services.

Drive efficiencies and transform digital public services

Optimise across multiple dimensions to deliver superior digital public services, cut costs, transform efficiency, and develop a capability for continuous and effective innovation. 

Zühlke’s GDS-aligned support combines management consultancy, digital engineering delivery, data strategy, and service operation, for a holistic approach to public sector digital transformation. 

Our multidisciplinary teams enable you to overcome legacy challenges, grow capability, and realise your greatest opportunities with a data-driven, agile, and user-centric approach.

  • Procurement framework qualified: Our multidisciplinary teams are procurement qualified, including the UK’s Digital Outcomes and Specialists, G-Cloud, and Technology Services frameworks. 
  • Accredited and compliant: Zühlke solves complex problems while meeting the highest standards in classification. We’re proud to be 13485, 27001, and 9001 ISO accredited.
  • Holistic support, from consultancy to operations: We deliver innovation, software, and hardware initiatives in complex and regulated areas – across diverse industries and ecosystems.
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Holistic support, every step of the way

  • Start small and uncover high impact opportunities

    Find the big wins fast. Our cross-functional teams of data scientists, service designers, architects, and cloud specialists map your data flows to uncover the best opportunities to achieve more with less. Our unique data-driven approach provides smarter decision-making and rapid time to value.

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  • Turn opportunities into working solutions that drive value

    Translate improvement opportunities into viable and measurable business cases. With Zühlke as your partner, you won’t be left with a theoretical strategy you can’t implement. We take you all the way from validated business case to working solution and tangible outcomes.

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  • Apply a human lens to prime digital initiatives for success

    Service design, tech modernisation, and change programmes must be viewed through a strategic and human lens. Where there’s a technical or platform-related challenge, there’s almost always a people or process dimension to consider. We apply a people lens to ensure the best outcomes for colleagues and citizens.

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  • Enable dataflow across borders to create new value at scale

    Some challenges are too complex to solve alone. And you can’t create new value inside silos. We join the dots and empower you to innovate beyond departmental and industry borders. Alongside diverse partners with a shared goal and complementary data, capabilities, and services. It’s how to solve complex issues and create new value at scale.

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Uncover innovative ways to reduce costs and improve digital public services.  

Our teams combine workshops, structured techniques, and data flow analysis to assess your current capabilities and assets, uncover ‘unknown unknowns’, and identify the data you need to scale value fast. 

From this we develop an incremental and prioritised roadmap with you, focused on initiatives with a rapid ‘value multiplier’ effect.

Turn critical improvement opportunities into working solutions that deliver positive and sustainable value.

With a relentless focus on quality and value, we don’t just advise and consult; we turn your opportunities into fully realised, operational solutions that drive value from day one.

With us, there is no ‘handover’. We’re with you, every step of the journey, and we become a part of the change you want to achieve.

Public sector digital transformations often fail because critical people, culture, and change management considerations are overlooked. 

We apply a human lens to each innovation stage, and ensure every team and product process is directly connected to and solving for real user needs.

Transform your ability to meet citizen and employee needs, while reducing cost to serve.

Apply user research and testing, customer journey mapping, prototyping, accessibility best practices, and data analytics to deliver connected experiences, build trust, and prime your digital services to succeed.

Democratised data is essential for accelerating public sector strategy, whether your focus is on decarbonisation, public health, or the delivery of superior connected services for citizens. 

Our collaborations with the likes of the NHS and Innovate UK demonstrate the critical role data ecosystems and co-innovation will play in solving complex challenges and transforming digital public services. 

We equip you with the data engineering capabilities, agility, customer-centricity, and strategic partnering mindset and capabilities you need to thrive in ecosystems. And create superior citizen propositions – smarter, faster, and at scale. 

The benefits of our ‘do more with less’ approach

Our collaboration with the UK Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) to develop the NHS COVID-19 app and infrastructure shows what’s possible with Zühlke’s ‘do more with less’ approach...

  • Reducing costs and inefficiencies: Our life-saving, award-winning app was delivered with a development budget of less than £0.50 per user. And that's not all: our analysis of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) technical architecture also resulted in cloud cost savings of nearly £2 million.
  • Positive impact on citizens' lives: the user-centric, accessible app we developed and deployed, available in multiple languages, prevented one million infections and 9600 deaths.
  • Smarter, faster innovation: developing a new digital service to support the COVID-19 response was an unprecedented challenge. Thanks to our agile, scalable, and user-centered approach, DHSC was able to solve nationwide problems in a very short time. In just twelve weeks, we deployed an app that was used by 22 million people.  
  • Continuous improvement of existing services: Over the course of two years, our team continuously developed and improved the app, resulting in more than 300 updates and the Development Team of the Year award at the UK IT Industry Awards. Today, the app remains one of the most downloaded medical apps in the Apple App Store.
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How to govern a digitalised energy system

The shift towards a green, decentralised energy system poses complex questions about how to co-ordinate and govern data effectively across disparate sources and organisations.

Our report for Energy Systems Catapult sets out an agile enterprise architecture solution to facilitate and govern energy sector digitalisation in the UK.

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Innovate UK shows how data can drive decarbonisation

We uncovered critical electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure challenges – and showed how data ecosystems help government, energy, and transport bodies solve them together.

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Data Today: the data podcast for today's innovators

Join us to learn how inspiring individuals from diverse fields and industries are transforming the way they work with data to realise their greatest opportunities. Discover in our episode with Tom Smith, how to ensure you're using data responsibly for the public good.

Contact person for United Kingdom

Jonathan Cook

Director Business Development

Jonathan Cook has 25 years' experience working for systems integrators, telecommunications, and engineering companies. He has pioneered better ways of providing engineering services, including Agile delivery, Lean user experience, and data science and data engineering. With a focus on practical innovation, he has a track record helping to implement new business models to decarbonise the energy and transport sectors.

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Contact person for Switzerland

Stefan Jäger

Regional Director Bern & Partner

Stefan Jäger has been with Zühlke since 2008 and is responsible for the Bern site as Regional Director & Partner. He ensures successful customer care and can be counted on as a trusted advisor thanks to his technical background. He supports projects from the initial request through to completion. Sharing in the success of both Zühlke and its customers is what motivates him to always go that extra mile.

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Contact person for Germany

Philipp Harrschar

Executive Director Business Development

Philipp Harrschar is Executive Director Business Development and Partner of the Zühlke Group. He has been with Zühlke since 2011 and provides strategic advice and support to clients in innovation and digitalisation projects. His focus is on cross-sector innovation patterns and the use of key technologies. 

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Contact person for Austria

Helmut Taumberger

Managing Director Cross Markets, Austria

With his years of experience and a strong innovative mindset, Helmut Taumberger is digital transformation personified. As a Managing Director Cross Markets in Austria, he is responsible for steering the company’s strategic orientation and development. A qualified engineer, he has worked in the IT sector since 2003 and has lent his substantial expertise to various international businesses. He likes nothing more than coming up with practical strategies and getting people excited about technological change.

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Contact person for Singapore

Angie Leong

Regional Managing Director Cross Markets APAC

Angie joined Zühlke in 2023 and is responsible for building Zühlke’s next strategic key focus portfolio in APAC. With over 20 years in the software industry and close to half her career in modern software services consulting, Angie oversees the public sector and the critical infrastructure of the nation portfolio in Singapore as part of her key responsibilities in leading and building new markets in Zühlke APAC.

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