Government Digital Transformation
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Government Digital Transformation
- 1. Government Digital Transformation It’s only just starting… Tom Scott 29th June 2016
- 7. GOV.UK
- 11. Design Manual, Digital Service Standard & Performance
- 16. Platforms
- 18. Patterns
- 19. Registers…
Editor's Notes
- Good morning, thanks for coming back for day 2! I’m Tom Scott and I’m the Digital Service Manager for Census. This is a new role for ONS and the Census team. I’m responsible for ensuring that there is an end-to-end digital service for collection, processing and dissemination of the responses. We’re taking the approach set out by Government Digital Service, GDS, to do this, loosely coupled platforms and products that meet the needs of their users, both internal and external to ONS. This is a new way to work and builds a legacy and capability that will go on beyond the 2021 Census. I have been asked to talk about the transformation of digital in government, I used to work for GDS. I set up the Digital Service Standard assessments, I’ve worked on the proposition for GOV.UK and lead the rebuild of the Service Design Manual. It’s given me some insight. I’m going to talk about what happened and what is happening now.
- The story of the recent government digital transformation starts in 2010 when the then Minister for Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, asked the Governments Digital Champion, Martha Lane Fox for recommendations on the future of DirectGov. It turned out to be the enabler for the changes that government that have been pursuing since. It was an important change, the response was a letter with high level recommendations and not a specific set of tasks. It was a challenge and call to action.
- Martha Lane Fox – Letter to MCO (Francis Maude) with 4 recommendations Make Directgov the government front end for all departments' transactional online services to citizens and businesses, with the teeth to mandate cross government solutions, set standards and force departments to improve citizens' experience of key transactions. Make Directgov a wholesaler as well as the retail shop front for government services & content by mandating the development and opening up of Application Programme Interfaces (APls) to third parties. Change the model of government online publishing, by putting a new central team in Cabinet Office in absolute control of the overall user experience across all digital channels, commissioning all government online information from other departments. Appoint a new CEO for Digital in the Cabinet Office with absolute authority over the user experience across all government online services (websites and APls) and the power to direct all government online spending.
- GDS was set up as a result of Martha’s recommendations, to enable and deliver the change. To coordinate the approach government has to digital and challenge the expectations towards delivery of services, bringing together the state and the citizen and keeping digital at the heart of decision making. The organisation is made up of people with experience outside of government, may attracted to do ‘national service’. The purpose is to bring the user closer to the service provider and ensure that the tax payer is not being exploited by having expertise in the decision making process, removing the reliance on big IT and bringing the skills and knowledge in house.
- GDS was made up of experts from across government, the DirectGov team. You can see the USDS visiting the team to talk about digital government and the relationship between the state and citizens. The behaviours of the team are perhaps the most talked about. They question everything and look for data driven decisions rather than reliance on history, so much has changed in the last 20 years around the internet and technology we can’t always take our prior understanding and apply it. They also look to build the ‘thing’ that is a minimum viable product, enhancing that only when further needs are identified and validated. They share skills, time and knowledge across government. Initially there was a single purpose for GDS - to build GOV.UK
- It followed the principles of a technology start up releasing software as soon as it is ready and maintaining an agile approach to get the MVP. GOV.UK became the place for government to publish data (exceptions being independent bodies like ONS). It’s vital national infrastructure. Started with department and service information publishing, transitioning users across and while not breaking URLs. Mainstream content is grouped around topics from user research and testing rather than departmental publishing. This allows GOV.UK to describe the end-to-end services rather than just the part an individual organisation is responsible for. Transition continued with Agencies, ALBs, NDPB etc. moving to GOV.UK – and continues today as more agencies see the benefits to transitioning to a shared publishing platform. User needs were at the centre of the approach, both citizens and government users. It had to be simple to find content and services and was built to encourage users to come to the site through search engines like Google. Traffic to GOV.UK continues to grow and averages between 12 and 14 millions visits per week, around 50% of users come from mobiles and tablets. It’s also award winning – 2013 Design Museum Design of the year award – the Mail called it ‘boring.com’!
- Transition continued with Agencies, ALBs, NDPB etc. moving to GOV.UK – and continues today as more agencies see the benefits to transitioning to a shared publishing platform. User needs were at the centre of the approach, both citizens and government users. It had to be simple to find content and services and was built to encourage users to come to the site through search engines like Google. Traffic to GOV.UK continues to grow and averages between 12 and 14 millions visits per week, around 50% of users come from mobiles and tablets. It started with an alpha and iterated quickly into the site you use today. It’s also award winning – 2013 Design Museum Design of the year award – the Mail called it ‘boring.com’!
- The second major strand of work for GDS began in January 2013 with 400 days to transform 25 exemplars for major government services and make them digital-by-default. Working with 8 departments across government to meet the needs of users rather than government. Focusing on the common and sharing resources across departments GDS built. By March 2015, government had delivered a range of world-class digital services used by millions of people, both in the UK and abroad. Twenty exemplar services were publicly available. The remaining 5 are still in development and departments are continuing to deliver them and more with the shared knowledge from this programme.
- This is just a single example – in fact it’s a much more comprehensive service now – of the visa service. It’s one of many that has been built around the user needs – in thins case in their own language, tested with native speaker in their own countries and circumstances. There are many other great services, paying vehicle tax for example with started small and grew to include direct debit set up, viewing the details of a licence and MOT, drawing all this information together under a service to enable users to do the things they needs to do to be able to drive. Some are transformational like the Lasting Power of Attorney service – please take 5 minutes to look at the YouTube video on the GDS channel, it’s great to see how a well designed service can affect peoples lives for the positive.
- It’s not enough that GDS started this work, transformation needed to happen across government. Digital-by-default was the rally call to organisations, keeping the focus on digital being the primary access point for services and supporting those users who couldn’t use those channels. The Service Design Manual represents the best practices for building user centred digital services. It covers all areas involved in doing it from technology to the team and governance to operations. It’s constantly refined and improved as knowledge across government increases, it represents all the communities of practice (designers, developers, technologists etc.) and helps teams to meet the Digital Service Standard.
- The Digital Service Standard was put in place as a check for services across government to assure that the needs or users were understood and met and that the teams building the services were sustainable and able to develop as users feedback and changed over time. There are 18 criteria, they are not prescriptive, rather a way of working that aligns to the objectives that GDS and government has set. Part of the objectives are to be open about the KPIs that the service is meeting, GDS built a platform for those.
- The Performance platform is a real time data publishing platform that provides real insight into the services that government is offering. It’s important as it provides details on the success of services and the digital transformation they are on. This is the Lasting Power of attorney service, you can see that digital take up has grown from nothing in September 2013 to over 26% of all applications – seen as this is an industry dominated by legal firms this is a real achievement, putting the user at the centre and allowing them to make decisions on who will be their appointed guardian when they can not make decisions themselves in the future.
- And this is the real achievement of GOV.UK and the digital-by-default approach bringing the state and citizens closer together. Meeting the expectations of user (which keep raising) and understanding the needs they have. It’s not about making a personal and friendly service (that can be a good thing), it’s about giving users access to the services they need to use. This is the fundamental difference in approach. Users have no choice over the service they use, they are not customers, there is only one HMRC, there is only one DVLA, there is only one ONS. And we are accountable to those users more and more, these are the citizens, people who provide the means and the demand for our services to exist.
- There is much work still to be completed. Almost all services need to be rethought outside of organisational silos, I shouldn’t need to go to different departments or agencies to achieve a single task. So what do we do to solve this. There are a number of things that government is working on that will bring this together.
- You may have used one of these already. These are common tasks and shared components that are part of a service. Some of these are in the early stages of development, GOV.UK pay, GOV.UK notify, Government PaaS, blueprints for technology. The most obvious example being GOV.UK Verify.
- GOV.UK Verify has created a market place for identity. It allows users to sign into services where there identity is required to be known, and users do not need to rely on government to hold details about identity. Users can trust a 3rd party (probably someone who they’ve trusted before). This is really important because users do not need a single government account and can move providers at any time, but still only need a single log-in for the whole of government.
- Service patterns for common services. Seems simple but there are hundreds of services government runs that provide similar outputs, licences being a great example.
- I’ll leave most of the explanation to the next speaker, suffice to say all services in someway or another are underpinned by these, they are canonical and have a well understood structure. They are the foundation to the future of government services and digital.