The Warren Smith interview: sustainability, innovation, place and technology

The decisions we make today, be they economic, social or political, will shape how digital innovation serves the common good tomorrow. To meet the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, it is imperative that we innovate at speed and with care, which requires society to adopt bold new models, mindsets and ways of working.

Procurement plays an essential role in our ability to achieve more sustainable futures – particularly in ways that support the public sector and SMEs. With over 30 years of public and private sector experience, Warren Smith is an expert in modern procurement delivery. Currently the director of insight, innovation and impact at Posterity Global, Warren also co-leads the UN’s International Telecommunication Union United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) working group on intergenerational procurement for people-centred cities, and was a senior official at the UK Government Digital Service.

In this interview, Warren discusses how to set up procurement processes for sustainable urban innovation, the impact of AI and why good design and collaboration is key.

How can the procurement process for innovative digitally-enabled products and services be sped up, in ways that support the public sector client and the SME?

What I see time and again is a lack of meaningful engagement before procurement even begins. If conversations start only once the procurement is launched, it’s already too late. By then, you miss the chance to explore ideas openly, which can create frustration and even tension between stakeholders, and ultimately slows everything down. Early engagement across the organisation and wider system is essential. When a project is for towns and cities, bringing in the local authority or city administration, finance partners, commercial specialists, procurement practitioners and legal advisers helps build a shared understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve and the outcomes you want to deliver.

Speeding up procurement for innovative, digitally enabled solutions requires a more holistic, people-centred approach. That means considering the community and end-users from the outset and creating opportunities for them to participate meaningfully. When procurement starts with those needs in mind, it becomes faster, clearer and far more effective for both public-sector clients and SMEs.

Too often, specifications are issued without any reference to the needs of the citizens or businesses who will rely on the service.

What examples of good practice have you encountered in the UK or worldwide?

Wales is a unique example of great sustainable public sector practice, as it has embedded the Sustainable Development principle and the wellbeing of future generations into the very fabric of the country’s policy and legislative landscape. From a procurement perspective in cities or local government, there is a requirement to think about the long-term and intergenerational impacts of decisions that are made today, ensuring they don’t have a negative multiplier effect on generations that are either yet to be born or yet to become service users of municipal services.

There’s some great work by a non-profit company called Connected By Data, which has developed a toolkit for empowering workers’ voices in procurement of AI and data systems in Wales. Specifically, it is looking at participatory and anticipatory approaches. There are similarly great examples elsewhere in the world where teams are taking a more participatory approach to designing procurements that meet the needs of their citizens and businesses, rather than a traditional arms length approach with short-termism.

Cities are vital for this because they are at the coalface of delivering public services for the communities that they serve – from health and mobility to education and jobs. Public procurement is such a powerful, yet typically under-leveraged, area of public policy with eye-watering amounts of money spent through it every year – £400bn in the UK alone, with further estimates of €2bn in the EU and US$13tn globally. It’s vital that we use procurement as a lever for positive, equitable, resilient, sustainable approaches to urban transformation.

Photo: Lulu Black

How can contracts be written and contractual environments be created that support multi-agency collaboration with the client?

Design is key, yet seldom do we see contracts being designed from a perspective of user-centred design. Public contracts in particular are often written by lawyers or policy practitioners, with no regard for how the needs of the users can or should be met. 

There is a significant opportunity to reimagine contracts as collaborative tools for problem-solving, constructive relationships, positive service delivery and impactful outcomes. But it requires cross-functional and multidisciplinary collaboration by teams designing the contracts, who must then ensure it doesn’t get stuck in a filing cabinet once the procurement process is done – as it so often does, only coming out again when something goes wrong.

What are the motivations of the client project managers and legal teams, and are they at odds with the aspirations and stated aims of some innovation projects? Is the need to de-risk projects that are inherently uncertain the wrong approach?

Quite often they can be at odds. This is typically because there is too much of a focus on the technologies and technical solutions, rather than taking a step back to ask what the problems are and whether we understand them from the perspective of those experiencing them. That inevitably leads to friction and failure through the procurement and contracting process.

Here, the C-suite has a collective responsibility for creating the right conditions within their organisational structure, to enable everyone to take a more outcomes-based and innovative approach. This should then feed positively into the procurement and contract.

As part of this, we need to make sure we’re not reinforcing organisational silos. We need to be using that pre-procurement planning and investment appraisal stage to bring together those different organisational verticals. Then the problem can be approached from a more horizontal perspective that establishes this shared understanding. That is one of the biggest antidotes for the parochial approaches that tend to lead to sub-optimal outcomes at odds with more outcomes-based, human-centered, solution-oriented approaches.

Photo: Vitaly Gariev

Often, those people reviewing a tender response for a truly novel digitally-enabled product or service, are not equipped with the level of understanding to properly assess the tender response – how can this be changed? Have you examples of good practice?

If this is the case, then there is a failure in early stage engagement internally. If you’ve got to the procurement step, received your tenders and they are now being evaluated by people who aren’t sufficiently specialist in the areas they need to be, because you haven’t considered the right specialisms as part of your approach, then this is a considerable risk. For example, it increases the risk of challenge by an unsuccessful supplier, which might have been rejected for not meeting requirements initially, but can demonstrate that they do.

It is vital that when we’re developing the case for change, the business case, that we’re also starting to develop the narrative around the problems we’re trying to solve and the outcomes we’re trying to achieve. We must also make sure we understand the contextual complexities of the world that we’re trying to move away from. 

The bigger and more complex the transformation, the more evaluators you’re going to need. I was involved in a recent procurement for an NHS Foundation Trust in the UK, which was implementing an electronic patient records system. We spent a lot of time in the early days making sure it wasn’t viewed as a software acquisition, but as a business and clinical transformation programme that will span at least a decade. This involved engaging with internal specialists and domain experts to bring them into the evaluation process. That took an inordinate amount of time but without that, you run the risk of a sub-optimal evaluation, outcome, contract and delivery. 

Thinking about smart cities and the quick enmeshing of AI technologies into city infrastructures, what are the challenges for procurement professionals when creating and sustaining programmes in such evolving environments?

If people are only focusing on smart cities then they’re missing the vital part, which is sustainable and smart. If the focus is on technology for technology’s sake, they will almost certainly be blind to the needs of both current and future generations, and therefore unable to implement the right technologies for the right reasons in order to support sustainable and impactful change.

There are specific considerations for new and emerging technologies such as AI, be that algorithmic transparency, the approach to testing large language models, minimising the risk of bias in model design and testing, for example. But we can take some of the prevailing guidance, such as the UK government’s guidelines for AI procurement and the World Economic Forum’s AI procurement toolkit, to create the foundations for good technology procurement and contracting.

It is important to remember that in fast-moving areas like AI, solutions available today may be different from those available only weeks ago. Initiatives like the UK government’s algorithmic transparency reporting standard and its repository of AI-related projects are important steps, though there is room to go much further. Encouraging transparency throughout the delivery lifecycle must be part of the operating principles – from early planning and investment appraisals, to procurement and contracts, to service delivery and exit – and especially when private or social sector partners are involved. Contracts should embed experimentation, learning and flexibility to support innovation-enhancing procurement rather than locking-in predefined solutions.

ITU Secretary-General​ Doreen Bogdan-Martin with UN Secretary-General António Guterres at the ITU Council headquarters. Photo: UN ITU

Can you tell us a bit about your work for the UN?
I lead a U4SSC working group for the UN’s specialised ICT agency, the International Telecommunications Union, which is all about intergenerational procurement for people-centred cities. A large part of that has involved developing a model policy to support city administrations with how they would apply intergenerational thinking. But through that work, we’ve also developed procurement guidelines for smart sustainable cities. A major factor of those guidelines is about how you approach evaluation in a more constructive, collaborative and multidisciplinary way, to help optimise the decisions throughout the whole process. 

The U4SSC procurement guidelines include several case studies of governments from around the world who are adopting and implementing similar or consistent approaches to modernise their procurement practices. For example:

• Empowering women-owned businesses in the Dominican Republic
• Designing cities that work for women: the value of inclusive design
• Driving Artificial Intelligence adoption through procurement: how the UK is keeping its roads safe
• Buying in the open: renewing Mexico City’s cycle hire scheme
• How New Zealand is using procurement to benefit indigenous businesses
• How Rotterdam is building the City Local Digital Twin using innovation procurement
• How to get public servants to work outside of their silos

Innovation-enhancing procurement is another area I’m advancing in collaboration with Lina Svensberg in Sweden, through the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s Team of Specialists on Innovation and Competitiveness Policies, where we are developing guidelines and toolkits to support this work. I was also glad to contribute to the Open Contracting Partnership’s recently released guidelines on buying AI, offering practical tips, tools and case studies for public-sector buyers. It also includes a practical pathways chart and is a great resource for anyone working in this area.

I’m also contributing a policy profile on intergenerational public procurement for the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, who’s developing a roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth that’s anticipated to launch in summer 2026.

Thank you Warren for sharing your ideas and insight. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you and hearing about the positive action already underway, the resources available, and the principles, approaches and methods that need to be adopted to help us achieve sustainable urban futures.