Earlier this week the the final ministerial department joined GOV.UK. This isn’t the end of the GOV.UK story; in fact it’s barely the end of the beginning. But today is still a big moment, the result of commitment and collaboration from  hundreds of civil servants all across government.

So to mark the occasion I thought I’d gather up and share some historical artifacts; some sketches, diagrams, lists, photos,and screengrabs that chart the evolution of GOV.UK from a crisp recommendation for a ‘single domain for government’ in Martha Lane Fox’s November 2010 report, through to today’s award-winning reality.

PS If anyone’s got any interesting stuff we’ve missed lying about on their hard drive, please send it my way and I’ll add it to the gallery.

We’re learning a lot about users as we work with more teams outside GDS. Jamie Trollope from the Customer Insight and Diversity Team at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) writes about what they’ve discovered during some recent user testing.

Customer insight plays a vital part in ensuring any DVLA product, service or initiative is fit for purpose and easy to use for all our customers. Recently we tested new versions of driving licence renewal reminder forms and new online transactions with profoundly deaf customers. We wanted to share some of our findings.

Insight and diversity

Our Customer Insight and Diversity Team is an in-house group of researchers and usability testers who use a range of techniques to engage with our customers.

We test a variety of things from paper forms, mock web pages or online transactions, to telephone Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) systems. We also make sure we get a diverse selection of people in for these tests. This ensures we get feedback from disabled or traditionally difficult to reach customers.

There are more than 3.7 million people of working age (16 to 65) in the UK with some form of hearing loss, which demonstrates the potential impact of not catering for this customer segment.

For the testing with deaf users, we worked closely with various associations and charities to help us find participants. In this case we had excellent support from Robin Ash, Midlands region Empowerment and Campaigns officer for the British Deaf Association.

What did we find out?

User testing is always an important opportunity to challenge (or validate) assumptions we make while designing services. Initial discussions around the reminder letters quickly made us realise how difficult certain groups of customers find it to access DVLA services (and many others across the public sector).

For example, it didn’t occur to me that the average reading age in the deaf community is generally lower than the UK adult population. This was first identified by Reuben Conrad in 1980 when he tested deaf children’s reading skills and found that the average reading age was 8 years old. It was so shocking that many people started to change from oral education to signing. The average has now crept up to about 9 but it is still less than what’s required to be able to read the Daily Mail.

Statistics cited by the Department for Education show deaf children’s attainment at Key Stage 2 English and Maths was 42% lower than their hearing counterparts. There are too many reasons for such low figures to include them all in this short post. However, it is useful for us to know what we are dealing with; and important that we’re aware that deaf people have varied levels of written and sign language competency.

This meant that some of the wording and terminology we used in our literature was completely unknown to the participants. For example, words like ‘surrender’ and ‘defaced’ were known only in a very specific context, and caused quite a bit of confusion. Customers also mentioned they found using our online services generally hard for those same reasons.

On the whole, the new transaction pages we tested were very well received. They were described as simple and easy to follow, allowing the individual to retain their independence and complete the transaction rather than potentially struggle with communication through an intermediary (for example, face-to-face at a DVLA office or with the help of a social worker).

The younger participants were particularly receptive, and although there were a couple of issues raised there wasn’t anything that would result in a failed transaction or cause them to seek someone to help. These results are being fed back to the relevant teams and recommendations have been made to improve the language and accessibility of our digital services.

I’m pleased to say that the test was a great success, and we now have some valuable insight about the changes we’re proposing. It’s a great example of how the Customer Insight & Diversity team has been able to identify significant issues that we need to address, and how our recommendations have been fed back into the delivery of products and services.

Research and testing in this way is critical and should be a part of any business change or service development. Putting the customer at the heart of what we do is more important than ever, particularly in supporting digital by default services.

Highlights: A very big week, as we marked the 24th and last of the ministerial departments moving to Inside Gov. The numbers that describe the volume of activity over the last six months are incredible – and thanks go to so many of the team who’ve worked hard to make this happen. Other notable things this week have been GDS participation in a cross-government major project review – working with Defra to answer for performance in and around our work with the Rural Payments Agency, one of our first exemplar services. We also had the opportunity at the Public Sector Show this week to talk to counterparts looking at digital services in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

(Full transcript below)

Interviewer:
Hello, Mike. A big week for GDS this week.

Mike:
Huge week. We made it; we made the 24th department onto Inside Gov. As well as Export Finance UK, we moved the Number 10 site and the Deputy Prime Minister site to the platform. It’s the end of a hugely ambitious five months to move the entirety of Whitehall onto one domain. It’s a tremendous, tremendous achievement.

In the last six months we’ve published 50,000 documents; 222 sub-domains have been closed; 2,250 user stories have been delivered; 223 policies have been written to a new clear style; and 5.8 million people have visited Inside Government pages, making more than 29 million page views.

I want to give a lot of thanks. The team here have been amazing; people have worked really, really hard. Neil Williams and all the guys here have done a great job. I’d like to thank some people who’ve helped us with moving these last two domains on. I’d like to thank Susan D’Arcy and Louisa Harper, who worked on Number 10; Anthony Simon and Amy Khan, and the teams at the PM’s office and over at Downing Street, because they’ve been constantly supporting us. It’s great to now have them on the platform.

Interviewer:
We were joined for some celebratory words later, weren’t we?

Mike:
We did. We did, firstly we should thank our Minister, Francis Maude, who took time from a very busy day for him. He came over and gave a fantastic speech, really raised all the team. We also had some visitors on the day. Chris Martin, who’s the Prime Minister’s PPS, who’s a very busy man and obviously can’t spend much time away from Number 10, he came over to see what we’d been doing and left, I hope, impressed. It’s great to have him on side. I should also thank Stephen Kelly, who obviously runs the Efficiency and Reform Group. Stephen came over and also bought us all a drink, which was nice.

Interviewer:
That was very kind of him. Have we been up to anything else this week?

Mike:
One of the interesting things to happen this week was we had an MPA review, called MPRG; it’s a Major Project Review Group. It’s when treasury-led groups of civil servants and external advisors hold us up to account. Sometimes we sit on those when we look across government and what it’s doing.

This week we were on the other side of the table with our colleagues from Defra; it’s one of our first exemplars. We were held to account by Sir Peter Gershon and others, who asked us really searching and challenging questions about RPA, the Rural Payments Agency, and our work there and agile across government.

It’s fascinating to hear the challenge and also to take the challenge. It’s also a little bit intimidating sometimes to be on the other side of the table. That was the major thing this week. It’s good; it’s good that everything we do is in the open and it’s audited. It’s great that we can on those panels say to people, “Look at our website. Look at our blog,” because we’re trying to do all these things as openly and transparently as possible.

Interviewer:
Excellent. You’ve got away to talk at the Public Sector Show as well.

Mike:
It’s really important that we engage as much as possible with colleagues right across the public sector, and it is a great show. This one was in London, but we had time afterwards with colleagues from Scotland, and also particularly spent an hour with the Northern Ireland colleagues who are looking at their digital agenda.

They actually have their own domains over there, but they also do a lot of work looking at how we’ve worked on platforms, to see if we can help them. We’re going over soon to Belfast to meet them, but it was great to really connect with them as well.

These shows are really important, because at the end of the show more than a dozen people waited and asked us loads of questions about how they can work with the central government agenda. Again, it’s another way of reconnecting with the wider public sector.

Interviewer:
Excellent. We’ve also had some new starters and a couple of people saying goodbye.

Mike:
Yes, Will Callaghan left this week. He did a great job for us and it’s important to know – we wish Will the best, great guy – but also where he’s gone. He’s gone to ‘Go On’ trust and he’s going to be a huge force in driving those on. We’ll miss him but we’ll still see him.

I think it’s great from my point of view that we as a hub here, when people do leave they go on to really notable digital things. In some ways I’m sad to see Will go, but I’m glad that he’s gone to another high profile digital role.

We say “Hello” to some new colleagues here. Fola’s [Ekundayo] joined us as a content designer on the GOV.UK team; and Gavin, who’s joined the transformation team, Gavin Watson. It’ll be good to welcome those into GDS this week.

Interviewer:
Excellent. Enjoy the Bank Holiday.

Mike:
Thank you very much, and you; onwards.

I’ve recently been embedded with the Inside Government team to work on understanding user behaviour through data analysis. One of my first tasks was to investigate the way that policies are being used and to identify any interesting or notable conclusions. Here’s an example of the format of a policy:

The content explorer provides a very useful snapshot of how the policy content is performing. But I wanted to dig further down into the data.

At the time of the analysis, Inside Government featured approximately 200 policies. I started by examining usage of the format to provide some background context using our analytics package.

The black line in the graph below shows the weekly visits to Inside Government since it was launched. The red line, plotted on the right axis, shows visits in which at least one policy was viewed. Note the different scales on the two Y axes. Visits involving looking at a policy page make up around 10% of visits to Inside Government, and this has remained fairly consistent as more departments have moved to GOV.UK.

I next looked at the pageviews of policy pages in the first two weeks of April to get a sense of the popularity distribution. (Use this chart to get a feel for the distribution, rather than the individual data points!)

This shows that there are a few policies which are relatively very popular such as Increasing the use of low-carbon technologies and Reducing obesity and improving diet. The majority of policies got fewer than 2000 pageviews but this is not surprising as many of them are topical, such as Marking relevant national events and ceremonies, or specialist, like Managing freshwater fisheries.

The majority of policies feature 3 tabs: ‘Policy’, ‘Detail’ and ‘Latest’ and I broke down each 3-tabbed policy by the share of pageviews each of the tabs received.

From this I was able to calculate that on average the Policy tab received 57% of the pageviews. Next, I created a histogram with percentage ‘buckets’ showing how many policies were categorised in each.

This shows, for example, that there were 14 policies in which the Policy tab share was between 50–55%. The broken yellow line shows the average, and outlying areas have been highlighted in red. On the left side are policies in which the main Policy tab was infrequently viewed, such as Making it easier to trade. On the right side are policies in which users hardly looked at the Detail or Latest tabs, such as Adapting to climate change.

The underlying data for all the policies have been shared with Inside Government content designers to analyse further how users are coming to these policy pages and to identify where improvements can be made.

This analysis is part of our work to understand how users are engaging with content since we completed the transition of the ministerial departments to GOV.UK. Next we will introduce additional factors such as the distribution of time spent on pages, the depth of scrolling and where links have been clicked on a page; all of which will provide a deeper understanding of user behaviour, and pinpoint where performance is good or where improvements are required.

Highlights: Progress this week on a new supplier framework, approaching launch around the end of this month, which will provide the whole of government with access to a broader range of digital and agile suppliers. GDS have also been working closely with the Student Loans Company in their selection of a technical transformation partner. The Digital Advisory Board also met this week. Next week, the monthly all-staff meeting will see updates from all the different projects and workstreams across GDS.

(Full transcript below)

Interviewer:
Hello Mike. What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Mike:
So a few things; firstly our supplier framework, which is a means to get a much broader range of digital and Agile-type suppliers working across the whole of government. That is making its final way into a thing called the OJEU [Official Journal of the European Union] process, which means we go out to the market, and we get suppliers signed up to that. We are hoping some time around the end of this month, to actually issue that. It is a lot of legal work, but that has been going on for six months now. We are getting to the final throes of that, which will be a real big step for us. Because it will open up to all departments, a whole new supply chain. So that is good progress. I spent the last two days in Glasgow with Mat Wall, helping SLC [Student Loans Company] select a technical transformation partner. So viewing supplier presentations, catching up with the good folks like Gordon Simpson and Tom Mead, and Martin Campbell up there, on the work they are doing there. We had a good meeting in the Digital Advisory Board this week, on Wednesday, where they all came in to meet with us.

Interviewer:
Excellent. We have got a big meeting here as well next week.

Mike:
Yes. Next week is our monthly all staff meeting. So that happens on Wednesday afternoon. So we are all looking forward to that, to see what the updates are across all the different projects and workstreams in GDS.

Interviewer:
Cool. There will be a few new faces.

Mike:
There are a few new faces around, who started this week as well. A person called Ian Chick, has just started in the transformation team, central programme office there, to help us get a bit more mature and established in how we run some of these big programmes in GDS.

Interviewer:
That is excellent. We have had some good weather since the Bank Holiday as well?

Mike:
We have, yes. Thankfully, the ice age is over and the GDS Griffins, our softball team, went out there and won their first game. Good old Albert Massa was named our MVP, or “man of the match,” as we used to say.

Interviewer:
Excellent, until next time.

Mike:
Thank you.

David Thorpe writes in response to yesterday’s report by Lord Young on support for smaller businesses.

Yesterday Lord Young released Growing Your Business, the second instalment of his report on small firms. The report looks at ways to help small firms grow. Record numbers of people are starting a business each year, joining a community of over 4.8 million firms in the UK today. Of these, 3.6 million are sole traders.

Lord Young’s report identifies just how much complexity, cost and inconsistency hinders Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs. GDS is making its contribution through GOV.UK with its focus on user needs and delivering simpler, clearer and faster information and services.

Support for SMEs

GDS is working with colleagues at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) to bring more coherence to the wealth of schemes and programmes available through a clear, simple framework based around user needs, not the needs of government departments.

Through an ongoing process of iteration, and acting on user feedback, we will tailor our communications with businesses over time to deliver greater and greater impact. This includes the content and services on GOV.UK and also the way we communicate with businesses more generally.

Getting closer to users

Lord Young’s report recommends the use of the 130+ business schools around the UK as ‘anchors’. These anchors will provide an information resource to meet the specific needs of SMEs. SMEs will be able to access practical advice, additional face-to-face support, and mentoring.

GDS is working with BIS colleagues to determine what kind of support government can, and should, provide to support these local communities of practice.

Open data

Our commitment to open data will help us to provide better information to businesses. We are developing APIs through which businesses can access government data. Since the launch of GOV.UK we’ve been trialling a content API and we’re continuing to improve and refine it.

Open standards

We’re being more transparent throughout the procurement process for government technology. By doing this we’re giving suppliers of all sizes the information they need. Setting out our Open Standards Principles is a part of this. We’re providing a level playing field for all suppliers and making our contracts more accessible.

The G-Cloud Framework is improving the way in which suppliers can sell technology services to government. It has simplified purchasing and it provides a marketplace through the Cloudstore. It has already cut the long tendering and procurement process for commodity IT to days or hours rather than weeks or months.

We recognise the time demands on SMEs and so we’re keen to communicate with them in a clear and straightforward way. Our dedication to user feedback means we’ll continually be looking for ways to reduce the burdens on SMEs, and promoting the support that government can give to them.

Phil Buckley, Product Manager of the Performance Platform, writes:

I’m very proud to announce the latest release of the Performance Platform. Building on the performance statistics we have for GOV.UK, this release powers the dashboards for all the different Licences, Notices, Registrations applications you can make. David Williams blogged about these in March.

The Licensing dashboards are the first of many; the Performance Platform is built to allow any government service to input data from any source, to see how that data changes over time, and in the future to compare their service’s performance with that of similar ones. The aim of the platform is to allow the owners to make data-driven decisions to improve their services.

Although the primary audience for this information is the person who owns the service, all this information is also publicly available – you can see it yourself at https://www.gov.uk/performance/licensing; and in the future you will be able to download the data too.

In this instance, we are combining data from both web analytics and from back end systems so we have a very good picture of how many licences are being applied for online and how many are being processed.

Users can drill right down into specific local authorities such as Cornwall, or look at individual licence data such as collecting money in the street for charity.

As an example of the sort of data being collected, here is the drop-off rate for all online submissions in the week starting 6 May 2013:

So, we can see that many more people are downloading a form than are going to submit it; and of those who get to the submit application page, only 68% (21% of the total visitors) actually successfully submit the form and where necessary pay the fee.

Now, with all data, it seems to me that the most important question is: is this number big or small? And the truth is that at this early stage, we don’t quite know the answer: given that in many instances people actually have to pay money for one of these licences, a 32% drop-off rate may be perfectly reasonable.

However, it’s fantastic that we now have this benchmark, and as we start to get more and more data in on this and on other transactions, we will be able to see more clearly if this is typical behaviour.

There’s plenty more to come from the Performance Platform, and we hope it will give real power to service owners and allow them to make a positive impact on the transactions people make with government. In the meantime, those who are technically minded might be interested that the Performance Platform code is publicly available on github.

I’ll write more when we have more services available and more statistics to compare – but I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the Performance Platform team who have worked so hard on the project.

The first meeting of the newly formed Open Standards Board took place on Thursday last week (9 May). Liam Maxwell, the Government’s Chief Technology Officer, chaired the meeting writes Linda Humphries.

I am enormously grateful to all of the members for volunteering their time and their expertise for the public good. Over time, their efforts will have a massive impact on people’s lives, making our services better and potentially saving millions of pounds in public money.

It was great to finally get down to work on putting the structures in place to help us make the right choice of which open standards to use.

The Open Standards Board agreed the process for how we should select open standards and appointed Nicholas Oughtibridge from the Health and Social Care Information Centre to chair a Data Standards Panel to advise the Board.

They also agreed to use the assessment criteria proposed in the European Common Assessment Methodology for Standards and Specifications as a starting point for the criteria to be used by advisory panels and challenge owners when assessing challenge proposals.

The terms of reference for the Board are published on the Standards Hub along with more information about what was discussed at the meeting.

The first challenges have been open for responses since March and we’ll be starting to close these soon. Challenge owners can then begin to put forward proposals, drawing from these responses. You’ll be invited to discuss these proposals with us as they develop.

If you’ve not already signed up to the Standards Hub and had your say, now would be a perfect time to get started.

Today we released our third major update to the Transactions Explorer tool.

The complete list shows the breadth of transactional services provided by the government, from tax-based transactions with volumes in the millions per year, to applications to burn heather and grass, for which only one licence was issued last year.

We’re collecting data every quarter for a rolling 12-month period, and the latest release covers January to December 2012. As this is the second major release of data, we’ve started to present a clear view of changes in services over time.

For the first time, we’re also publishing data on digital take-up: the number of transactions completed through digital channels. As departments start to implement their digital strategies, and as services are being transformed, the Explorer tool will track the rise in digital take-up and the effect this has in reducing costs per transaction.

The main purpose of the Transactions Explorer is to ensure that service owners and the public have transparent access to key measures of service performance. Since its launch, we’ve been encouraged to see departments starting to improve their processes for collecting, using and sharing performance data about their services.

In the Explorer, each of the 70 highest volume services now has a more detailed page showing some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) we’re using to assess transactional services. Cost per transaction and digital take-up are there already, and in the coming months we’ll start to publish data on user satisfaction and transaction completion rates.

More updates are planned in which we will automate more of the data collection where we can, and integrate the Explorer more closely with the Performance Platform.

Highlights: The 1000th code release on GOV.UK – that’s about seven every working day. We also created a team within HMRC to extend the way we’ve been working out into departments. At our big monthly team meeting on Wednesday we heard from the Student Loans Company about the great work they’ve been doing to transform their transactions. We also saw the launch of the Digital Skills Alliance, led by Martha Lane Fox at the Go ON UK Trust. Next week we’ve got our regular digital leaders’ meeting on Wednesday and a major release of new guidance for CTOs which will form part of our digital by default service standard. We’ve also got more new starters in the team, and continue with our progress on the 25 exemplar service projects. As part of this I’m going up to the north-east to meet DWP and HMRC, and while up there I’m speaking at the Thinking Digital conference.

(Full transcript below)

Matt:
Okay. Hello Mike, what have you been up to at GDS this week?

Mike:
Hi Matt. We’ve released our thousandth code release to GOV.UK this week. That’s an amazing statistic. That means really about seven releases every working day. I want to talk about that for a moment, because when we came to government the MO for getting stuff done was like “IT programmed a code release every three months”. Now we’re doing one every hour and a quarter, and it shows you just how reactive we are to user need. I’m delighted, it’s a real testament to the strength of the team’s architecture, and the way it’s been built and also our receptiveness to user need and user feedback. James Thornett and the team have done a great job.

The other thing we did this week, the major achievement is actually we moved a team from here. This is a year when we’re trying to get out and spin up our examples in lots of parts of government. We moved a team to HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs], Etienne and Chris, and the gang, and having a digital centre in the heart of our tax system is a really big step.

Matt:
That’s excellent, we’ve also had a couple of big events this week.

Mike:
We have. On Wednesday we had a team meeting, me and everyone went in a room and did the show and tell and it’s great. One of the best bits of it, we had our colleagues from Student Loans company come down, Martin Campbell, Lindsay Brown, Hilary Brownlie. They came down and gave us a presentation of the work they’ve done. So much of this year is about successes that don’t happen here in GDS with GOV.UK, it’s successes happen where transactions are. That was terrific.
On Monday Martha Lane Fox, Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho as it is now, she launched the Digital Skills Alliance with the Go ON Trust that she chairs. Lots of companies involved, Danny Alexander the Chief Secretary of the Treasury made a great speech about digital skills. So it’s great to see government and Go On working to generate more skills out there for everyone to increase their digital uptake.

Matt:
Brilliant. We’ve also got another big meeting next week as well.

Mike:
We have digital leaders next week, next Wednesday, and a crucial thing on the agenda there is applying the digital by default standard and working out how some of our new services meet that standard and what we do with some of our existing services.

Matt:
We’ve also got some releases coming up next week.

Mike:
We have, our biggest single release is the CTO guidance, which is going into the manual. Liam Maxwell who runs the Office of the CTO here in GDS, his team have actually been creating a load of advice and guidance and direction for the many, many CTOs and CIOs in government. Actually the fact that that isn’t a meeting or a paper, the fact that it’s on a browser, it’s a manual, is part of our new governance for technology. I’m really excited by that.

Matt:
We have also got some stuff taking place outside of the office next week as well.

Mike:
Yes, plenty of things going on outside this office. There’s 25 exemplars in 15 locations. I’m going to Newcastle next week, seeing the team up in Longbenton which is just north of Newcastle, it’s where the DWP and HMRC offices are, seeing what we could do digitally there. I’m also speaking whilst there at the Thinking Digital conference, and I’m really going to be talking about how we get many of those companies and individuals with great digital skills up in the North East into our supply chain.

Herb Kim, who runs that conference has been a pioneer in this space for many years. There’s loads of companies up there and we’ve got to get them into the government supply chain.

Matt:
Finally we’ve got some new starters as well at GDS.

Mike:
We have plenty of new starters, and one worth mentioning is Julie Hendry. She’s an Agile coach, and it’s great that we now have people who are going out and coaching other parts of government around Agile principles, and how we do stuff here. She’ll be working first and foremost with DVLA.

Matt:
Excellent. Until next week.

Mike:
Onwards.

Today we are releasing a further iteration of the Government Service Design Manual. We’ve updated this with more guidance for service managers and, for the first time, information for Chief Technology Officers on how government is rebalancing its approach to technology.

Users need services that are genuinely agile and responsive to changing needs – where change reduces costs and risks rather than raising them and so making government more productive and our public services better.

Our guiding principles for this change are simple:

• focusing on user needs, ensuring that technology becomes so good that our colleagues, citizens and businesses want to use it
• putting outcomes first; such as reductions in cost per transaction
• using ‘openness’ to our advantage – open data, open standards, open source, open markets

Making a start

The Cabinet Office has already begun to make some changes. The delivery of commodity infrastructure services – connectivity, application hosting, hosting, collaboration and productivity services, devices and support – is moving towards the use of standard services procured via common frameworks such as the Public Services Network and G-Cloud. The Integrated Shared Services programme is driving towards the delivery of browser-based shared services through a small number of common service centres. And then there’s us, GDS,  in place to co-deliver Digital Strategies with Digital Leaders in departments and agencies.

In making these changes, we are enabling departments to focus on their Mission IT systems – the technologies needed to address the specific user needs of that department. GDS is working on a review of the governance and support provided to IT professionals. This is an important part of ensuring that we are providing structures in which they can flourish, and work in tandem with their digital colleagues to deliver great services for users.

The shape of government technology

We have mapped government technology into four distinct functional areas:

1. Digital public services: the transactional services that drive citizen engagement with the state.

2. Mission IT: the line of business applications that run the individual internal processes of departments and agencies. These are often specific to their business functions and many can be defined as ‘special’, although they draw upon underlying commodity components.

3. Infrastructure: the common connectivity, hosting and device management services that enable organisations to have the tools they need in the hands of officials and colleagues.

4. Back office: the day to day services like HR and Finance that run the operations of all our departments and agencies

Some of these areas are things that meet common user needs across government. To address those, we will implement government as a platform, providing departments with common business functionality that can be re-used by multiple users in multiple service areas. For specific needs, such as those in Mission IT and digital public services, GDS and the Cabinet Office will work alongside departments to ensure they have the capability and support they need to meet them. The service manual is a big part of building that digital capability across government, and GDS plans to provide a similar level of support to technology services.

Other organisations like eBay and Paypal have already successfully implemented the platform model, developing a core technology infrastructure that others have then built upon – driving the success of the platform and meeting users’ needs more effectively than the original provider could have achieved alone.

These changes will be introduced over the next 5 years as deals for existing services come to their natural end. As these expire, departments and users will be transitioned to common services. The Cabinet Office will support departments in ensuring that it can be successfully delivered. The outcomes will be worth it: early adoption of this approach has already made significant savings.

By focusing on our users’ needs, driving towards commodity services wherever possible, sharing services and breaking down departmental silos we will be able to make large savings for the taxpayer. But we will also be able to deliver technology that is fit for purpose and supports civil service reform.

We are starting to talk to potential providers of assisted digital support from the commercial, voluntary and wider public sectors.

The Assisted Digital team at GDS is working with departments to develop assisted digital support for digital services. This will give the 18% of UK adults who are offline access to digital by default services.

Assisted digital support will be provided by the private, voluntary and community sectors as standard. So it’s time for us to start talking to potential suppliers of assisted digital services. Here at GDS we’ve done this before with Identity Assurance, with SMEs building digital products for government and with SMEs more broadly. Encouraging early conversations between departments and potential suppliers is critical in shaping these services.

The official way to start market engagement is by publishing a Prior Information Notice on the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily website. Next we’re holding an event on 13 June for potential suppliers. You can register for the event on the Government Procurement Service website. For those of you who can’t make the event, the presentations, questions and answers will be published afterwards on the GPS website, where you’ll be able to feed in your thoughts.

At the event we’ll be giving an overview of the government’s early requirements for assisted digital. Departments will also speak about their needs and there’ll be lots of time for questions and discussion. Assisted digital services are new so we welcome input and challenge from potential suppliers. We hope to see you there to start the conversation.

Highlights: The launch of new guides for Chief Technology Officers on the Digital Service Manual. We also published the latest quarterly update on the transaction explorer which for the first time included information about the digital take up of all departmental services. We met with digital leaders to carry on conversations around building digital capability within departments and DCLG talked about how they are supporting local authorities with their move to digital by default agendas. We also met with the BIS Entrepreneurs Forum to talk to them about GOV.UK, the advice for businesses on there and how we could look to improve it. After the bank holiday we’ll start testing with real users some of the improvements to the search facility of GOV.UK that we’ve been working on over the last few weeks.

(Full transcript below)

Matt:
Hello, Kathy. What have you been up to at GDS this week?

Kathy Settle:
Two big things I want to highlight. The first one, which was mentioned last week, is that Liam Maxwell’s technology team have launched some new guides for Chief Technology Officers on the Digital Service Manual. So, some really useful stuff on there about how to take forward improvements to technology.

The other thing that’s worth mentioning is the transaction explorer. So as you know, we do regular updates on that. The last quarterly update we did came out last week, which also included for the first time information about the digital take-up of all departmental services. So, some really interesting stuff there people might want to look at.

Matt:
We’ve also had a couple of big meetings this week as well.

Kathy Settle:
We have. We had – the digital leaders had their monthly meeting on Wednesday. Quite a few things they talked about; two of the big ones probably worth mentioning. The first one was we carried on our conversations about building digital capability in departments.

This meeting particularly focused on how we can help departments recruit the right people to fill the gaps in their capabilities. The second presentation was from DCLG. Both Julian Barry and Sheila Reynolds gave a presentation about how they’re supporting local authorities with their move to digital by default agendas.

The second meeting we went to was the BIS Entrepreneurs Forum. This is a meeting run by their BIS Secretary of State. They meet quarterly to talk to entrepreneurs who run business to get their feedback on various BIS policies. We went to talk to them about GOV.UK and the advice for businesses on GOV.UK and how we could look to improve it.

We’re having follow up meetings, particularly with Dale Murray, who’s one of their non-exec directors. We’re arranging to meet her in a few weeks, which will be really interesting. It’s always good to get some feedback from real users about our services.

Matt:
You’ve got a couple of big things coming up after the bank holiday as well?

Kathy Settle:
Yes, we have and probably the big thing really is the improvements that we’re making to the search facility on GOV.UK. We’ve been working on that for a few weeks now and next week we’re going to start testing it with some real users to get their feedback, which will be really helpful.

Many thanks to Kate Cook and the user testing team for that. We look forward to their comments feeding into the improvements that we do between now and probably around about mid-June.

Matt:
We continue having new starters but also a couple of people moving around in house as well.

Kathy Settle:
We do. Particularly worth mentioning today Janet Hughes. Janet has been the real guiding force behind getting all the policy work onto GOV.UK. So, all those policies you see negotiated between departments, Janet’s been the force that’s made that happen.

Now we’ve transitioned all the departments onto GOV.UK, Janet’s going to be moving on to our identity insurance team, where I’m sure she’ll be just as influential there.

Matt:
GDS staff continue to be out and about talking in places as well.

Kathy Settle:
Yes, that’s right. I think Mike Bracken mentioned last week he was speaking at the Thinking Digital event which he did on Wednesday. Also, Jordan Hatch who people might remember joined us as a 17 year old only about 18 months ago now. He was speaking at his second ever talk at the OpenTech event. By all reports was excellent, so well done Jordan.

Matt:
Excellent. Well, enjoy the bank holiday.

Kathy Settle:
And you.

The Assisted Digital team at GDS is working with departments to develop assisted digital support for services being redesigned to be digital by default. The first 25 of these are known as exemplars, as their progress will inform and guide that of other services.

Our goal is to make sure that the 18% of UK adults who are offline have access to digital by default services. The first step is to talk to departments to find out what they know about their offline users and the issues they currently face. Once we have an initial idea of who the users are, we talk to departments and to people outside government to define user needs and develop ideas for assisted digital support.

Last week, we ran a workshop on the Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) exemplar with the assisted digital Stakeholder Reference Group and colleagues from the Office of the Public Guardian and the Ministry of Justice Digital Services Division. Our Stakeholder Reference Group has representatives on it from the Post Office, Citizens Advice, GoON UK, Age UK, Digital Unite, the Shaw Trust, Carers UK, UCanDoIT, Online Centres Foundation, Shelter, Ability Net, RNIB and Scope. These organisations know lots about offline users and are already heavily involved in providing services to them.

At the workshop, we asked the group to identify user needs or user stories for offline users of the service, and to prioritise these needs. We also asked them to think about potential assisted digital solutions that would meet these needs. Some examples of user needs identified are:

• As someone with literacy issues, I want help understanding the complex terms so that I can submit an accurate LPA.
• As someone who is socially isolated with no family support, I want access to a support service staffed by qualified people so that I can get the help, advice and support I need to complete an LPA.

The attendees emphasised that all users should be able to get information about the service in an understandable and accessible format, offline as well as online. This is really important, as applying for a Lasting Power of Attorney is not always straightforward and some of the concepts and language will be unfamiliar to a lot of people. Some attendees also noted that users needed to have access to a printer to print out completed application forms to sign, as the current process still requires the Lasting Power of Attorney form to be signed by hand.

Among the options the group discussed was the possibility of allowing users without internet access to complete an application offline and then go to a place with internet access to upload it quickly. Attendees also thought a phone-based assisted digital solution would work well. For example, a user could phone the Office of the Public Guardian, or a trusted third party, who would then talk them through the digital service or support them in accessing it.

A few weeks ago, we talked to members of the Digital Advisory Board about the Lasting Power of Attorney exemplar. They also highlighted the phone as a preferred route for delivering assisted digital support. They suggested using a contact centre with new technologies, such as remote access to a user’s computer, that would allow an agent to be fully aware of a user’s progress while talking to them about the support they need.

We’ve learnt a lot from the work we’ve done so far, but we know we won’t get the final answer for assisted digital from just two workshops. We think it’s really important to involve a range of people from outside as well as inside government in developing assisted digital support, and we’re trying to do that right from the start. In the coming weeks, we’ll be continuing our work on the LPA exemplar. We’ll also be running workshops with our Stakeholder Reference Group on other exemplar services and will be talking to members of the Digital Advisory Board to get their input.

And we want to look more widely. We will be talking to offline service users, organisations interested in inclusive design, people involved in service delivery, and others with relevant experience and expertise. We know that we need to get assisted digital right to make sure that everyone benefits as services become digital by default.

Highlights: Transaction work is making progress, including the launch this week of the discovery process for the e-Gates “exemplar” [service transformation to digital] in the Home Office, and the start of writing code for the Carers’ Allowance transaction. Agile coaches are joining the Land Registry and Intellectual Property Office to work at Board level on explaining the principles and supporting the management of change. GDS visited the frontline operation of the Office of the Public Guardian – owner of another exemplar service, and the Alpha version of the training course for service managers will start next week.

(Full transcript below)

Interviewer:
Hello, Mike. What have you been up to at GDS this week?

Mike Beaven:
Hi there. Busy old week. One of the big things we’ve done this week is with the Home Office, where we started the discovery the process for the e-Gates exemplar, which is part of Border Force. We’ve also actually started cracking code, or writing code, on the Beta for the Carers’ Allowance transaction. We’ve also managed to hire some Agile coaches into a couple of business agencies, which is the Land Registry and the Intellectual Property Office.

Interviewer:
What will they helping to do?

Mike:
Basically the teams there, at leadership level, aren’t that familiar with Agile and how it works. So we’re getting someone in to operate at a board level. To explain the principles and help them start their change.

Interviewer:
We’ve been out at other departments as well?

Mike:
We had a good day up at the Office of the Public Guardian’s Birmingham Office, where they actually process around 250,000 applications for Lasting Powers of Attorney a year. So a very typical frontline operation. Spent time with the people on the ground, who have the delights of loading scanners and punching things with large stamps, to say that your Power of Attorney is actually valid. Good to actually see the frontline operation, and to see how the work that we do can actually transform those businesses.

Interviewer:
We’ve got more of that kind of work coming up next week?

Mike:
We’ve got a real key milestone for us in GDS as part of our big transformation agenda, of getting service managers in place in each of the departments.
So next week sees the Alpha of the service manager training course. We’ll start next week, so we’ve got a little bunch, I think, of about 5 or 6 of the service managers from our key exemplar transactions. They’re coming in for some training. There are some GDS people in there, as well, of course.
In the true GDS fashion, we’ll learn some stuff from that, then we’ll iterate and we’ll do a Beta.

Interviewer:
Finally, we’ve got a few people joining us this week?

Mike:
We’ve had a new chap join the transformation team this week, called David Durant, who’s joined as a business analyst. He is, at the moment, just learning the ropes, then he’ll shortly be out there, working with the rest of them.

Interviewer:
Fabulous. Until next time.

Mike:
Thank you.

On Friday (31 May) we published a new version of the Good Practice Guide (GPG) 45 – Identity Proofing and Verification of an Individual. It can be found on the Cabinet Office site together with the full set of previously released guides.

This guide sets out the basic requirements for proving an individual’s identity and forms the basis for delivering trusted, online government transactions.

The update has been produced jointly by government departments, private sector representatives and the UK National Technical Authority for Information Assurance (CESG). This new version describes more clearly the proofing and verification requirements for obtaining an assured digital identity. It also describes a new stage in the process for establishing assurance, based on evidence of activity in the real world for the claimed identity.

As always, we welcome your feedback via comments here.

Sam Sharpe is an Operations Engineer at GDS, working within our Hosting and Infrastructure Team. This post was contributed to by others – see the change history for more details.

After a talk by Jordan and Tom at the OpenTech 2013 Conference recently, I was asked if the number of technologies we use scares us. I thought this was an excellent question leading to lots of interesting points about diversity which I would like to explore here.

GOV.UK is a diverse collection of individual applications and supporting services. We use at least five different programming languages, three separate database types, two versions of an operating system and other variations too numerous to count. When issues arise, the first problem is often to determine which of these many things are related to the problem.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

The reason we operate such a diverse ecosystem is that we are focused on solving real problems. Our first task is to understand the problem or need we are solving and then to choose the best tool for the job. If we restrict ourselves to moulding the need to the tools we already have, then we risk not solving the initial problem in the best way possible for the user. By restricting software diversity or enforcing rigid organisational standards on a project, there is a possibility of descending into a cargo cult, where we simply repeat the same patterns and mistakes in everything we make.

GOV.UK is designed as a set of modular applications that each fulfil a defined set of needs. The code that generates the maternity pay calculator is completely different from the code to publish information from government departments. By having these independent pieces, we make sure that the application is suitable for the job and we also allow ourselves to increase our scale of operation by having different people or teams work on something independently.

The advantages and challenges of code diversity

Advantages

These are:

• using the best tool for the job

Sometimes the best tool for a job is not the one you are currently using. My colleague Nick Stenning recently prototyped a new router to direct requests to the right applications in Go - yes, it could have been done in Ruby or Python or another language we use elsewhere (we’ve created a router in Scala before), but Go is designed for massive concurrency which is a feature our router needs; the code also has fewer dependencies. Implementing something similar in one of those other languages would require many more lines of code (compare the Scala and Go versions); more lines of code increases the chance of errors.

• minimising the risk of one tool causing a problem across the entire site

We have patched some of our applications several times in the last few months due to vulnerabilities in the Rails application framework. If every component application on GOV.UK was written in Rails, we would need to upgrade every single application each time a new vulnerability was discovered. It’s true that using lots of frameworks means more possible bugs, but each one of those bugs would have a smaller risk to the site.

• encourages a wide variety of contributions and skills

Often developers who are comfortable in more than one language are more creative, choosing the right tool and code pattern for the job. If you only know one language then you’re likely to shoe horn the job to the code patterns you already know. Probably not the best approach.

At GDS we concentrate on hiring good developers who display a wide variety of skills. We do not have a bias for the people being masters of the tools we already use. A good developer who can already use more than one language should have no difficulty grasping another. We may also learn something new from them and the team will become stronger as a result.

Challenges and how to mitigate them

These are:

• breadth of knowledge required to operate

GOV.UK embraces the DevOps model. The developers of an application are actively involved in supporting that application in production. While that means that the breadth of knowledge is still large, the depth of that knowledge is held within the application team who provide additional support. As an Operator, I need to understand roughly how it works, but for the detail I can defer to the experts.

• large number of pieces that can break

Yes, we have a lot of things that can break, but if they do, large parts of the site and content available to the public (which is ultimately why we exist) will live on. Although breaking a very complex site down into a number of small components does increase complexity, it also reduces the risk that a single error can cause overall failure.

• unfamiliarity with tools leading to poor quality

If a team chooses to implement something in a new tool that none of them are familiar with, it may lead to poor quality code. At GDS, we like Pair Programming - two people collaborating on something generally increases its quality, and can allow those with more familiarity to teach others a new tool. Once that piece of work has finished, the pair can split up and pair with two new people, meaning that the number of developers who are familiar with the code doubles quickly.

We follow other best practice, for example code reviews which ensure the output of the pair is understandable and easily maintained by others. We also use Test Driven Development, to confirm our code works and to build up a regression test suite over time.

Standardisation is still important

Prior to launch we used two separate search tools, Apache Solr and ElasticSearch; each one does roughly the same job and the effort to convert applications to use either of them is relatively low. For that reason we standardised to reduce complexity – shortly after launch, all of our applications were converted to use ElasticSearch.

Imposing loose standards can sometimes reduce the support burden. We use Ubuntu Linux, but the version (10.04 LTS) we were using prior to launch didn’t run some of the software we needed. Rather than pick a completely different distribution of Linux, we made a decision to install a more recent version of Ubuntu Linux (12.04 LTS) on some of our machines. This allows us to share tools and knowledge.

So is it scary?

Yes, software diversity can be scary, but sometimes scary things make us better. If you like software diversity, maybe you should work for GDS!

We announced in March that we would reform the governance of our technology provision in central government. We need a simpler, clearer model of governance based on user needs. Those users are our colleagues as well as citizens and this issue strikes right at the heart of the civil service reform programme as well as our digital agenda.

So what are we doing?

So far we have:

• completed an initial analysis to identify how the current system is put together, and how it’s working
• closed 2 existing boards and put the rest on “pause”
• created one board that we are publicly committed to – Open Standards
• communicated the main changes, and
• monitored the effects of doing these things.

We have also started to identify user needs, to work with and consult digital leaders, department technology leads, procurement leads, finance directors, delivery staff and service managers. We will create user groups to ensure all stakeholder needs are taken into account and that we don’t lose the knowledge and expertise from previous boards.

New approach

The new approach to governance will be transparent and include effective peer review with open and honest feedback from all users. It will be based on clear principles. It will itself be supported by digital technology. It will identify the areas where we can co-deliver more services – create common service provision across government or parts of government – in a more effective way.

How it will help

This will help us make our common infrastructure more efficient and effective. It will help departments get the most out of their existing contracts and to negotiate the end of those contracts that aren’t working for users. It will help us implement less costly solutions for citizens that are based on open standards, that use data effectively and deploy modern technology at a fraction of today’s cost.

It will also help us in building technical capability across government and providing succession planning so that our best graduates and internal talent can use relevant tools to help shape their careers in technology.

What next?

By July we will be in a position to propose a new governance model for the delivery of technology: one that works for the digital government services we are creating. As we develop this model over the coming weeks, I will report on the progress we are making on this blog.

This will be based on user feedback, so please send us yours – and if you have any questions about this process either email me or my colleague David Cotterill.

I’ve been Creative Lead on the design team at GDS for the last two years, and I’m really thrilled about my next step. On Monday I’m joining the design team at Twitter.

I’ve been asked to write a blog post about my time here, and I’ve also written on my personal blog about why I’m excited to join Twitter.

In the beginning…

I started at GDS before it was really GDS. It was early 2011 when I was invited to meet Tom Loosemore in an unfurnished, disused government office in a 60′s tower block near Waterloo. In that building a handful of hackers were plotting a revolution.

They’d been tasked with redefining government online, and challenging the way things had previously been done. Could they make something demonstrably better, in less time and costing less money? Things were already under way and Tom introduced me to a great team – it sounded like they had everything they needed, apart from a designer. Could I start Monday?

Starting from a blank canvas and with the freedom to do whatever we wanted was a dream gig, so I made a few calls to shift some other client work, and the very next week I was prototyping and designing the kind of digital services you and I have come to expect, but which traditional government processes wouldn’t allow to happen.

We were confident that this was the right way to go, but that didn’t necessarily mean politicians and senior civil servants agreed. So once the Alphagov project was over it came as delightful surprise when the project team was hired as part of the newly forming GDS. We’d proven ourselves with the Alpha, and we’d been given the green light to join others from across government to replace the existing online services with a more substantial, fully operational version of Martha Lane Fox’s vision.

Alphagov to GDS

At first I spent a fair amount of time working on concepts for the beta of what’s become known internally as GOV.UK ‘mainstream’ – the citizen and business published content side of the site. As the team grew and we had more hands on deck, I switched to laying the groundwork for transactions – prototyping and user testing concepts for several services which aren’t yet live but which GDS will continue to work on and release over the coming months. Recently, I’ve been helping to document the design patterns we’ve worked on, so these can be shared with digital service divisions across government.

Over the two years I’ve been here, the team has grown rapidly from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred, and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some of the top talent in the industry – a great bunch of people to know, as well as being fantastic at what they do.

A large team has given GDS the capacity to release early versions of many new products which, for government, has been ground-breaking. But the speed of growth hasn’t been without its growing pains, which we didn’t have during the Alpha. I’ve sometimes found myself reminiscing about those early days, when life was so much simpler.

This is the first time I’ve worked on something of this scale, and I’ve learnt an incredible amount. I’ve done more prototyping, usability testing, and iterating than I’ve ever done before. I’ve dabbled with technologies like SASS, Jekyll, and Git, and I’ve learnt a lot about how design fits into an Agile workflow.

A story told

GDS is at the beginning of a big adventure. But for me personally it feels like the part of the GOV.UK narrative, which we began two years ago, has come to a conclusion. Citizen, business and government content, which was the extent of the alpha, is all now live on a ‘single domain’ – an ambition which felt almost unachievable when we started.

There are many parts of the project that I haven’t been involved with, but I’m proud and honoured to have played a small part in the journey so far. I’ll certainly be watching from the sidelines and cheering @GDSteam on in next few years.

And since I’ll be working there from next week, I should probably finish by saying: follow me on Twitter.

The Government Digital Strategy says that all new or redesigned digital services will meet the Digital by Default Service Standard from April 2014. Before then, GDS is using the standard to support the Cabinet Office spending controls, to deepen knowledge of the standard across government, and to identify areas where we can support departments in building their digital capability.

We’ve now started to carry out assessments against the standard. I want to explain how and why we’re doing these, and how you can request an assessment for your service.

The 26 articles of the Digital by Default Service Standard were published alongside the Government Service Design Manual a few weeks ago. Formal assessments of new and redesigned services against the standard will begin from April 2014, however, it’s important we start using the standard as early as possible. Partly because it gives the teams building services time to get up to speed with the requirements, and also because it will give us feedback that we can use to fine-tune the standard over the course of the year, and improve the guidance we offer through the manual.

We expect that most services assessed during the course of this year won’t meet all 26 criteria – at least initially. This is not surprising; the standard is part of a new approach that’s deliberately intended as a ‘stretch’ to improve the quality of government’s digital services.

We’ve already conducted assessments on 13 different services across 7 departments. The assessments take a couple of hours at most, and are led by an experienced product manager, with support from a technical and an analytics specialist.

It’s been a really helpful process for us in helping improving services we’ve built, and providing more structured feedback to service development teams across government. It’s also helped to clarify any systemic blockers that departments face in meeting the standard, for example, using agile processes, publishing their code, or conducting early stage user testing.

We’ve been really impressed by the fantastic work going on across government, and we hope that the process has been as helpful for the teams in the departments and agencies as it has been for us. I’ll be asking some of those who have been assessed to write about their own experience of the assessment in the coming weeks.

GDS will conduct assessments when a new service applies for GOV.UK domain, or for spending approval for further development, or when a new service applies to launch a beta on GOV.UK. GDS will not conduct assessments on existing services on GOV.UK, or on non-public facing services. Service managers can request an assessment at any time and ideally, an assessment will take place relatively early in the design and build process to raise any issues before they develop.

To request an assessment, please email gdsapprovals@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk with a brief summary of the service, and the team will be in touch.