National Digital Architecture (NDA)

The NDA aims to establish a public sector that is “transformed, sharing, resilient, and high integrity” by creating a more unified and efficient approach to digital service delivery.

The UK Government is developing the National Digital Architecture (NDA) to enhance the public sector’s use of digital technology. This will involve not only improving current technologies and practices but also fostering a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing. While the NDA will primarily benefit the public sector, its impact is expected to extend to the private sector, benefiting UK businesses and citizens alike.

The NDA will address three key challenges:

• Many of the 100,000 digital data professionals in the UK public sector are held back from doing their most valuable work because “sharing is currently not just difficult between organisations but so hard, the incentives are so misaligned as to make it an act of irrationality”.
• The systems the UK public sector builds often have lifespans that exceed the projects and programs that fund them, leading to periods of “neglect and decay” that require new projects to fix.
• While the UK is a “digitally dependent nation,” the public sector is not currently equipped to manage the potential risks associated with this dependence, which can result from malicious cyberattacks or from things as simple as “things going wrong”.

To address these issues, the NDA will focus on three key solutions:

• The National Digital Code (NDC)
• The National Digital Exchange (NDX)
• The National Digital Resilience Platform (NDR)

While the NDA is an ambitious vision, it can be achieved “through a combination of existing assets and platforms with some built,” requiring an investment of “millions, not billions” and “dozens of people, not hundreds”.