If you’ve ever wondered what the difference is between a ‘content designer’ and an ‘editor’, here Holly Challenger and Beck Thompson reveal all.

In the latest of our occasional films highlighting the work of the teams at GDS, we spent some time with the GOV.UK content design team, finding out how they work.

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Meet the content design team - video transcript

GOV.UK content design team “crit” meeting

Crit group:

Oh, yeah, yeah… But yeah, “only available” doesn’t sound quite right. Yeah. Skip the word “from”. Or “you can only get employment history…”

Beck Thompson (Product Content Lead, Government Digital Service):

Content design is kind of a new phrase, I guess, because we used to call ourselves editors before, you know, and I must admit that when they first started talking about content designers I was like, “What’s that? We’re editors.” But actually it’s more than just writing and editing, it’s, you overlap quite a lot, especially if you work on a service, you overlap quite a lot with designers, and you need to understand the work that they do, and they need to understand what you do, so it’s quite a broad discipline, I think.

What sort of person do you need to be?

Holly Challenger (Content Designer, Government Digital Service):

I think you have to be a very empathetic person. You have to be able to put yourself in the position of the user. So you really have to be able to get to grips with different content topics very, very quickly.

Crit group:

Industrial disablement. That’s not medical negligence, that’s like health and safety negligence. Apparently you do have to have a signature somewhere if you’re making a compensation claim for some things like this.

Holly Challenger:

We work in a really collaborative way. We regularly have what we call “crits”.

Crit group:

While we’re on nit-picking comments… (laughter) Feel free!

Holly Challenger:

We ask the team to gather round a screen and make suggestions for improvements, to raise questions, and it’s an incredibly helpful way just to get other people’s ideas. The aim of GOV.UK is to meet the needs of users and not the needs of government. So we start with what individuals want to do and what they need to know from government in order to get on with their lives, using user research and data from analytics. We receive comments from members of the public. We’ll often look at those comments to look at what problems are people having with this, what are they not understanding.

Beck Thompson:

You start with the user need and that will tell you what you need to do, what you need to produce in order to fulfil that user need.

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution Zach Inglis

The other day, while driving along a local shortcut, I was faced with a ‘road closed’ sign and had to u-turn. Beyond the sign, there was no road where road had been yesterday.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault that I couldn’t continue, but it would have been more helpful if the sign had been put closer to the last junction, 7 miles back.

Until recently, this was pretty similar to the experience we were giving some users of the Carer's Allowance digital service.

Users remind us of their emotional needs

While Carer’s Allowance is designed to help with the physical and financial aspects of taking care of someone, our users often remind of us their emotional needs. Our service design needs to consider these too.

Comments like this aren't uncommon in our user research:

... this payment could affect my life, as long as it doesn't affect my Dad's.

An emotional and ethical ‘road closed’ sign

When you receive a carer’s allowance, the person you’re caring for could lose some of the benefits they currently receive. Content about this originally formed part of the legal disclaimer at the end of the service:

*This version of the form auto-populated the person-being-cared-for’s name into the disclaimer. In this example, Bill Sykes.

Around 5% of our first time users dropped out of the claim at this point, just 2 screens away from application completion.

The insight was clear: for some users (should they skip round the relevant content on GOV.UK), the idea that their actions could affect someone they care for was an insurmountable emotional and ethical ‘road closed’ sign. It was also a sign that appeared a long way into their application journey. It gave them no option but to abandon.

We’re not upfront

We moved the disclaimer content from the back of the service, to the front. We also reduced and clarified the message to make it clearer when the disclaimer would apply, negotiating the changes with legal colleagues from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Crown Prosecution Service.

Importantly, in our new version (and against common practice), we gave users an exit point from the service to return to GOV.UK if they needed to:

Deliberately failing some users fast paid off

We knew that putting one of our known pain points at the very start of the service would come with risks. We immediately saw dropouts on the page rise to a whopping 9%. But, the risk paid off.

As the disclaimer now encouraged earlier dropouts, the high figure on the disclaimer page was countered by a fall in abandonments elsewhere in the service.

We saw no overall drop in applications. In fact, during the week we released, completion rates actually leapt 6% and have risen steadily to over 80%.

Separately, the completion rates for returning visitors have also risen to well over 90%,  implying that taking a short detour at the right time and returning later, may be the better journey for some users, at least for now.

The most important plus was saving users time.

It used to take around 25 minutes to arrive at the old disclaimer - coincidentally about the time it takes to drive 14 pointless miles on a B road. Today getting to the disclaimer takes users around 30 seconds. If a user decides to abandon, they’ve lost little time and they’re hopefully more likely to return later and apply successfully.

We’ll keep working on reducing abandonments, but in the meantime, deliberately failing some users fast, and the first time, may just be the best option.

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Most people have to pay government money at some point or another. For example, when you pay tax, or renew your passport, or get a new driver’s licence, or buy an environmental permit.

But at the moment, different government organisations collect money from people in different ways. It’s not a good user experience, and it’s not very efficient.

So, in the last few months, a team at GDS has developed a prototype cross-government platform that will improve the way government takes these payments. This initiative is part of the Government as a Platform programme where GDS works with departments and agencies to improve digital services.

The project has 4 goals:

1. Make it easier for citizens and businesses to pay government

Competitive e-commerce companies spend lots of time and effort creating a seamless check-out process. They design easy-to-use payment pages, and offer users a choice of convenient payment options. We think government should be able to do the same thing, making public sector payments equally user friendly, both on mobile devices and desktop computers.

Nearly two million adults in the UK don’t have a bank account, so it’s important that alternative payment methods are available for them. These could be provided through services like PayPoint, Payzone or the Post Office, which enable citizens to pay for government service with cash in their local store.

2. Make it faster for new government services to start taking payments

New digital services often need to accept payments too. Right now, the teams building those services have to procure and integrate a new payments system - which takes time.

Product teams wouldn’t have to worry about this responsibility if a single platform maintained relationships with payment providers, and that’s exactly the scenario our development team is exploring. Government services could integrate with the Payments Platform through simple APIs we’ve developed. In our prototype, developers can trial the platform in a “sandbox” that has self-service capability, allowing them to test the frontend payment user journey and the backend financial tracking functionality.

Using the platform would make it quicker and cheaper for the government to launch new services, since it avoids unnecessary repetition of the same procurement and integration work every time.

3. Make it cheaper for government services to reconcile payments, provide user support, and issue refunds

Managing the reconciliation of payments across multiple payments types, such as cards, direct debit and e-wallets, is currently a complex process that involves many manual steps. Providing one reporting interface that shows all payment types and providers could make this process more efficient.

Providing detailed and timely transaction information would help government call centres keep citizens better informed about the status of their payments. More accurate information could also reduce government costs of running these call centres.

Government organisations issue millions of refunds to citizens each year, and there’s an opportunity to make this process more efficient and secure. Instead of refunding card payments with cheques (which is what often happens, even today), it could become standard to issue full or partial refunds directly to the cards used to make the original payments. That’s not just more user-friendly, it also helps prevent fraud.

4. Increase innovation

The Payments Platform could help government take advantage of new innovation in the financial technology industry.

At the moment, each government service is directly integrated with certain payment and security functionality, making it tough to launch new products. For a cross-government change to happen, hundreds of services would have to adapt their existing front- and back- end integrations. That’s a great deal of work.

By contrast, a single change made within the Payments Platform would instantly be available as new functionality to every service using it. Very little work, resulting in instant, cross-government change.

What we’ve been up to

During the alpha we’ve developed easy-to-use payment pages that match the GOV.UK design guidelines. Together with DWP and the Insolvency Service we’ve tested these pages with citizens and made multiple iterations of the design.

Here’s a screenshot of a page a user might see:

We’ve also developed an initial version of the backend that civil servants will use to do reconciliation, provide user support and issue refunds. Exploring what support developers in government organisations need to integrate with our platform was another focus of our alpha.

Here’s a sneak preview of what the backend system might look like:

Don’t forget: we’ve only just finished the alpha. These pages will almost certainly change as a result of feedback and user research.

What’s next

During our beta phase we’re planning to integrate with two or three government services and start taking card payments in a secure and reliable environment. We’ll then focus on fine-tuning the API and the self-service components, making it as easy as possible for government services to adopt the platform. We’ll also add new payment types so that users can chose the most convenient way to pay.

We’ve already had close conversations with the main government organisations that take payments, and we’re keen to talk to more. If you’re in a finance department, product team or call centre and would like to share your experiences, please get in touch.

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Part of building government as a platform is people.

We’ve talked a lot about how people in departments and GDS have worked together as part of transforming government. The last 4 years is testament to teamwork between a small, centrally funded digital centre and departments and agencies across central government - both the unsung heroines and heroes building services, and the high profile supporters of making government digital by default, like Mike Potter at HMRC and Tim Moss at Companies House.

One of the things I’m most proud of is that GDS has played a vital part in creating a digital and technology profession in the Civil Service - in departments but also, just as importantly, in agencies. We had many years of outsourcing, where we saw digital skills drain out of government. This led to a state of learned helplessness and reduced innovative thinking about the benefits digital could bring to government.

Forming GDS went some way to addressing that problem. But real change needs to be deeply embedded.

Yes, GDS is a centre of digital talent at the heart of government, but we’ve also taken the lead in bringing pivotal digital and technology professionals into the rest of government. Rebekah Ramsay and her team have done some great work in recruiting people right across the board.

They’ve been instrumental in hiring senior digital and technology talent from the private sector. That means that we’ve brought in people like Sarah Wilkinson, Home Office CTO and  Norman Driskell, Home Office CDO, from Credit Suisse and Razorfish respectively.

We hired Paul Shetler from Oracle, who went from being CDO at MoJ and then worked at GDS until going to Australia to be Chief Executive Officer of their Digital Transformation Office. We’ve also brought Mayank Prakash on board from Morgan Stanley, to be Director General Digital and Technology at DWP.

We played a part in hiring Darrell Midgley, CTO at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), Tom Fitzpatrick, CTO at the Student Loans Company, Connall Bullock, CDO at the Cabinet Office, Phil Macpherson, CIO at the Valuation Office Agency and many more.

I’m personally committed to improving the technology and digital world’s track record when it comes to the roles held by women. Government should be leading the way on this. That’s not only because I think it’s the right thing to do, but also because diverse teams perform better. There is still much to be done, but it’s great to see that we’ve brought people like Jacqueline Steed (CDO at Student Loans Company), Heather Savory (Director General for Data Capability at Office for National Statistics) and Emma Stace (previously GDS, moving to BIS to be CDO/Group Digital Leader) into senior digital roles in government.

In total, we’ve appointed over 120 senior digital and technology professionals. We’ve also brought in 90 senior interims who have worked on digital transformation.

In the same way that GDS itself has benefited greatly from strong ministerial support, having senior staff in departments who really “get” digital means that the people on the front line know that they have the backing they need. Hire the head and the rest will follow.

That said, part of working in an agile way is knowing that good ideas don’t just percolate from the top down. They require clever, creative people at every level of the organisation. That’s why, beyond the senior hires, GDS has also been involved in hiring and training 172 service managers, who are already bringing their expertise to building services so good people prefer to use them. And we’re thinking about the future. We currently oversee 125 Digital and Technology fast streamers (we hired the most recent intake), and we designed the new 3-year programme which sees them working on digital projects in departments across government.

We’ve made a great start, but we are always looking for suitable candidates to fill senior roles as they come up. We advertise across a range of platforms and work closely with recruitment agencies to get the right fit.

As you can see, digital thinking is no longer a disruptive thing. It’s becoming part of the fabric of government. Through the services and platforms we build and, as vitally, through people.

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As part of the work we’re doing to prepare for government as a platform, we’ve been investigating ways to help government agencies use shared platforms and data registers to build better services.

One project looked at the Land Registry, and in particular how it might work in the future. The work re-examined Land Registry’s first responsibility: providing a reliable record of information about ownership of and interests affecting land. It asked the question: how could the agency do its work as part of a wider digital infrastructure of platforms and registers?

This wasn’t our first collaboration. During the transformation programme, we did some work that helped us:

• create a new, more transparent approach for data storage and protection, something that has the potential to be widely re-used across government
• shape our thinking about government as a platform, because we developed a better understanding of just how important registers would be to its success

That work provided us with a useful starting point for this year’s project. Think of it like bridge-building. The first thing bridge-builders used to do was throw a steel thread from one side of the valley to another, then use it to help build the rest of the bridge. Last year we threw the steel thread, and found the point where new ideas crystallised and we began to understand what should happen next. Now we’re building the bridge itself.

A system of record

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution Paul Downey

The Land Registry stores and maintains a dataset of more than 24 million titles, providing a state guarantee of title. It also runs statutory services for users, mostly solicitors and lenders, so that they can view and edit the data, as part of the conveyancing process. It’s one of the largest property databases in Europe and underpins the UK housing market. So, quite important.

At the heart of our collaboration was a new way of thinking about the data: that “more transparent approach” mentioned above. What does that mean?

It means less thinking about maintaining a database, and more thinking about managing a system of record. Not simply storing the data that’s correct now, but storing it in context, with a full history of changes and amendments. An ever-expanding archive of information: data that includes history about itself. A database is constantly changed, and loses all this context. A system of record is constructed of immutable records, written once and never removed - but amended, or marked in certain ways, if need be. When a fact is out of date, it’s not deleted and removed forever - instead it’s kept, and marked as “out of date”. Keeping data this way helps Land Registry with it’s Assurance role and helps reduce property fraud, and means it can make data open and available to users and third parties.

Making the data more open and more transparent brings lots of potential benefits. It has the potential to unleash opportunities for innovation in the private sector. It could bring greater transparency to the transfer of property, making it easier for all parties - from property buyers or sellers, bank lenders or solicitors and conveyancers - to see the progress of individual transactions. This could reduce uncertainty for users, and reduce the burden on intermediaries (and the Land Registry itself) to provide basic progress updates on the phone or in writing. It could help demystify legalese, and help property owners make more informed decisions.

Registers matter

Consider what’s happening at Companies House, “the model for registers of the future”.

Land Registry has the same ambition. It’s putting its focus on building a modern digital register, one that’s accessible by third parties, responsive to user needs and open 24/7. A register that enables services to be built on better, more dependable data.

It wants to be outward facing, part of the wider digital infrastructure, supporting development of services provided by government or the market.

The result of this new thinking will be lower costs, better services from government, brand new (and previously impossible) services from the public and private sector, and faster, more automated processes. It’s a win-win.

Big changes, important changes. A new way of thinking. A better way of managing data. That simple steel thread is fast becoming a brand new bridge.

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A few weeks ago, we welcomed some friends from America to our office in London, members of the United States Digital Service (USDS) and 18F. Combined, their work is an approximate equivalent of what we're doing at GDS in the UK. (Code for America are friends of ours too, but their remit for working with US cities falls into a different category.) We've already posted about how pleased we were to see them, but I wanted to write in a bit more detail about what I made of it all.

It was a fascinating week, for all sorts of reasons. It was a delight to put some Twitter names to faces, to spend some quality time with our colleagues and get the chance to sit and really, properly chew over the work we’re all doing.

At one point, we grabbed some cameras and recorded a chat between myself, Mikey Dickerson and Haley Van Dyck of USDS, and Hillary Hartley of 18F. You’ll see snippets of that conversation embedded in this post.

Also joining us that week was Todd Park, former Chief Technology Officer of the United States and now a technology advisor to the White House, based in Silicon Valley. As CTO he was very successful at hiring technically skilled people away from the world of start-ups and global internet companies, and getting them into government. His new role in Silicon Valley puts him in the right place to continue and expand on that work.

Common causes, common needs

One thing became clear quickly during their visit. We’ve known it already, I think, deep down. But after we’d had the chance to talk things through it really hit home: although we operate in different circumstances operationally and politically, we have a lot in common. As the week went on, we kept discovering more and more common ground. The process of doing government, of providing public services, is much the same all over the world.

We realised just how international the scope of our work is. Strip away policy details and the user needs over here end up looking very similar to the user needs over there, or in any similar modern democratic society. Users everywhere need to understand tax policy, and be able to pay the right amount. Users everywhere need to get permission to do things, like drive a car or sell certain goods. Governments everywhere need to gather and store data about things like businesses, or schools, or imports and exports.

I’m not suggesting that there will be a single one-size-fits-all solution to each of these problems. What I am saying is that the more our teams share what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, the easier it will be for each team to meet their users needs. Because making things open makes them better.

Here's a transcript of the USDS, 18F and GDS: Sharing and swapping stories video.

Digital government is a global effort

It’s humbling to realise this, but it’s true, and our American colleagues are the first to admit it: they're copying us. They’re focussed on user needs, not government needs, then starting with small prototypes and iterating upwards. The 18F team is working on 18 digital services in an approach very similar to our our transformation programme of 2013-2015.

In particular, they’re building partnerships across the rest of government. This is a crucial step and I’m really pleased to see it happening in the US. No single organisation can bring about transformation on its own - GDS couldn’t, and didn’t. It has to be a team effort, involving everyone from senior decision-makers to the people on the front line, the ones who most often end up actually meeting and talking to users.

Both USDS and 18F operate from the centre. Of course we operate in different circumstances, politically and institutionally (the US has the federal/state divide that we don't have to contend with), but they are clearly working from the centre, outwards. They have support from the very highest level - the President himself can (and does) intervene to make sure people listen to their advice.

The Americans are not alone - the Australians are starting a similar organisation to do similar work. The Estonians have invested in digital government, particularly in the form of digital identities for citizens. President Obama in the US, Communications Minister and former Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull in Australia, and Prime Minister Taavi Rõivas in Estonia have all made their commitment to digital transformation plain. Prime Minister Rõivas approves parliamentary bills on his smartphone. According to Fast Company’s profile of what it calls “Obama’s stealth startup”, President Obama helped USDS with its recruiting, sitting in the room and asking people to join.

Our American colleagues aren’t just chipping in from the sidelines with suggestions and tweaks. They’re embedded, they’re part of the system. They’re making changes from within. “Their purpose is to remake the digital systems by which government operates,” says the Fast Company article. They plan to expand the team to 500 people by 2016. You can’t have a simpler or clearer purpose than that.

We’ve had our senior support, too. GDS would not have begun without Martha Lane Fox’s recommendations, and without Francis Maude’s steadfast support for every single one of them. Now we have Matthew Hancock as Minister for the Cabinet Office and he, too, has been quick to vocalise his support. We appreciate that.

Here's a transcript of the USDS, 18F and GDS: Building partnerships in government video.

Learning works both ways

The Americans’ emphasis on recruitment is something I wish we had thought about more clearly and earlier than we did. GDS grew incredibly fast. Our first major project was building the new GOV.UK beta, then we went on to run the transformation programme, set up the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, build GOV.UK Verify, and much more. We brought some incredible digital talent into GDS and departments, building a new digital profession in government. That doesn’t just mean developers, by the way - it also means user researchers, delivery managers, and more traditional career civil servants who brought their expertise of how to get stuff done in Whitehall to GDS’s aid.

Todd Park made this sort of recruitment a priority early on - earlier in USDS’s timeline than we did in ours. He appealed to their sense of patriotic duty, in a way which Mikey Dickerson expressed it beautifully when he wrote: “Some of you, not all of you, are working right now on another app for people to share pictures of food or a social network for dogs. I am here to tell you that your country has a better use for your talents.” That message got heard.

I also admire the Americans’ ambition. In the past, we’ve compared some of the work the UK government does with something like a medium-sized bank, because that’s the number of transactions we’re talking about. It’s really not that huge, and many commercial web services cope just fine at far greater scale. Government in America, though, certainly is huge. It’s also a federated system; central government may deliver relatively few services for a country that size, but the scale of the challenge at a state and city level remains. Just the fact that some of the early hires had to move across three time zones from San Francisco to Washington D.C. is a significant challenge.

So while they’re re-using our phrase “the strategy is delivery”, it’s the way they’re putting that strategy into action that I find most interesting. They, like us, have a strong centre (though they’d spell that differently) and a strong central mandate. As I made clear above, we’re seeing this around the world: digital transformation of government thrives under what the Americans call political “air cover”.

Here's a transcript of the USDS, 18F and GDS: Why the strategy is delivery video.

It’s the long game

The internet exploded into the public consciousness from the early 2000s onwards, and became embedded in everything we do once smartphones became reasonably priced consumer items. This technological revolution is still only a decade old, and it’s become part of almost everyone’s daily lives. But while the nation’s - the world’s - retailers and banks and media companies and consumer services all adapted to the internet very quickly, government didn’t. Government lagged behind, while the commercial web adapted and grew. Big companies got bigger as they shifted their focus to user needs, agile working and using platforms. (Amazon, for example, transformed itself into a platforms-based organisation after a famously forthright memo from its founder Jeff Bezos.)

We’ve long said we owe it to people to make government services and technology as good as what the private sector provides. We will make - we’ve already begun to make - significant cost savings as a result, but those savings are a side effect. They’re not an end in themselves, nor are they the driving force behind change. The driving force is user needs. The better we get at meeting those needs, the more we can earn the public’s trust.

At the same time, we really are different to the private sector. We can’t switch off our sites or services at will. We can’t say “this problem is too hard, let’s sell something else instead, or move on to more fun project with another group of our friends”. We’ve come in to fix the hard problems, and we have to ride it out until they’re fixed. And then be around to tweak them when the landscape changes. Public servants don’t pivot. In a Britishism that’s become popular in the States, it's the long game.

Responsive government

That’s what our work is all about, on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world. We exist to make sure government is as clued up about technology as its citizens are. As Hilary Hartley says in that Fast Company article, you end up with “much better clients” and “agencies who understand a new way of doing things.” Today’s public services must be designed with today’s technology, to meet today’s user needs.

Like the digital services we build, government should be responsive. That’s why we keep doing user research after a service has gone live. Why we’re building government as a platform, which will make it easier and cheaper for departments to build services based on their particular areas of expertise. Why we work in the open, be it about service standard assessments or the ways our services work. And why we’re constantly looking for ways to be more open, more responsive. Simpler, clearer and yes, faster.

That goes for us here at GDS and out in departments and agencies, for our friends and colleagues in the United States and for the other governments around the world who are fighting the good fight when it comes to digital transformation of government. We know our work is never done. That’s why we will continue to share our experiences with other governments, bringing together tales of best practices and bits best avoided, as they join our quest to, as our colleagues at USDS say, “deliver more, for less.”

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At the end of last week I went to see my boss, John Manzoni to tell him I’m leaving government.

I wanted to take a moment here to thank everyone for the tremendous help I’ve been given in the last five years.

I have to start with Martha Lane Fox and Francis Maude for making the conditions to bring me, and those of the Internet generation, into the very centre of government, and setting such an incredible challenge and offering unwavering support along the way. Chris Chant was my guide around Whitehall and showed me what unacceptable services really look like. I also have to acknowledge all the digital government pioneers who were here long before the advent of GDS, doing dedicated, important work, largely unheralded. We started off standing on the shoulders of giants. They know who they are. Most of them are at OpenTech each year. And before them, if it wasn’t for Tom Steinberg and his work with Rohan Silva, I don’t think GDS would have existed. They and the many other early pioneers, have my utmost respect.

There has been advice, support and hard work all across government. Digital Leaders and Tech Leaders, to the hundreds of digital people we’ve helped to hire, to the front-line staff who’ve been generous with their time as I poked around their services, to the digital teams in departments and agencies who’ve knuckled down and redesigned their services around their users.

There’s been kindness and encouragement from outside government too, our early conversations with Tim O’Reilly and Jen Pahlka in the US have blossomed into shared practises and mutual support with the USDS and 18F. Governments across the world have acknowledged the pioneering work we’ve been doing and have decided to join us on the journey. Our Digital Advisory Board has listened, advised and nudged us forward. The wider government technology/digital/open data community has been a fantastic critical friend, holding us to account and helping us improve.

And, as we always say - The Unit of Delivery is the Team. Leadership is a total privilege, one can only lead with the consent and support of a team and I’ll say right here and now that the team at GDS is the best digital delivery group in the world. It has been an honour and a pleasure to work with them all, whether they are here now or spent just a short period with us in the last 5 years. They are dedicated, determined, talented and funny. I will miss them more than I can possibly explain. Government doesn’t know how lucky it is.

Which means I’m leaving government’s digital delivery in capable hands – especially with the support we are getting for the future of digital transformation from the new Minister for the Cabinet Office, Matt Hancock. The GDS leadership is strong, our plans are clear and focused, our people - and digital teams across government - are rolling up their sleeves to continue the work of transformation. One particular pleasure has been seeing new leaders emerging, and I can confidently say within GDS and departments we have many inspiring digital leaders from a range of disciplines, and many of them are women. I wish them every continuing success.

And, finally, of course, I have to thank our users. Whenever this job has been difficult it’s been remembering people like Ann, applying for her Lasting Power of Attorney, that’s kept me going. On the many occasions when this job has been an absolute pleasure it’s normally been because someone’s just shown me a digital product that will make some user’s life a little easier. I’ll write more about where I am going - and the future I see for digital generally - on my own blog at mikebracken.com.

Onwards!

Mike Bracken

Here at GDS we are privileged to meet digital teams from around the world, and we often stay in touch well after our first meeting.

We share what has worked for us - embedding researchers in teams, asking teams to get their exposure hours, making sure projects include proper discovery phases. We’ll often give people a tour of our user research lab when they come to visit. Sometimes we’re helping them work out how to get started, sometimes we’re sharing experiences, often we’re learning from them.

Same, but different

Recently we had our colleagues from the USDS and 18F visit, and it was really valuable to discuss the similarities and divergences in our approaches, and how we can learn from each other.

Since January I’ve been talking to Dana Chisnell from USDS. We’ve been swapping stories about the projects we’re each working on and how we’re overcoming the different challenges we face.

We’ve each had similar challenges unblocking the ability to do user research inside government - recruiting participants, paying incentives, making sure we’re managing the data from research properly. We’ve both come to realise that in many cases there are some myths and assumptions about what’s allowed in government and and what is not. Turns out that in most cases, doing user research in government is very similar to doing private sector user research. Professional recruiting and incentivising (paying) participants is good practice and ensures that the research can be done quickly and efficiently.

Working together worldwide

It’s not just the USDS. We’ve shared our experiences with governments from around the world including  Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, Spain, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, and Israel to name a few. We’ve shared what we’ve learned about doing user research to transform government services with the D5 at their summit in London last year.

We have a lot to learn from around the world too. We’ve shared a number of Google Hangouts late in our evenings with the team in New Zealand. The NZ team have been really generous in sharing the research they’ve been doing to understand people’s experience of government at key life transitions like moving to the country, having a baby, taking on higher education. This has been really useful to help challenge and inform our thinking about similar experiences here in the UK.

It is exciting to see governments around the world get more and more interested in transforming their services with a focus on user needs.

To continue this conversation we’ve set up a Slack channel for people leading on user research in governments around the world. If you’d like to join the conversation, get in touch: leisa.reichelt@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

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A few weeks ago I wrote a post on the design blog about what public services might look like in a world of government as a platform.

In a nutshell, platforms, open data, and shared components (the building blocks of government as a platform) will make public services easier to build, but won’t on their own make services better.

To do that we need to fundamentally change the way that services work in government, and find ways that we can build those services faster.

So we’re focussing on two things:

1. Re-setting the way that services work to be unified, cross department journeys

eg. buy a vehicle, import plants, dispose of waste, start a nursery etc.

(We’ve already made the first step towards this by changing the way that GOV.UK browse works.)

2. Creating standards for 'what good looks like’ for certain types of services

eg. getting permission to do something, exchanging the ownership of a thing, or delegating responsibility to someone etc.

We’re calling these ‘service patterns’ - consistent (but not uniform) standards for the way that a repeated activity (like getting permission) should work both for users and government.

Why use service patterns?

Like any other kind of standard, service patterns will provide better interoperability between services, meaning that we can more easily join them up across government.

Importantly though it gives government a way to know how to provide a particular type of service well.

Government services aren’t like other services, there is no established industry standard for, say ‘getting benefits’ in the same way as there is for ‘buying a mobile phone’, because government is often the only provider of that service. That means that anything we learn, we need to learn ourselves.

Given how many services do the same thing in completely different ways - and the long tail of those that don’t meet user needs - we need to find ways to change these services faster. Service patterns will be our instruction manual for using platforms and registers to build better services.

As Matt Edgar wrote recently, most of government is mostly service design most of the time. Sadly, a large chunk of this effort is spent reinventing something that has already been done before. By creating standard patterns for services we can significantly reduce the amount of effort it takes to redesign a service well, allowing teams to concentrate on the things that are unique to their service.

What is a service pattern?

We’re still working out how the creation and management of a service pattern works, but we think these patterns are likely to provide a template for how to build a particular type of service, alongside a set of components to build that service with, including:

1. A consistent user journey
2. A consistent internal process
3. A set of standards (that cover when, where, and how that user journey and process should work)
4. A set of modular components that can plug together to build this journey (including common registers, platforms, and reusable code)

Most importantly, these patterns will need to evolve constantly, fed by the experiences of  those using and testing them in the field -  in the same the way that the GOV.UK interaction patterns have grown and evolved over time.

What we’ve learned in discovery

To see if creating standard service patterns was even possible, we worked with departments and agencies across government to look at three service patterns, doing user research across a broad spectrum of services to understand patterns in:

1. Getting permission to do something
2. Exchanging the ownership of a thing
3. Getting funding

It confirmed our assumption that there are huge areas of similarity in these services that do these things - for example we found over 300+ licences that required same process, but were delivered in completely different ways.

With users too, there were huge similarities in their needs around these things, regardless of what item they were exchanging the ownership of, or why they needed a licence.

Still lots to do

There’s still a lot to work out, but this is a useful starting point for finding out what we need to do to change the way that services work in government, and build those services faster.

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One of our four government as a platform workstreams is called department transformation, and it’s all about breaking down invisible barriers between departments and agencies so we can improve services for users.

One recent 8-week discovery  took a close look at the processes for importing and exporting goods across the UK border, which are currently handled by 26 different government departments and agencies.

The pan-government team worked with colleagues from HMRC, Home Office, BIS, Defra, DFT, DCMS, Border Force, Animal and Plant Health Agency, Port Health, Trading Standards, Environment Agency, Food Standards Agency, and Arts Council England; not to mention representatives from various trade bodies, port operators and logistics companies too.

They wanted to find out: how could imports and exports be made easier for users if government departments and agencies provided a more joined up service at the border?

A confusing process

Importing and exporting goods is the lifeblood of our economy – for example, a lot of the food we eat and the clothes we wear originate from outside the UK. Government operations at the border are there to make sure the right goods are being moved, that we know what they are, that illicit or dangerous goods aren’t coming into the country, and that the correct duty is paid.

For users, though, the whole system can be confusing and disjointed. Over many years, all those different agencies managing border controls have developed their own ways of managing data and handling information. There’s too much duplication of data gathering and data entry, and there’s not enough sharing of relevant information. All too often, data is inaccurate  or arrives too late to be useful. It becomes an uphill battle for our border agencies to intervene in problem cases, simply because the data flow isn’t as good as it might be.

Importers and exporters have told us they find the job of understanding and then complying with all these requirements to be confusing and time consuming.

Many importers and exporters turn to third party freight forwarders to help them navigate a route through it.

We gained a wide range of user insight that reflects the scale and experience of users, for example:

I thought it would be fine showing up at the airport with the paperwork, but it’s confusing about where to go and what you need to do.

In the beginning we'd pick stuff up in the van, but we didn’t know what to do with the forms. We went to Dover to collect goods, and although the people at Dover helped with the forms, and got it cleared, it was really time consuming. We got a freight forwarder to sort out the paperwork and remove the pain.

Without compliance we have no business. Security of our supply chain is paramount for the safety of our products and our brand reputation.

What we discovered

We began with our users. We conducted workshops and interviews with freight forwarders, motor manufacturers, retailers, small businesses, border control professionals and many more.

One of the issues that became apparent in our early conversations, was the difficulty people found in working out what they needed to do to move goods across the border for the first time. If we were going to improve the services, we needed to understand the user experience from beginning to end, from first plans to import / export through to the goods arriving with consumers.

Among many other things, we discovered that business users often lack confidence when it comes to organising international trade. The complexity of the system puts people off, particularly small and medium sized businesses. Simply making the whole process easier to understand would boost their confidence, and in turn boost trade, innovation and ambition.

There’s similar complexity in the computer systems being used by all the different agencies and departments involved. Data gets gathered more than once, then duplicated and stored in different places and in different ways. There’s a clear need for a more joined-up approach.

We need to know more

If this discovery taught us anything, it’s that we don’t know enough yet. There’s a lot more to uncover. Our list of recommendations includes more discoveries and pilots.

We think the next steps should be:

• a pilot data project, enabling commercial supply chain systems to talk directly to government ones. We think this could result in a more transparent flow of data, which would lower costs for business and help government be more certain about what goods are being moved across the border and focus limited border enforcement resources in the right place
• a trial joint working project, testing out multi-agency teams and multi-skilled teams at front line import/export locations, with the aim of reducing overlaps and duplication in different organisations (planned for the port of Felixstowe and Heathrow airport)
• a guidance and advice discovery, helping businesses deal with the complex tangle of compliance regulations that they constantly strive to meet - simply making the process easier to understand could boost confidence among business users, so they can do more international trade
• a licensing and permissions discovery, identifying ways for government and businesses to use data more effectively, reducing duplication and making it simpler to get permission to move goods from place to place

In our discovery, we also considered what issues might need to be considered and addressed if Government was to develop a secure, single experience for people moving goods across the UK border. Our ultimate aim is to facilitate international trade and travel whilst reducing costs, without ‎compromise to the protection of the UK from harm. We’re still a long way away from that, but this first discovery was a chance to understand what the current landscape looks like, and find opportunities for making it better.

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Dave Worley, a digital take-up advisor at GDS, describes how we are helping services across government to encourage users to use the digital service.

Point 14 of the Digital Service Standard requires services to encourage all of their users to use the digital service (with assisted digital support, if required), and to phase out non-digital alternatives. The digital take-up (DTU) team at GDS works with services to help them achieve this.

There are a couple of parts to our work. There is indeed a channel shift element, and we help existing services to direct their users to the digital route by promoting the benefits. We also help digital government services to ensure they are adhering to point 14 of the Digital Service Standard. This includes helping them identify strengths and weaknesses in their DTU approaches. Good digital take up requires a service that is fully digital from the start (used either independently or with assisted digital support), and not a service supplemented with non-digital alternatives.

We will be sharing our findings from across government. We will do this through our DTU blogs, the service manager community and by encouraging links between similar services.

What does success look like for us?

It’d be easy to say that our goal is 100% of all government transactions to be completed digitally. More realistically, we’re aiming at the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s 2014 Autumn Statement pledge of increasing digital take up by ten percentage points by the middle of 2016. This will take us above 90% of all transactions completed digitally.

So far, we’ve seen successes such as the Carer’s Allowance service, which has seen a consistent rise in digital service use since October 2013. Another of government’s most used services, HM Revenue & Customs’ Pay As You Earn transactions service, sends over 95% of users through digital routes.

Challenges

There are challenges of course. We work closely with the assisted digital and digital inclusion teams at GDS to make sure government's efforts to maximise take up don’t exclude those who need our support. It’s also clear that introducing digital services to replace long-standing traditional ones will require departments to transform their approach to service delivery.

What are the benefits?

• efficiency and cost savings
• allows departments to review internal systems and processes
• departments can phase out less used channels as the number of applications through traditional routes decline

By reducing resources spent on these areas, services can then focus on providing support for their users who need it the most.

We’ll be publishing some examples of good practice and lessons learned by services across government over the next few weeks. You’ll be able to see them on the assisted digital blog.

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You’ll have seen the media coverage over the past few days since Mike announced that he is leaving. Last week was a busy week sorting things out and speaking to people about what happens next.

I’m Stephen Foreshew-Cain, COO of GDS, and I’ve been here since April 2014. You haven’t heard much from me since I arrived (in fact this is my very first GDS blog post). Liam Maxwell refers to me as the ‘gaffer’, but really I joined GDS to ensure we have a clear plan for digital delivery across government and that we are delivering to it.

I’ve been running GDS for a year, now I’m stepping up to lead it.

But I’m not doing that alone.

Liam Maxwell continues as our Chief Technology Officer, leading our Government Technology Group. Chris Ferguson, previously GOV.UK Verify Programme Director, is stepping up to lead our GDS Digital group as we continue to deliver and operate digital services for government (such as GOV.UK and Performance Platform). Felicity Singleton, one of the original authors of the Government Digital Strategy and current Programme Director of ‘Government as a Platform’, will lead on Digital Policy and Departmental Engagement aligning us with the needs of departmental plans. Wendy Coello, currently leading our Digital Engagement teams, will increase the scope of her portfolio to include Digital Design.  

And that’s just the beginning.  

We have a growing number of leaders at GDS who are ready to step up and lead the digital transformation. And beyond them, we have helped to recruit a network of digital and technology leaders into government, such as Norman Driskell at Home Office, Mayank Prakash at DWP, and Sarah Wilkinson at HO amongst them.  As we continue to develop the Digital and Technology profession in government there can only be more opportunity for digital and technology specialists.

I recently tweeted that digital transformation was neither a sprint nor a marathon, it's a relay. As Mike has passed on the baton to a new leadership team, so too are others who’ve decided that they have run their stretch. Three of the most significant architects of GDS success to date, Tom Loosemore, Deputy Director, Russell Davies, Director of Strategy, and Ben Terrett, Director of Design, have decided the time is right for them to move on as well. All of GDS is incredibly grateful for the energy, leadership and direction (and stickers) Tom, Ben and Russell have given us over the past 5 years and we will miss them very much.

We know that this is the right time for new leaders to stand up, and for some to move on. We also know we have a talented team, ready to take us through the next phase. I have worked closely with John Manzoni and the Minister Matthew Hancock to ensure we have full backing as we move through this period. When John and I talked about it last week, we talked about how far we’ve come and how our greatest strength is the people here.  Alongside making sure we continue to deliver our priorities this year, our focus is on gearing up for the Spending Review, and getting a settlement that will enable us to drive the government’s digital agenda forward.

So, that’s where we are now. As soon as we’ve got more news or updates we’ll let you know, as we always do here on this blog.

And as we say around here: Onwards!

Three months ago, when I was appointed Minister for the Cabinet Office, one of the first things I wanted to do was visit GDS.  I'd worked with GDS over recent years, and I’m a huge supporter of GDS's mission.

The 500 people working hard in Holborn are creating some of the most transformative government programming the world has seen, which is why governments across the globe are following in our footsteps.  GDS is the digital core of government and it’s helping the public sector deliver better digital services for less - essentially making sure that government 'can do' digital.

Today I was at PWC with Greg Hands, co-chairing a discussion on the power of digital to transform the entire public sector.  The work that GDS is doing, and the vision of Government as a Platform, is changing the core infrastructure of shared digital systems, technology and processes.  Look at what's already been started with GOV.UK, a world leading platform for publishing and, now with GOV.UK Verify, for identity too. But there's a lot more to do to cement this work and embed modern digital, technology and data throughout government.

We could not have come so far in such a short space of time without the leadership and vision of Mike Bracken. With Mike at the helm the UK has become a world leader in digital government and we've recruited a host of extremely talented people, who will continue the work of digital transformation. I wish him well in the future.

Stephen Foreshew-Cain is stepping up as Executive Director of GDS and he has a wealth of experience delivering digital projects.

Alongside him Liam Maxwell as CTO has brought about a tectonic shift in government digital services and replaces outdated, rusty government IT with new systems that actually work.

With Liam and Stephen as well as a stellar team we have the right people in place to deliver the next phase of GDS. There is so much more to do, and I look forward to leading it at Ministerial level, and driving the transformation across Government that our citizens expect.

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We've talked a lot about the preparation work we're doing for Government as a Platform. One of the benefits of having GDS sit at the heart of government is that we can take a cross-government view on how to best use digital to deliver better services for users.

Today I want to tell you about one small part of our work on Government as a Platform. It shows how digital people, technology, and thinking could transform the justice system. Service design, not silos.

Discovering digital justice

The Digital Justice discovery was a 12-week project led by Mark O’Neill here at GDS, and supported by Natalie Ceeney from HM Courts and Tribunals Service, and Matthew Coats and Indra Morris from Ministry of Justice. They were looking for answers to questions like: what could happen if all the different parts of the criminal justice system were better interconnected, if everything worked with everything else? If we dismantled all the silos and incentivised departments and agencies to take a cross-government view, and talk to one another?

To get answers to those questions, you first have to take a close look at the current set-up. A multidisciplinary team from across the Ministry of Justice, Home Office and GDS did just that. They started by creating a map of the entire criminal justice system, completely agnostic from the organisations that run it. It's very big. It looks like this (you can download a full-size version of the map on our Flickr page):

This is something that's not been done before. It's a view of the system as its users experience it, a visual echo of our number one design principle: "User needs, not government needs."

Not a system at all

Take a close look at the full-size version and you might notice that the map doesn't name any organisations or government departments. That’s because that's not how users see the system. They talk about going to court, rather than dealing with "HM Courts and Tribunals Service"; they talk about going to prison, rather than being part of a "National Offender Management Service" process. Also, this is a living map, something that can be maintained and updated as the team learns more.

The more you look at this map, and the rest of the (extremely detailed) work the team has done so far, the more you realise that the criminal justice system isn't a system at all. In reality, it's a series of events and processes made of bits of policy from MoJ and the Home Office, interpretation from the Judiciary, implementation from local police forces and the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), the Crown Prosecution Service and much more besides. Each one of those acts as a separate entity. A silo.

They all do things in different ways. They all store data differently. They all count and measure things differently. They all notify one another (and members of the public) about changing circumstances in different ways. Their processes are chock full of legal jargon which means little or nothing to offenders, witnesses and victims of crime.

Of course it was never designed to work this way, but that's because it was never actually designed. The system we have today is the result of years of accretion, ad-hoc process on top of ad-hoc process, letter by letter, form by form. It needs a good dose of proper service design thinking.

Paperwork isn't working

During the discovery phase, the team found out that paperwork is the third biggest cost in policing.

Police, court and prison staff frequently have to copy information from one form to another, by hand; sometimes literally copying words on one piece of paper to another. Pre-trial hearings, usually held to confirm that information like names and addresses is all correct, could easily be transformed into a simple digital service. A large number of low-level, non-imprisonable crimes could be resolved without a court hearing, again using a digital service.

It's 2015. Police and court officers shouldn't have to waste hours of time copying words from one box on one form into another box on another form. This is astonishing, needless bureaucracy, the sort of work people end up doing “because it’s always been done this way”.

Computers can fix things like this.

The discovery team came up with a short list of recommendations:

• make the language simpler, so users easily understand how to report or resolve crimes
• make it easy to resolve low-level crimes online
• make digital services to help repeat offenders break the cycle of offending
• use consistent, structured data across the entire system, and make it easy for different departments and agencies to access it

An opportunity for radical reform

I'm barely scratching the surface of what this team's been doing, and I hope they'll be able to share their work in much more detail soon. We want to show it to some other people in government and get their feedback before we do that. There's a lot of ongoing reform work across the Criminal Justice System, including courts reform, and we're keen to make sure our work fits together with that.

This project is impressive for all sorts of reasons. It's uncovered a tangled mess of inefficiency and failure waste, so much of which can be fixed by the careful introduction of properly structured data, cross-government technology platforms and user-centric digital services. It's found opportunities for radical reform and setting new standards, and for creating more unified systems that focus on user needs, not organisational needs. It's a starting point, pointing towards very real infrastructure change at very large scale.

Well done to everyone involved. Matthew Coats told me this was the best piece of analysis he’s seen in government. It’s another brilliant example that demonstrates the power of the discovery phase: get the right people in a room together, and give them a few weeks to think things through. Amazing things can happen. This project's one of those.

You can send an email to mark.oneill@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk if you would like to receive a PDF of the Digital Justice roadmap, or if you'd like to discuss it.

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This image was taken using LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology, by shooting a laser beam down to the ground from an aircraft. LIDAR is useful for all sorts of applications, and the Environment Agency (an arms-length body under the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs - Defra) has huge archives of LIDAR data covering 72% of England. In a few weeks, that entire data set will be available for free, as open data, to everyone and anyone who wants it.

This is just a small part of Defra’s new open data policy, recently announced by Environment Secretary Elizabeth Truss.

Defra is putting data first

Defra has a lot of data. Its roles within farming, the rural economy, and management of the natural environment mean it collects all sorts of data about all sorts of geographical features, natural phenomena, agricultural activity, and much more besides. It’s an extremely broad data set, with specific collections that can be very niche.

Crucially, and impressively, Defra has realised that its future depends on being a more data-driven organisation. So that’s what has begun: Defra is focusing its efforts on thinking about data first.

The open data project has begun with an accelerator programme, designed to get at least 8,000 separate data sets out into the public domain within a single year.

Cultural change and digital change

This is more than simply opening up some spreadsheets. It’s about deep-rooted culture change, shifting Defra’s internal and external focus so that it’s open by default. Some of the new open data will be stuff that was previously only available to those who were willing and able to pay for it. Now it will be free.

Data has to be managed and looked after, so the project also includes some work to make sure that what’s made open is curated and improved as time goes on. The Defra team plans to work closely with community groups, NGOs, arms-length bodies and agencies to make that happen.

They’ve also set up a new Data Governance Board to provide strategic co-ordination and oversight. The board will help spot unnecessary duplication, and encourage the adoption of standards.

Defra has been working with the Open Data Institute to develop an organisational maturity model for open data. That will be used as a benchmark for future improvement plans.

So far, open data has been an urban story. Think about the success of opening up transport data, and the subsequent boom in urban transportation apps on smartphones. That gives you a hint of what opening up Defra’s data could achieve. Parts of the LIDAR data set, for example, have been available for free non-commercial use since late 2013. That data set’s re-release as more accessible open data in a few weeks will make it available to everyone, including commercial interests, which means we could see a marketplace of entirely new services created on top of it. Open data is a catalyst, an open door that encourages new ideas and new innovation. These ideas will benefit rural communities and businesses too.

This is great stuff from Defra. They’re treating data as a public asset, which is exactly the right thing to do. If other departments are wondering what to do with their own piles of data, I have four simple words of advice: get it out there. Take a look at what Defra are doing, and see what you can learn from it.

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The technology you use to do your job should help you achieve more. When it doesn’t it’s frustrating. That’s true for the wide variety of users who come into contact with government technology, from the civil servant doing an inspection to a developer trying to make improvements.

Over the last four years, we’ve encountered many frustrated users. Government departments all over the country experience common problems with technology.

We’ve found that quite often, the technology that people use across the Civil Service is outdated. It doesn’t meet their varying needs and it impedes collaboration between departments.

Too often technology acts as a barrier to innovation – a really expensive one.

Government’s technology leaders are addressing these problems and know that many of the answers lie in their code of practice.  The technology leaders know that their users’ needs are similar and are investing in making progress together.

Their next step is Common Technology Services (CTS).

Introducing Common Technology Services

CTS helps government departments provide their staff with better value technology, technology that helps meet user needs, makes cross-government collaboration easier and costs less. This should help civil servants work more flexibly and efficiently.

We call some technology 'common' because it is as familiar at home as it is at work. It’s technology like mobile and desktop devices, and the productivity software you use, like email and single sign-on services. It is also the way you connect, like wifi, and the servers and data centres that make these possible.

Our aim is to make the Civil Service more flexible and more productive. We do this by ensuring technology is a tool, not a barrier.

CTS grew out of work undertaken by the Government Digital Service on technology infrastructure including two transformational projects: Cabinet Office Technology Transformation and the Crown Hosting service. The first was about providing civil servants with better everyday tools, the second helped departments to use cost effective data centre capacity much more easily. Combined, they gave us an informed starting point for a new team and a new focus.

That new team is CTS.

What CTS does

We are already working with departments investigating user needs, identifying what is common and how design can be done once. At the same time we are working out how to unpick contracts, allowing for steady improvement.

Already we have some good examples of what the savings from change could be.  Savings will be possible from:

• common designs and products
• reusable services
• cheaper cloud solutions
• pricing that takes advantage of our scale
• shorter, more flexible contracts
• competitive supplier rates due to SME market access

Our early designs and products are being tested against user needs and security essentials, and we are already iterating them. We are working with departments and suppliers. We are helping departments deploy and operate reusable services,  avoiding getting locked in to long-term contracts with specific suppliers or technologies.

CTS is not a replacement for IT teams, nor are we an in-house systems integrator.

What’s happening now

We’re working closely with departments to identify what will become our initial projects. Some are already underway.

We’re building teams and project plans in four areas:

• departmental engagement builds understanding of user needs and business needs. Team leader: Sana Khareghani.
• commercial works with departments and CCS to review current IT contracts and uncover saving opportunities. Team leader: Victoria Filkin.
• technical leads the design and build phase, working with departments’ experts to create designs for common technology products that align to government’s technology strategy. Team leader: Shan Rahulan.
• delivery works closely with departments to test and iterate new technology before it is deployed at scale. Team leader: Nathan Swift.

You’ll hear more from those teams as we start work inside departments.

The next few months

We will be accelerating the creation of the CTS organisation and working with more departments.

Some really useful results came from early work with the Home Office. We identified profiles of the common ways of working. These profiles build up a picture of the specific needs and pain points. These are already looking highly relevant to other departments, which we are now confirming.

As our early work lands, Common Technology Services will allow departments to transform themselves quicker.

We want to make the Civil Service more flexible and more productive. We’ll keep updating as we go.

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We want to see how platforms can improve the way people communicate with government. As part of this, we’re starting discovery work on status tracking and notifications. Put simply, we want to improve how we keep people updated when they’ve asked government for something.

By quickly telling people that we’ve received their application, made a decision, or when they can expect to receive their money/passport/license etc we can keep them informed, and reduce the need for them to pick up the phone.

Know when government receives the thing

DVLA gets 2.4 million phone calls every year from people just checking the status of their application.

Finding ways to reduce the time people have to spend chasing government can make a big difference. For example, the Carer’s Allowance team in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) reduced unnecessary calls by nearly 40% - simply by sending people an email to say their application has been received.

There are other good examples of keeping people better informed across government. But, we’re repeatedly having to solve this same issue and in different ways.

Platforms will make it simpler and faster to communicate with government.

Status tracking and notifications are some of the common building blocks for Government as a Platform. They’ll make it quicker and easier for teams delivering digital services to just plug in the bits they need as they build new services, and iterate existing ones.

This gives us an opportunity to improve people’s interaction with government and avoid millions of unnecessary phone calls and letters.

Know when you'll get the thing

There’s also the potential to let people know more accurately when they’ll receive the thing they’ve asked for. Rather than always telling users the longest time something could take, we’ll use data generated by the platforms to give people a more precise timeline.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking to loads of service teams to discover common user needs, and test a bunch of hypotheses. We’re already working with several trailblazing teams across government - DVLA, Land Registry, and DWP’s Carer’s Allowance to name just a few of many. And we’ll be blogging about it as we go.

If you work in government and want to get involved - please let me know.

Pete Herlihy is a Product Manager at GDS.

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We’ve mentioned registers a few times on this blog, most recently in relation to the work of the Land Registry building on the steel thread, the brilliant new Companies House public beta, and their importance for building platforms.

For the past few months we’ve been exploring what is meant by “register”. That means we’ve been:

• conducting user research
• talking to colleagues across government who manage data (in organisations like the Food Standards Agency, the Land Registry, Companies House, MoJ, DVLA)
• processing lessons learnt building services during the digital transformation programme, and
• testing hypotheses by experimenting with software

We’ll show some of the things we’ve been doing in future posts, but here are some of the things we’ve discovered so far about registers.

Why we need registers

A register is an authoritative list of information you can trust. A canonical source of truth. Registers are important, and there are already many of them. A search of “register” on GOV.UK finds nearly 11,000 pages, and a similarly high number of documents on legislation.gov.uk contain the word “register”.

There are different kinds of register:

• open registers contain public data, and are open to everyone
• closed registers ask you to do something before you can access the data, for example pay a fee (as with seeing a Land Registry title) or provide a token (such as your driver number when using the view my driving record service)
• private registers contain sensitive information, but may be able to provide answers to simple questions, such as “Is this person registered as a potential organ donor?”, or “Is the registered keeper of this vehicle over 21 years of age?” without revealing further details about the individual

Many registers are kept by government because the law instructs it to “establish”, “maintain” or “keep” a register. A typical example is the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 which says:

The Authority shall establish and maintain a register of persons licensed under this Act.

This has resulted in the Gangmasters Licensing Authority keeping a public list using specialised software and run on their own website.

Registers can also emerge to meet the operational needs of service providers. For example, because a visa may be sponsored by one of a number of different types of organisation, UK Visas and Immigration publish lists of sponsors such as sports governing bodies on GOV.UK in a PDF document.

Teams building digital services

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at a large number of such lists, and what’s become apparent is that they’re all held and maintained quite differently.

That causes problems.

Services have no standardised way of accessing the data in these lists so they need to develop bespoke software to do it. Where a snapshot of a list is periodically published, a service may need to notice there’s a new list, and then download and process a copy. Not having direct access to the data through an API introduces potential errors, and a lag between a change to the data being available to users of the service.

More importantly, a service team needs to be able to trust the integrity of the data. They need to know that the list will be kept up to date, and not disappear or change shape, breaking their service. Understandable documentation including clear licensing can help people use the data, but registers demand an owner, a registrar. That’s a person responsible for maintaining the list, with a clear process for quickly fixing issues with the data.

People providing services shouldn’t have to worry about data integrity. That’s the registrar’s job. That means registers should be designed so that data is always maintained and fixed at source, simplifying the design of services.

To reduce errors and reduce duplication, data in a register should reference other registers. To make that possible, registers should use standard names and formats, and each register entry should have a unique, stable identifier. Ideally, a register of limited companies should be able to trust Companies House to be the canonical source of company directors, and cite the Companies House company number rather than just a company name, which may change and can be easily misspelt (or spelled in different ways).

A registrar, responsible for a register

Maintaining an authoritative, canonical register can be quite onerous. Currently, this often means building or procuring an ill-suited product or bespoke system, or having to remember to periodically upload documents to GOV.UK.

We want to change that. We have started thinking about what a register product might look like. It should support registrars, providing them with a standard way to establish and maintain a register and assure them that it’s being kept in good order. In particular, it should be able to prove the data hasn’t been tampered with.

Here’s a screenshot of an entry in a basic prototype (this will change as we iterate further):

Simplifying and standardising how the data is stored frees registrars to concentrate on tasks specific to their domain, such as assessing and processing requests to change their register, or monitoring data quality.

Registers are for everybody

It’s not just people building services, or those in charge of data who are users of registers. A register should store a history of changes to itself and be open to independent scrutiny.

Government issues lots of artifacts, certificates, licences and other totems for information held in registers, which we should be able to check should things go wrong. We call these digital proofs: a digital register may supersede or expire your permission to do something, but it shouldn’t be able to later refute that permission was ever issued to you. Every change to a register is recorded with a digital fingerprint, and every fingerprint can be verified independently.

We believe moving from periodically publishing data to operating more standardised, open data will help everyone build better services – cheaper and faster, and across government, not just within a single organisation. We’ll continue to work with colleagues in departments and beyond, and we’ll blog regularly about what we are learning along the way.

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There’s huge potential for digital transformation in local government as well as national government.

One person with opinions on the subject is Camden Council's Chief Information Officer, John Jackson. Camden has already started making use of digital technology, using smart road sensors to cut down the costs of monitoring car parking, and investing in digital skills, APIs and shared code.

We invited John to share his thoughts about all of these innovations on camera, and here’s what he had to say.

Digital technology in local government

Local government as a platform

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Digital technology in local government - video transcript

John Jackson, Chief Information Officer, Camden Council

I think we’re seeing real innovation on the Internet of Things in local government, harnessing the power of the Internet of Things to just do services completely differently.

Using sensors to control car parking

Putting parking bay sensors in is revolutionising parking, so we don’t have to send round lots of enforcement officers, we don’t have to have big back offices.

When we started off with parking, it was a system that everyone was complaining about; we had lots of complaints about the standard of service that we were delivering, and we had a lot of calls to our call centre. By adopting an open systems architecture, what we did was first of all we separated out the user experience, so we designed the user experience with residents. The second thing we did was we said to the supplier, “Don’t you try and do the workflow; provide us with the APIs to connect to your services and share data.” They did that, so we’re using their workflow to connect to other systems to validate whether or not, for example, somebody is resident in Camden.

What’s great about this is we’ve harnessed the innovation, we’ve got a more usable system, and we’re using an approach which is scalable to other councils who want to do it. It’s scalable because we’re going to open source our code and share it with other councils.

Local government as a platform - video transcript

John Jackson, Chief Information Officer, Camden Council

Digital transformation is about making our services citizen focused, easier to use, and accessible. Secondly, it’s about making our workforce more efficient, digital by default, and mobile. Thirdly, it’s about harnessing the power of information and data to join services up so we do things once and we can spot problems sooner and help vulnerable clients earlier. It’s also about linking up with our partners so we don’t do things in different ways; we break down the silos to make us more efficient.

Part of it for me is creating a platform that you can actually make it possible to share information on. You can make it possible to connect things together so they can share data. It’s about making systems more user friendly and co-designing those solutions with citizens and residents, and it’s about harnessing the other legacy systems that are already out there and connecting them up rather than spend lots of money on new systems.

There are not enough APIs available at the moment in government to allow us to connect the system together, to allow us to share data, to allow us to transform processes, so let’s pick up APIs and focus on doing more with those.

Open source, open data

Open data is fundamental. I think part of it is getting the information out there helps us to be more transparent, but it also allows us to design new digital services because you can bring data together from different sources to design things that otherwise you couldn’t do in isolation.

I think also what I’d like to see is more of a commitment on open source, really. I know it’s controversial in some respects, but I think we’ve got a great crowd out there. We’ve got lots of people doing civic development; we’ve got lots of councils developing solutions. What’s the point of doing that lots and lots of times? Let’s just turn government into one big crowd – open source stuff, share it; make it easier to get to.

Right now, hosting services is one of the most time-consuming barriers for new digital services, and usually involves duplicating work done elsewhere. On the Government Platform as a Service team we’re working on solving that.

Repetition, repetition, repetition

Every digital service that government runs needs to have a place to run from; it needs to be hosted somewhere so that it is accessible to users via the internet. The service doesn’t ‘just work’; there is a lot of effort involved in setting up all the components required to host a service.

These components don’t vary much between services. Every service needs an automated way to let developers know when something is wrong, or to alert them to something. So, in practice, these groups of components end up looking very similar across very different services. The picture below shows you an example:

As you can tell, there’s a lot of duplication. Teams all over government can end up duplicating work that’s already been done elsewhere. That means spending time on areas that aren’t their speciality, such as application monitoring or log aggregation, which stops teams from focusing on their areas of expertise.

It also leads to a lot of time searching for people with expertise in this area to hire. All of this takes time and money and leaves teams less time to focus on their users’ needs.

One way to address these issues is to provide a platform as a service (PaaS) that services could use for their cloud hosting. A shared PaaS would then change the diagram above into something more like the one below:

A Government PaaS wouldn’t just solve the issue of duplication, and where to focus your teams. One thing that takes a lot of time in government is procuring commercial services and making sure they are accredited. If we could do that once, for the PaaS, then that could save service teams a great deal of time, while making sure that those aspects are being handled in the correct way.

What a Government PaaS needs

From the user research we’ve been doing it’s clear that it’s important that our platform has a concept of multi-tenancy - applications that run on the platform should be isolated from each other and not be able to read or change each others’ code, data or logs. It wouldn’t be appropriate, for example, if the Digital Marketplace application was able to access the data of the GOV.UK publishing platform.

We’ve also learned from our experience supporting GOV.UK that a platform where the people developing applications also support the application out of hours leads to better software and a better user experience. We want a platform that supports this model right from the beginning.

Apart from multi-tenancy and the support model, there are some other things that we feel are important in a shared PaaS.

It needs to be self-service. It needs to be easy and quick for application teams to get started, and the teams using the platform need to be able to make frequent changes. That means we need to make sure applications can be deployed and managed by the application teams, but also that they can make other administrative changes to their applications, for example configuring DNS. Allowing teams complete control of their applications will remove any unnecessary delays for them, and means the platform team can focus exclusively on iterating and improving the platform itself.

It needs to run on multiple public clouds. This approach ensures that we avoid being locked into a single provider, so we encourage price competition, while also removing the risk of a single point of failure. Changing infrastructure providers is very difficult to do if you’ve built to a single provider’s specification so this needs to be built in from the beginning.

What we've been doing

We’ve spent a couple of months exploring what a Government PaaS might look like and how it could help teams running digital services across government. We’ve spoken to many potential users, and we’ve worked closely with our colleagues in other departments who are working to address similar problems, and we’ve found that no existing departmental solution meets all the needs we’ve identified.

We’ve evaluated several open source and commercial options, and we’ve built a prototype and shown it to potential users – developers, web operations engineers and services managers – both within GDS and in other departments. We’ve tested our prototype by seeing how it works with real applications (for example, we tested it using Digital Marketplace and GOV.UK’s Government Frontend).

We’ll write about all of this more in later blog posts.

What we're doing next

We expect to be in alpha until the end of November, by which time we will have completed a detailed comparison of two open source PaaS technologies and addressed issues around performance, security, and scalability, for example. We are really interested in talking to more potential users, so if you are interested in getting involved in our user research, or seeing a demo of what we’ve done so far, please get in touch.

If this sounds like the kind of problem you'd like to work on, we are currently hiring for developers and web operations engineers. We are always on the look out for talented people to join the team so take a look at our videos describing how we work, our vacancies page, or drop us a line: gds-recruitment@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

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