speaker photo

Anna Hirschfeld (she/her)

Director, Public Digital

Anna leads digital transformation programmes which deliver real human impact.
She is an experienced leader who builds and scales teams to solve highly complex problems. This includes working with governments and public agencies to transform their services so they are human-centred, secure and efficient for both civil servants and citizens. Clients she has supported include the governments of Nova Scotia and British Columbia, UK Research and Innovation, and Homes England. As Interim Executive Director at the Nova Scotia Department for Cyber Security and Digital Solutions, Anna reset and then led a large-scale transformation to deliver a new digital vehicle and driver licensing service. This involved founding and scaling new multidisciplinary teams, creating a transformational roadmap, designing new end-to-end services, and introducing new governance structures across three government departments.
Prior to joining Public Digital, Anna was Senior Product Manager on the Universal Credit programme, successfully taking it from proof of concept to a scaled live service supporting six million people. This was the biggest transformation in the UK benefits system since the founding of the Welfare State.
Anna is a leading expert on digital identity. She worked with GOV.UK Verify to integrate it with Universal Credit, and now sits on the OECD panel helping to draft the Recommendation on the Governance of Digital Identity.

Sessions

Delivering

Radical transformation - Why you can, even when everyone is telling you you can’t

Transforming services and organisations, starting small and learning, being led by users needs and making data driven decisions - that’s what so many of us want to be doing. But how often have you heard someone say “yeah that all sounds great in theory, but we can’t do that”? Anna Hirschfeld will talk about her experience of successfully delivering benefits modernisation in the UK in a truly radical way, and how the team overcame challenges everyone said they couldn't. See More.