A few years ago, I stood up at the first GDS all-staff meeting and told everyone there to “look sideways”, by which I meant: don’t get stuck in silos of your own making. Talk to people, look at other teams’ walls, ask questions, seek help, seek feedback. The unit of delivery is the team, and a good team is one that communicates well.

I think the same can be said for the whole of government. Right up to senior levels, even departments themselves, we all need to be looking sideways. Collaboration is key to doing the work we have to do, and good collaboration comes from good communication.

Collaborate both ways

Digital transformation isn’t just service design, it’s organisation design. It’s as much about people as it is about pixels and processors. And it’s hard. Re-thinking digital services means re-thinking how your organisation does things and why it does them in a particular way. It means challenging the status quo and constantly asking “Why?” and “What is the user need?”

The simple truth is: the best work happens when there’s collaboration between departments and the centre. Everyone looking sideways, seeking help. All of our successes have been a direct result of collaboration with departmental teams, working together to build brand new services, redesign old ones, and reshape departments themselves.

A few examples:

• almost all of our work on the transformation programme was about collaboration - GDS experts went to work with digital teams in departments all over the country, advising and supporting them
• GDS worked closely with colleagues from the Land Registry earlier this year, looking at data, registers, and their vital role in the future of government as a platform
• as Pete Herlihy wrote just the other day, the status tracking and notifications platform team is working together with colleagues from DWP, DVLA and Land Registry, among others
• the border mapping project brought together people from 26 different departments and agencies, working collaboratively to understand imports and exports as users see them
• the digital justice discovery project involved people from MoJ, Home Office and GDS working together to explore new ways to make justice more efficient and more effective

That’s just a few examples. There’s so much more going on right now, and you’ll hear more about it in the coming weeks and months.

It’s not about us. It’s about collaboration. None of these things would have happened without it. We need a digital centre in government, a team that can build connections and interdependencies where they’re needed; but that team cannot know each department’s users and user needs well enough to do all the work on its own. Similarly, those departments need help from the centre to build their own digital teams and skills, to understand and meet standards, to get encouragement and support for doing the right thing.

Freedom to do means stuff gets done

Good collaboration is more than just having a meeting with colleagues from other departments. It’s more than just working together in the same building or even the same room. It means talking through the issues, communicating them well and making sure everyone on the team understands them. It works best when teams have permission to innovate and experiment. Nobody needs more forms, they just need freedom to explore what’s possible. It’s harder, and less common, than you might think.

You need people from all levels, from management to front-line operational staff. You need people with all sorts of skills and experience. You need digital expertise but you also need that understanding of the service, the users, and the problems they all face every day. It’s only when you get all that knowledge being shared and discussed that you really begin to see the benefits of collaboration.

Learning goes both ways

In my leaving announcement I said thank you to a lot of people, and made only brief mention of all the people in departments that GDS has collaborated with over the last few years. Let me take this opportunity to be more direct: thank you, all of you, for your collaborative spirit, your patience and support. I think we’ve learned a lot more from you than the other way round.

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Last month I was invited to give a talk as at the Cambridge University Computer Science lab.

The lab was running a summer school for teenage girls to encourage them to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) subjects and to teach them about coding. Eighty 15-19 year old girls spent a week getting their first taste of HTML, CSS, Javascript and how the web works. They had little to no coding experience but an academic track record that makes STEM study a possibility.

From the code to the screen

For most of the day they were following a tutorial to build a flappy bird game, and were given the opportunity to customise it themselves - that was a great idea. Some of the girls created a Wonderwoman vs. James Bond version, others replaced the bird with Channing Tatum’s or Selena Gomez's head and an R.Kelly song would play once you reached a certain level. On top of being fun, this really helped them experience the satisfaction coders get from getting their idea to the screen.

They also had a daily talk from developers, to give them a sense of what it's really like. I gave them a presentation on what GDS is, what we have achieved, but also what the day of a developer looks like, including pair programming and retrospectives.

Find things out for yourself

Having only learned to code a year ago myself, I highlighted how it was very different from learning at school. Learning to code is not about remembering facts, but about building things. And it's perfectly acceptable to look up all the knowledge you need online. In fact, part of becoming a developer is becoming efficient at finding things out for yourself. It’s also about asking the right questions, like when there is a bug: could it come from the code I wrote? Which line? What things should I check to find out? What do I need to research to fix it?

The last part of my talk gave them ideas to keep on coding after the course was over. I introduced them to APIs, and gave them ideas of applications they could build using them. For example, an app that texts you when brands you’re interested in tweet about a sale (using the Twilio and Twitter API) or a travel website that allows you to pick your destination according to the average temperature and humidity level (using the Kayak APIs and a Weather API). The power of APIs is inspiring.

Seek support

I also encouraged them to seek support after the course, as working with other people is much easier, and coding can be very sociable. I suggested they stay in touch with each other and meet up to keep coding together. I also suggested they go along to Codebar, a weekly meet up where professional developers coach students from minorities underrepresented in technology. I attended Codebar as a student myself, and found it so useful having a knowledgeable person to answer my questions.

The Wise UK Statistics show that the proportion of girls picking information and communication technologies drops from 50% to 36% between GCSE and A-level. It’s therefore a critical time in their lives to encourage them in that direction. This course was really well thought out, giving the students a glimpse into the type of job they could have and providing them with a lot of support. It also showed them how social coding can be, all the while giving them space to experiment and that's what coding is all about.

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I’ve written about the important work we’ve been doing in building a Digital and Technology profession across government. Digital transformation of government is bigger than any one person.

It requires leadership, sure, but the leaders are there to make sure that the talented people in the organisation have the support and direction they need to do great work. When it comes to big organisations, hire the head, and the body will follow.

Visiting the Department for Work and Pensions’ Digital Academy in Leeds, it was great to see that dynamic in action.

Kevin Cunnington, DWP’s digital Director General for Transformation, founded the Digital Academy in February 2014 to build digital skills across the DWP workforce.

I sat on the panel when Kevin was hired, and have been excited to see what he’s been doing at DWP since. The Digital Academy sits with the Department’s Leeds Digital Hub. Here, multidisciplinary teams work on new digital services: learning and doing together.

There’s work to be done when it comes to connecting the digital vision with the operational realities across the department. It’s just not on that civil servants can’t use freely available digital tools at work, if that’s what helps them do their jobs. Government has been working on this problem for a while. As Bob Kerslake said last year, there are lots of reasons why this is a challenge. But: it has been done in other places. Helping civil servants work smarter and more efficiently can only be a good thing. I’ve raised these issues with Mayank Prakash, DWP’s Director General, Digital Technology: it’s a big job, but one worth doing.

That said, while the DWP Digital Academy is in its infancy, it has made a strong start.

Strengthening the Digital and Technology professions

Initiatives like the Academy are going to be a big part of strengthening the digital and technology professions across government. That’s why I was pleased to bring Liv Wild along when I visited Leeds. Liv recently joined GDS as Head of Professional Development.

She brings a lot of private sector experience to her new role. She’s been both a digital delivery specialist and a senior HR professional in a number of digital agencies and technology consultancies. Bringing those skills to the digital profession will help bring government into the digital age. After all, it’s people who make transformation happen.

Getting going with digital delivery courses

As part of my visit, I sat in on sessions from two of the Academy’s courses. The first one, called The Foundation, is a 12-day introduction to digital delivery. It will prepare anyone who’ll be working on a digital project at DWP in the future for working in an agile, user-focused multidisciplinary team. It’s not a substitute for hiring experienced digital and tech professionals. Instead, it’s another strand of embedding digital across the civil service.

I also joined the groups in the middle of their two-day Service Design project - building a digital shop front for a fictional department store. It was good to see long-serving DWP staff, new to digital, enjoying creating a user-centred digital service. Both DWP ‘old timers’ and newbies gave the same, unanimous feedback: let’s get going.

Working for the good of the user

You don’t have to go far to see digital teams doing the do. I joined a Universal Jobmatch replacement show and tell session. Trudie Whitworth and others on the team shared the work they’ve been doing to identify the underlying needs of the users of Universal Jobmatch. They’re using Companies House data to identify potential employers who weren’t yet on board. That’s digital thinking at its best. Sharing information across government, then putting it to work for the good of the user.

I met the Small Digital Services team. One of their projects is to improve the applications for emergency interest-free loans for benefits claimants. These currently take 22 days to process: that’s potentially 22 days without a cooker or a fridge for some of the UK’s neediest people. Digital transformation is about more than fixing websites. It’s about making sure we deliver services and help our users. Digital public services done right can do things like improve processing times. In the case of services like emergency interest free loans, those processing times add an extra and unnecessary burden to people who are already in a difficult position.

Context - the icing on the cake

The icing on the cake, though, was meeting participants on the Digital Awareness for Leaders course. The group I met were mostly middle management. People too often describe middle management as the ‘frozen middle’. But at the DWP, I saw the same thirst for change that kept me motivated for five years in government. The people in that session could see the power of digital to serve citizens better. They’d been working on an exercise to define the characteristics of good digital leadership. What they came up with can’t be improved:

• digitally fluent
• collaborative
• curious and experimental
• contextualising

It’s that last point, contextualising, that’s really the crucial insight. As we take digital transformation wider and deeper, we need leaders who can explain why digital really matters. The Academy is building a movement for change: a body of digital professionals to transform government services. Making sure it’s being used strategically, to drive digital transformation within the main bulk of DWP, will be an exciting next step.

Delivering the Service Manager training program

This visit showed us how the Academy has earned so much recognition for its success in training members of the DWP and beyond.

This week I’m pleased to announce that DWP Digital Academy will take over delivery of the Service Managers training programme that has so far seen over 250 graduates, with demand still high. GDS will still own the course and develop content for it, but the Academy will be responsible for delivery.

This is in keeping with GDS efforts’ to embed digital expertise throughout departments, and to devolve responsibility outwards. DWP will run its first course on 22 September.

Thanks, DWP team, for a great day. It was inspiring. The Academy is doing great work, and I look forward to seeing the results of that work appear in the digital services yet to come.

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I have a new favourite form: HMRC’s Pay your self-assessment online. Enjoy!

But maybe before you do, you’d like a little explanation? OK, I’ll back up a bit and explain.

Making better forms isn't easy

I’m a forms specialist - I work with organisations to help them make their forms easier to fill in and more effective. These days, I’m lucky enough to have my dream job: I’m part of the team at GDS creating design patterns and other resources for people who design what we call “government services”. But just between you and me, I’ve yet to meet a government service that doesn’t have at least one form somewhere - so really, what I’m doing is helping the whole of government to make better forms. It’s exciting.

Only: making a better form isn’t easy. Even making a new design pattern isn’t that easy: we’re discussing over 100 of them on our design patterns hackpad, and we only publish a pattern on our Service Manual when we’ve got plenty of evidence from user research to justify recommending it. And the design patterns are only part of the job - designers have to do many other things, such as working out which questions on the form are really necessary.

I look for examples of good forms

One thing that helps designers: examples. They like to see what ‘good’ looks like, and that’s why the GOV.UK form elements have examples in them.

I’ve been collecting example forms forever, but as I mentioned: making a better form isn’t easy, and it turns out to be even harder to make a good form. I often find parts of forms that are fine - but there’s some detail or other that isn’t right. The patterns might be good but the instructions aren’t. Or both of them are fine but it’s weighed down with too many questions.

A good form lets you do what you need to - easily

A good form is legible and looks organised. It certainly can’t be a good form if you can’t understand the questions. But the real winner, the thing about a form that makes it truly successful, is if it lets you do whatever you need to do - easily.

A great form gets you to the point straight away

My new favourite form lets you pay your self-assessment tax online.

Paying a tax bill is a bit like going to the dentist: important, but not necessarily pleasant. It’s good to get it over with as little fuss as possible.

To get a tax bill paid, all you need to know is your UTR and how much you have to pay, both of which you can find on the tax bill. Click into the form, stick those two numbers in, type in the details of the card you want to pay with, and you’re done. That’s it. You can get directly to the point, straight away.

No log in. No nonsense. How cool is that?

Great forms save costs

Why bother making your form into a great form? Because they save costs.

This one has successfully reduced the costs of support calls. The old form got about 18 calls for each 8,000 payments. The new no-nonsense one is down to 1 call for each 8,000 payments.

How cool is THAT?

(If you’d like to try it, contact me and I’ll send you my UTR. I don’t mind in the least if you pay some, or all, of my tax bill!)

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I wanted to point you to a post on the GOV.UK Verify blog that you might have missed. It talks about the programme’s objectives, and how the team has been making progress to meet those objectives.

We're working with 51 services across government, of which 13 are now connected to GOV.UK Verify (7 as public beta services). We’re on track to meet the demands of the services in the pipeline - we expect about 30 government services to be using GOV.UK Verify by April 2016 and the remaining 20 or so to join in 2016/17.

Take a look at that post, and note the GOV.UK Verify success rate: in 6 months, it’s increased from around 40% to 69%, and it’s on track to hit 90% by next April. That’s iteration in action.

Thank you, GOV.UK Verify team

I’ve only got a few days left in government, but before I go I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly congratulate the GOV.UK Verify team. You couldn’t go out and buy a team like this - it has to grow along with the service. It’s packed full of talented technical people who understand public service. Stephen Dunn, Pete Gale, Liz Sarginson, Todd Anderson and others, led at first by Chris Ferguson and now by Janet Hughes, have done great work.

They’ve built something brand new and completely unique - no other country in the world is as far ahead on identity assurance as this, and that’s because of the hard work and dedication of everyone on the team. I don’t use words like “dedication” lightly, either: these people are properly dedicated to building an identity assurance system that does what it needs to do, and meets user needs. Our strategy has always been delivery, and this lot have delivered in spades.

How GOV.UK Verify is different

GOV.UK Verify is important because of the things that make it unique. It’s been designed from the outset to be straightforward, secure and private. Government services can be sure that they’re dealing with the right person each time, and users can be confident that their personal information is in good hands, and not stored in a single huge database.

That’s because GOV.UK Verify works via certified companies, who check and confirm someone's identity before they use a government service. This happens completely online, and it's the first time this has ever been possible. Previous methods have always involved waiting for something by post, or going somewhere in person. And it’s fast: it takes about 15 minutes the first time you verify your identity, and less than a minute each time after that.

GOV.UK Verify changes the game because it piggybacks on the wider commercial market. More household names joining as certified companies in the near future will be a huge benefit to government. In the old world of silos, government was competing with itself and with the market. In the new world we’re working alongside it, setting standards but allowing innovation to thrive. Both sides benefit.

This is one of the first times digital public services have worked with private companies in this way to make the most of both their expertise and the marketplace. All the certified companies have to meet or exceed high standards set by government and an independent certification body, as well as data protection laws and contractual obligations put in place to respect user rights and needs. Beyond that, they’re encouraged to develop the best solutions in the market for helping people prove who they are. It’s exciting to watch this happening.

GOV.UK Verify is straightforward to use, but its market-based approach and technological sophistication make it one of the most forward-thinking examples of digital transformation I’ve seen anywhere. Other governments around the world are watching its growth carefully, and preparing to copy its template. It’s a fantastic success and over the next year or so, as it moves from beta to live, it’s going to have a huge impact. With nearly 300,000 users now, and having a successful roll-out in some of our most vital transactions like self-assessment in January 2015, GOV.UK.Verify has huge potential, and that’s down to the team and its users.

Building trust

Investment in GOV.UK Verify is investment in the future. It’s already verified 275,000 people, just during the beta phase. It looks set for rapid uptake and greater success when it goes live next April. A lack of trust in the identity of the user is one of the biggest barriers to digital transformation in the public and private sectors. If you can’t establish trust online, you are limited in the services you can offer digitally - not just filling in online forms which are then manually processed, but interacting with automated processes that give immediate responses and outcomes, so that you can complete your task and get the outcome you need there and then.

In government we accept that we’re just one part of the market and ecosystem for identity, validation and assurance services. We can’t compete with such an emergent marketplace; instead we need outward-facing standards so everyone can service government, and operate to those standards ourselves. For years our identity management and validation systems have been siloed, lacking interoperability and burdened by locked-in data structures which are hard for us and users to change. This means more manual checking, more duplicate phone calls and forms to fill in. It results in a few contracts locking out the many emergent players in the marketplace. Continuing to work this old way - where we have 300+ parts of government talking to, and competing with, a digital marketplace - would mean turning our back on a crucial part of the digital economy.

As it grows, GOV.UK Verify will mean that government can make more valuable and compelling services available as digital services, making them more convenient for users and less expensive for government to deliver. People will be able to check and update their details, and get access to automated, immediate services that are currently only available on the phone, by post or in person. And because of its market-based approach, the service is also helping to grow a new market for identity services to meet the same needs in the wider public and private sector, unlocking massive digital transformation opportunities in local public services, health services and the financial and retail sectors.

That’s why GOV.UK Verify matters. And the team that has made it - against much scepticism since the end of the ID card approach - deserves huge credit for looking sideways: looking out and driving a market, and looking in and acting as one government. Well done to them.

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There are so many committed teams delivering digital services all over government, it feels unnatural to highlight just one - but when it comes to doing stuff that matters, at scale, and under pressure, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) team developing the Universal Credit (UC) Digital Service is impossible to ignore.

Here's a video demonstrating the UC Digital proof of concept developed by DWP and GDS following the 2013 reset of UC:

Not an easy ride

Their mission is to simplify the welfare system, and to help more people to move into work, while supporting the vulnerable.

From the moment the UC Digital Service team was established in summer 2013, they’ve been at the sharpest of sharp ends. The entire UC programme was being reset. The UC Digital Service was given the herculean task of developing the strategic “end state” service, to support the full diversity of people who might claim UC at some point during their lives.

It hasn’t always been an easy ride.

And as the UC Digital Service scales up from a few hundred diverse claimants in South London to cover the whole of the UK, there will doubtless be more bumpy moments ahead. This stuff is hard.

Doing the hard work to make things better

But, when you spend time with this incredible team, it’s impossible not to be impressed with just how much they’re getting right in designing a service that will give this radical policy the very best chance of success.

Let me give you a few examples:

1. They’re not building a website; they’re creating a new service to deliver new policy. That requires a new organisation, with new ways of working and a new culture, as much as it requires great user journeys or quality code.
2. They have strong backing from the top of DWP, from Ministers and Permanent Secretary down. The Universal Credit SRO Neil Couling provides exemplary leadership (he’s at every show and tell), chair of the UC Programme Board Sir Robert Walmsley is applying appropriate governance with refreshing alacrity, and the digital support from Kevin Cunnington has been crucial.
3. They make sure they really understand and meet the needs of UC’s users. All users. Even the most vulnerable. Especially the most vulnerable. And they never forget that DWP frontline staff are vital users too.
4. They don’t pretend they get everything right first time. They watch how users interact with the service, and then they iterate the whole service to better meet the policy intent. Sometimes they iterate code, sometimes process, sometimes training, sometimes policy - it’s all one service.
5. They’re not scared to deploy the real-world user insights they’re gaining to challenge policy decisions or existing custom and practice, sometimes long-standing. Doing the hard work to make things simple.
6. They swiftly and cheaply prototype multiple different ways to meet the policy intent, ditching those that don’t work in practice in favour of continuing to iterate those that do. That’s the future of policymaking.
7. They’re confident enough to start small, recognising that the value of early work often lies in learning about the reality of users and their needs, and testing the most important assumptions.
8. They know that the unit of delivery is the team, and that each team must contain the right mix of specialist skills and experience. Those with deep frontline operational experience are highly prized for their often priceless insights.
9. They scale up carefully and organically. They started with one team, and are now up to six, but have grown at a steady pace so their culture and quality hasn’t been compromised.
10. They invest the time in hiring high-quality specialist skills, and are happy to seek support from the centre when they need it, be that from GDS, CESG or elsewhere. From its inception, the UC Digital team welcomed the support GDS can offer, a close collaboration which continues to this day.
11. They make sure all those joining understand the intent behind the policy. Indeed, they constantly remind each other of the point of UC - to simplify welfare, help people gain sustainable employment, support the most vulnerable.
12. They are agile. They update the service early and often. They are highly disciplined in their agile planning, they prioritise ruthlessly, and their testing and integration is continuous.
13. But they’re not dogmatic. Where it makes sense, they’ll accommodate other project methodologies - for instance, when integrating with some parts of DWP’s legacy IT estate.
14. They don’t try to do it all themselves. If they can use an existing tool or capability they will - though they know when not to compromise the coherence and quality of the service. They’re not afraid to do less.
15. They know that security, like user experience, is the responsibility of the whole team, and requires defence in depth, awareness of emerging threats and agility to respond swiftly.
16. Openness. They’re open with each other about what is and isn’t working, and honest with stakeholders about what is and isn’t possible. They know the value of such a culture, and fight tooth and nail to protect it and maintain it.

I could easily add more.

The challenges continue

It would be wrong to suggest that the UC Digital Service team is getting everything right - indeed the demonstrations they give during their regular cross-government show-and-tells rarely go unchallenged.

The challenges that lie ahead as they build on and replace the existing ‘live’ UC service remain profound; daunting even. It’s vital the team are given the time and space to iterate towards a mature operational service, able to support a reality that is often messier and more complex than appreciated.

But if anyone can do it, they can.

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It’s time to update you on what’s been happening on our work with data. It’s one of our three interconnected strategic areas of focus: digital, technology and data. They’re so closely intertwined that we can’t work on just one or two of them. It’s all three, or nothing.

Mike Bracken was appointed Chief Digital Officer back in March but of course, relinquished that role when he left government. So here’s what we’re doing next.

New beginnings

First, let me introduce Paul Maltby. Paul’s been working as Director of Open Data and Government Innovation in the Cabinet Office since 2013, and is now leading the data workstream at GDS. His name will ring bells with anyone who’s worked in the data sector - he’s known as a vocal advocate of open data and a prolific Tweeter.

Paul and his small team are busy planning the next steps. Getting data right is a fundamental part of the next phase of digital reform, and a vital building block for government as a platform. But the potential of data goes even further.

Collaboration, not empires

The team’s near-term priorities are to:

• communicate the mission - we haven’t communicated enough about the work or our plans for the future, so that’s going to change
• focus on execution and get stuff done; teams from GDS and the Government Innovation Group will work on three different strands of work, which Paul will explain in detail in a future post
• move faster, which means making sure communication between various governance groups and stakeholders is better
• continue to work with departments; we want to work more collaboratively with our colleagues around government

On that last point, let me be very clear: we’re not trying to build a data empire at GDS. There’s good work being done across government, and we want to support and encourage it. Even as policy, governance and controls remain at the centre, it’s important that the management of data should remain with departments (as demonstrated recently by Companies House). Our aim is to help ensure government data is good data, and is put to good use.

We’ve published many blog posts about our preparatory work for government as a platform, including discovery projects and ideas for registers. That work was all useful, but it’s just the smallest of beginnings. Our aim, and Paul’s job, is to help departments move onwards from there. It’s a far bigger, bolder and more ambitious plan.

We should value data as part of our national infrastructure, and there’s still a need for central coordination of the data agenda. Keep an eye open for posts from Paul and his colleagues, as they spell out their plans in more detail.

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It’s Mike Bracken’s last day today, and on behalf of everyone at GDS I want to say this: thank you, Mike.

Government, and government services, have changed beyond all recognition since 2010 when this all began. You’ve been pivotal in making that happen.

Personally Mike, I just want to say this: the past year and a half has been amongst the most challenging, exciting, and rewarding I’ve ever had working in digital and technology, and I’m here because of you. Your influence will continue to be felt, long after you’ve gone. We wish you all the best of luck in your new role at the Co-operative Group.

Meanwhile, @gdsteam will keep doing what it does best: collaborating with colleagues from all over government to design and develop great new tools and services. Starting small, and iterating towards better. Starting with user needs, not government needs.

I always liked your catchphrase. In a single word, you acknowledged the path we were treading, the work done to date and our ambitions for what’s yet to come: “onwards”. That’s the direction we’re all heading; not so much parting ways, more like just forking the repository.

In some ways, the civil service is very different to corporate organisations. And in other ways, it’s very much the same.

Most of our time is spent building secure digital services for citizens starting from data. Just like people in almost any large organisation, civil servants have to go through induction and training courses, do performance management reviews, claim expenses, and sometimes move from one civil service job to another.

All of those things require a certain amount of management, which of course comes with inevitable paperwork. Right now, that management happens in lots of different ways. Sometimes it’s wrapped up in some sort of database or information management system, and other times it’s just documents that sit on people’s computers and get emailed from one person to the next.

Basic tasks like this shouldn’t be difficult or time-consuming, but at the moment they are.

It takes up much more time than it should. Civil servants, just like people in other sectors, should be able to focus on the work they were hired to do, and not spend hours and hours on the bureaucracy that surrounds it.

What is the user need?

In recent months, a small team based at GDS has been running a discovery, looking at the tools civil servants use to get all these tasks done.

They started with user needs, because civil servants are users too.

They talked to, listened to, and observed some civil servants in different roles and departments about their experiences of using various services to do things like apply for jobs, book meeting rooms and record training. They heard people’s frustrations, and developed an understanding of their needs. Then they started to build a prototype.

A cross-government platform for civil servants

Here’s a quick video overview of some of the features included in the cross-government services prototype:

It’s built as a platform: a common, shared technical infrastructure that can be used across government. That means departments can use different ways of meeting the needs of their users, while being confident their services will talk to other services in different departments.

It’s not designed to replace any of the large systems many departments depend on for complex interactions like payroll management, but it is designed to change how data is passed in and out of those systems to make them easier for civil servants to use.

It includes a personal data store for every civil servant - a digital space every individual can use to control what data they share, with whom, and how it’s updated. It could enable staff to share their work objectives (or not), their career history and specialist skills (or not), or their preferred forms of communication (or not).

That will make it easier not just to find the right contact details for someone, but also to find the right person to contact, wherever they are in the civil service.

Three collaborators, two workstreams, one goal

There’s a lot of work to be done to take this project further.

GDS isn’t looking to do everything - we can’t, and we don’t want to build everything centrally. So we’re working with others to take the next step from discovery to alpha.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is hiring digital technologists and as we attract the best talent across the UK we want colleagues to experience an amazingly easy to use digital workplace. So DWP has decided to become the seed adopter of this alpha, with Technology users as the pilot user community. DWP and GDS will together build on everything that was uncovered in the discovery and make it better so that it can be used by colleagues across DWP and across all government departments

Civil Service Learning (CSL) is funding an additional programme of work focusing on ways to improve how civil servants do training and development, another vital part of every civil servant’s day-to-day work and another thing that would be improved through user-centric design. These changes will link up well with the big improvements CSL will be making to learning.

There will be two teams working collaboratively towards a single goal, made up of individuals from DWP, CSL and GDS, and working from both DWP and GDS offices.

This is great news. It’s exactly the kind of thing we mean when we talk about collaborative working between departments and the centre: it’s all about building the team and giving them time and space to think. Because together we can do more.

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In my previous blog post, It's all about trust - auditing local government domains, I talked about auditing all gov.uk domains belonging to local authorities, the devolved governments and locally related services e.g. fire services, National Park Authorities. It had never been done before and boy, what a job!

I pored over thousands of domains to see if their websites breached our current guidance of being inaccessible, not functional, or leading to a non-government domain (.com or .co.uk addresses, for example). With that big list of domains the next task was to contact the owners.

Gov.uk is where it's at

I wrote to domain owners when their websites didn’t meet our guidelines and asked them to rectify the problem. The bottom line is to maintain trust in our world-leading website, GOV.UK. Every time a user clicks on a local council website (fleckshire.gov.uk is a made-up example) that takes them to a non-gov.uk domain (fleckshire.com), the recognition and trust of GOV.UK is chipped away.

Is this really a big deal? Well, I’m also currently working with government departments, the big search engines, and our legal team to remove a number of domains/URLs that pretend to be GOV.UK (or the old DirectGov website). These sites dupe users into paying fees for government services that are often free or much cheaper on our official sites, e.g EHIC, passport, driving licence, car tax.

I want to safeguard the public by ensuring all government related services can be found at a gov.uk domain - whether GOV.UK or a local authority one. If a local authority or organisation has a gov.uk domain, they should use it.

Let’s keep it simple

Having recently supported a local housing association by helping their residents to gain basic IT skills, it’s evident that when it comes to local authority services, users want a very simple user journey. Research by the BBC early last year found 20% of Britain's population lack the basic digital skills required to realise the benefits of the internet. We ought to be making it much easier for them to use online services.

When it comes to local authority websites, users don’t care about the name of a campaign. They just want a simple, online presence to pay, report, request, apply, or understand something. Local authorities having multiple websites can confuse users.

This is a prime opportunity to start persuading local authorities to retire old domains and consolidate the different services they offer under their main website. Some gov.uk owners don’t realise that defensive registration on gov.uk is not necessary and have a small stockpile of domains (which they’ve probably owned since the internet began!).

There is no risk of cybersquatting as only public sector bodies can own a gov.uk domain. We’ll never allow a non-public sector individual to register with our domain. The savings from closing a domain might be small (a maintenance charge upwards of £40 + VAT every 2 years for each domain, depending on what your registrar wishes to charge you), but every penny counts and so far local authorities have agreed to close around 30.

Naming and registering websites guidelines

In a nutshell, I’d encourage you to familiarise yourselves with the local government: naming and registering websites guidelines, to be confident you still fulfil its requirements.

Our guidelines state:

If after registration the original status of your organisation changes to, for example, charity, voluntary or commercial status, then your eligibility for a gov.uk address ceases. You must inform us …

Some organisations have had a gov.uk domain for years, but are no longer eligible to retain it. We try to accommodate the owners as much as possible where closure of a site is concerned. We’ve got to maintain trust for the user and by keeping these domains open for long periods when they are found to be ineligible erodes that trust.

If you are concerned that you may be breaching the standards or your status has changed, get in touch with the Naming and Approvals Committee (NAC) via the gov.uk registrar JANET. We’ll be happy to help and negotiate a timescale for closure of the name.

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Over the last two years the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) have been preparing for a huge change. Last Friday, the Partners Achieving Change Together (PACT) contract closed, bringing in-house the technology team that keep DVLA’s services running.

The fact that no-one outside DVLA noticed it happening, and that their services continued to work without a hitch is a testament to the success of the switchover. It’s a remarkable achievement, and one that shows what digital transformation really means. We’ve been saying it for years: it’s more than just websites. It goes so much deeper.

The DVLA IT estate had been an outsourced function for 22 years. The PACT contract itself was over a decade old, and had been through several hands since it was first specced out in the late ‘90s. It effectively put all of DVLA’s technology provision into a third party’s hands. All of the onsite technology, all the service maintenance, and all the digital delivery was handled by a large IT company.

The contract effectively turned the DVLA’s technology team into an assurance team, making sure the contract and services were delivered to specification ... but not much else.

During the last parliament, DVLA recognised that the PACT contract would be a major blocker to their digital transformation plans. They began talking with Liam Maxwell and the Government Technology team about what exiting the contract might look like, while using the exemplars to kickstart building in-house digital delivery teams.

In 2013 Iain Patterson, CTO of DVLA (on loan from GDS) began investigating what that contract consisted of:

It’s fair to say it’s morphed into lots more things. It meant anything you want to do in the IT world, or IT people, had to go through that contract. Every item you delivered was treated as a contract change, making the contract more complex and harder to unpick should you want to leave.

DVLA faced a choice: continue investing money in a contract that allowed them to maintain their current setup, or bring those teams in-house to kickstart the transformation of DVLA’s services.

The board decided at the start of the year to start insourcing.

It all comes down to planning

Fundamentally, PACT was about people: the IT professionals working to provide services to and on behalf of DVLA, many of them based in and around the DVLA’s offices in Swansea.

Leaving PACT would mean bringing many of those people in-house through a Transfer of Undertakings (TUPE), a legal mechanism that would leave DVLA unsure about the final numbers of people coming over to them from the suppliers until the morning of the switch.

This risk necessitated building a small team to handle service operations in the unlikely event that key team members wouldn’t come over. Fortunately, the lead-time meant that the emergency team were assembled and briefed well in advance. Preparation really was everything. Iain and the team had to negotiate contractual wrangling through the final weeks, while engagement with the supplier-side staff continued.

Success boiled down to knowing what was in the contract well enough that the team could accurately plan the transition well enough that, on the day, users don’t notice anything.

What this enables is huge

In-house, the potential for culture change is massive. A few hundred new DVLA staff will now be empowered to change the product they work on, so they can meet user needs instead of business needs – the kind of changes that wouldn’t have been commercially viable a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, existing DVLA staff will be able to learn from how private sector teams operate, while having actual colleagues to call on to effect change (instead of just ringing a supplier helpline). DVLA has started up partnerships with local universities as well as Swansea’s TechHub, so that as the newly empowered teams begin to ask for training and external expertise, there’s a framework to support it.

But ultimately, it’s the technology that will start changing the fastest. The team are looking to move aggressively away from ‘Drivers90’, the 25-year-old mainframe system still underpinning major motoring services. It allows DVLA to become a truly modern, agile organisation, empowered to improve services to users quickly and cost-effectively.

Over the last few years we’ve seen a new ecosystem of digital suppliers spring up across government. That’s something the DVLA team can now take advantage of, commissioning small teams of experts to build specific tools, and providing a base of companies that their staff can flow to and from as new opportunities open up.

A landmark in transformation

Change like this, on this kind of scale, is a first in government. The contract was worth some £230 million a year, which is money DVLA can now invest in their own teams to genuinely improve services instead of just keeping the lights of legacy technology on. They’ve taken on more than 400 IT roles and 300 contracts to support 65 services it offers users every day.

This is great news. DVLA are taking charge of their agency and the direction of its technology and although they led this in sourcing they have been quick to acknowledge that they benefited from support across government. They utilised advice and expertise from the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) and GDS in particular to drive the project forward and remove the blockers which are inevitable when delivering change in the public sector. That’s a model the rest of government should learn from.

Outsourcing has, for far too long, been seen as a way to mitigate risk – ‘If the service doesn’t work then it’s not our fault, it’s theirs!’. That’s a negative way of thinking, and it can damage people’s relationship with the state.

If you’re a user and you can’t renew your vehicle tax, or renew a passport, or do any of the things you need to do with government, the chances are it’s government you blame and not a company off the M4 corridor.

Government always carries the risk. We owe it to users to take pride in the things we build, build them well and get them working.

Oliver Morley, Iain Patterson and the rest of the team should be incredibly proud. DVLA has grown, not just in numbers, but in confidence. There’s a community of people in Swansea who are delivering services and can now start improving them. I’m looking forward to see what they do next.

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Transcript 1

In September DVLA brought all their IT teams in-house.

Alun Williams, Head of Application and Infrastructure Services, DVLA

DVLA historically has outsourced all of its IT operations as a completely bundled function.

Tim Daley, Project Director, Exit, DVLA

Gradually over the last 12 to 18 months we’ve been growing towards the day we take on all of that for ourselves. So we run all of the operations, manage all of the change, build our own software. All of it becomes our responsibility.

It gives them the freedom to build better services.

Alun Williams

By in-sourcing, it gives us freedom to make the small changes that maybe we weren’t allowed to do before because they weren’t commercially viable; it allows us to be more aggressive with the transformation portfolio. We still have some legacy systems; it allows us to look at very aggressively moving off that, without having all of those layers of commercial barriers between us and the people actually doing the work.

This is a new model for government.

Iain Patterson, Chief Technology Officer, DVLA

Every government department has to look at, one, the commercial arrangements they have already in place, to what sort of models they want to actually incorporate later on, whilst still trying to bring the intelligence, if you like, the capabilities back in-house. You can’t beat having your own information, your awareness and control over your technology landscape, and making sure the commercial pieces fit together in the right way.

Bringing staff in-house will bring a new culture to DVLA.

Tim Daley

It’s not simply a migration and on that weekend, boom, everybody becomes DVLA staff and we swap over. We’ve been building towards that for a long time.

Iain Patterson

This could be anything between 270 and 320 people that could be coming into our organisation. I think the main thing here to remember is not the amount of people that come in, it’s the cultural change that is going to happen.

Alun Williams

Everybody’s voice is important and I think that message, it was a little difficult at first to get them to believe it, I guess, but now that they’ve started working with us and they’ve started seeing how things are going to work, they’re actually quite excited about the prospect of coming over, which makes it much more reassuring from my point of view, because now we’ve got people coming to us and saying, “We’d love to do this; we can’t wait until we can do this when we come over.”

Last month, we started discovery around status tracking and notifications. We’ve discovered a bunch of interesting (and surprising) things and are now moving into a 4-6 week alpha delivery of a government notifications platform. Our aim: making it easy to keep users informed.

The most important thing that we’ve learned is that there is huge user demand across services for notifications from government  - whether that’s a receipt, a reminder, a request for something, or an update.

Significantly, we have also decided not to continue looking into status tracking tools or platforms - at least not for now.

One hypothesis we had when we started discovery was that well timed, proactive notifications from services would remove the majority of needs for status tracking tools. Just about everything that we’ve heard and seen to date supports this.

Meet the user need without the user doing anything

This seems like an obvious thing to work towards, but in my experience it doesn't get addressed enough. It really should be the first thing we ask ourselves in service delivery.

Status tracking tools are often just ‘channel shift’ for anxiety. They solve the symptom and not the problem. They do make it more convenient for people to reduce their anxiety, but they still require them to get anxious enough to request an update in the first place. They often exist to meet the business need to reduce phone calls and contacts.

It would be much better if the service just tells the user what it clearly already knows, rather than making them call up or visit a website. Sort of ‘send, don’t publish’ (ironically).

Making it easy to keep users informed

So our focus as we turn to alpha, is around making it easy to keep users informed via notifications - namely timely updates by text message, email and, er, post.

Yep, letters. Turns out, that some people still want, or need, ‘something in writing’ and that government services still have some legislated requirements to notify people by post. So that’s a thing.

Building for the reality, not the optimal

In an ideal world, notifications would be fully automated, triggered when something is received and scanned in the post room, or when a caseworker approves something and clicks ‘save’. And, for many services, this is what will happen. But in other situations, the workflows, or back-office systems don't support this.

So we’ll also be prototyping an interface that will let back-office staff send notifications directly, without any integration to existing systems. This might be an individual text message from a caseworker or perhaps a batch of receipts uploaded in a spreadsheet that post-room staff created.

At this stage, we don’t think this platform should do much more than these things. It’s important to us that platforms do simple things really, really well.

The opportunity

So we’ve learned enough about the problems to know where to start and what not to do, which really is the point of discovery. We’ve spoken to many, many people, we’ve visited many different teams, post-rooms and train stations around the country. It’s time to get building so we can get real feedback from real people.

And what might we end up with?  Well, for a flavour of who we’re working with and what we’re exploring together (nothing committed at this stage), here’s a taster of what could be possible in the future:

• MOT reminders emailed to all vehicle owners
• Jobseeker’s Allowance complaints acknowledged immediately via text message
• Student Finance documentary evidence receipts acknowledged by email or text
• Lasting Power of Attorney updates automatically dispatched by post
• Universal Credit (Digital) updates texted to claimants
• Voter registration application receipts sent to people via text message
• Driver’s Medical assessment updates emailed to drivers
• Land Registry updates via email and text message for property conveyancers

And thank you to everyone across government for your time, hospitality, ideas, and data so far … it's much appreciated.

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So far we’ve talked about the technology that makes Government as a Platform work, and the technical benefits it brings, but less about the more tangible benefits for everyone else in government. For policy people, for front line staff, for service managers, all the way up to permanent secretaries and ministers. What does Government as a Platform mean for them? And what does it mean for the rest of us?

Here's what it means:

Services will be quicker, easier, and cheaper to create

Platforms exist to solve problems common to all or many government departments. They are interconnected components of a larger system.

With these shared components doing all the hard work behind the scenes, service teams can focus solely on building what their service needs to do, and don’t have to worry about procuring a whole stack of stuff alongside it.

If your new service requires some sort of payment to government from users, you could plug it into a cross-government payments platform rather than procuring some bespoke payments system just for your service (which would take much longer and cost a great deal more).

Another example: if you want to notify your service’s users that something’s happened (such as, “We’ve received your application” or “We got your payment” or “Your licence has been issued”), you could plug into a status notifications platform which will make it easier to send them emails or texts. No need to build your own bespoke notifications system, which again, would take longer and cost more.

Another component is data. Right now, government data is stored in many different ways, frequently duplicated and hard to keep up-to-date. All those problems make it hard to put to good use. We have bad data, not good data.

When we start building platforms, data becomes another shared component in the system. Standards ensure it is accessible by other components. It is maintained and curated by departmental teams who understand it best. Users are given control over their personal data, so they can choose which services can see it and when.

Not all the components are technology components. For example, we’ve put together design patterns and a development toolkit, which distilled months and months of user research into a set of interaction and design patterns that we know work well with a diverse range of users. This is often the bit that people building services say is most helpful for them when they want to get started quickly.

In a world of platforms, you find out what users need earlier in the process, so you know sooner whether or not you’re building the right thing.

When it's so simple to create services, you can create them as experiments. They can be almost disposable.

Platforms give us a digital infrastructure to build services on: an ecosystem of components that’s not closed and locked away inside a proprietary stack of technology and processes, but based on standards and open to all. The entire public sector can use it. So can third parties. Which brings us to the next thing.

Platforms stimulate markets, and markets drive innovation

Government’s current siloed approach stifles innovation, and leads to various problems such as:

• rent-seeking behaviour from incumbent suppliers
• new suppliers being excluded, even if they have newer, more innovative ideas
• encouraging proprietary activity and technology

If we create platforms based on open standards and interoperability, we automatically create competition and drive innovation. That means more providers and lower costs.

We can boost a nascent market of providers, building upon our open services - a market that has, until now, been held back by the contracts that locked us into those closed, proprietary systems.

Companies, charities, clubs and co-ops can use the same infrastructure to set up additional services that government can't justify, or can't afford.

For example: look at GOV.UK Verify, which is stimulating the identity services market. It is setting standards, aggregating demand across government and government services, building a whole new market for identity services in the UK. New identity services are springing up and moving from “clever idea” to “commercial product” very quickly.

Programme Director Janet Hughes explains it brilliantly in the presentation she gave recently at the Follow the Entrepreneur conference: without that market influence, if government had tried to procure a solution a few years ago, the specification would already be hopelessly out of date. The market brings innovation, and innovation brings better identity services.

Services can change as policy and circumstances change

Services built on platforms are much more flexible.

Change happens: government policy, global and local politics, governments themselves, all of it changes over time. Services built the old way struggle to adapt, or even change at all. Trapped in the structure that was imposed on them from the beginning, service delivery teams invent clever workarounds. Over time, things get messy.

Built on platforms, that no longer applies. Services are separated from the things that make them work (things like data and technology). Every service rests upon an ecosystem of components that can be snapped together or pulled apart whenever needed.

So when policy changes, or when circumstances force change to happen, it can. Quickly, without fuss. Perhaps some of the components a service is built on might need to be replaced - which isn’t a problem when you’re using platforms. Everything’s built on standards and designed to interconnect. You swap out the old and snap in the new. Users don’t need to notice, or even be told (unless the service offered to them is changing).

Services are closer to policy intent

This last thing is the inevitable consequence of the previous ones.

Because it’s quicker and cheaper to build new services, and because they’re flexible and easy to change, you can iterate your way towards the right thing: not just the right thing for users, but the right thing that meets policy intent. The right thing for government. You can prototype services. You can prototype policy itself, running quick, cheap trials before rolling out further. New services from companies, charities and other third parties become possible, meeting user needs that government cannot meet.

The result? We get more services, we get better services, and for less money than before.

That’s what Government as a Platform means. That’s why it matters.

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Licence: Creative Commons Attribution Giles T

At GDS, we think working in an agile way is a good thing. You’ve probably gathered that by now.

Over the years, we’ve not missed an opportunity to talk about why we think it should be happen more often across government.

The reality for many of our colleagues is that being agile is easier said than done. One thing they often say to me, or to my colleagues, is something along the lines of:

I want to work in an agile way, my team wants to work in an agile way, but we're just a small part of a much larger organisation that doesn't work that way at all. What can we do?

A fair point and a good question. I have a few suggestions.

The first thing you need is top cover. Find the most senior person you can find who will back your efforts to be agile, and get them to publicly declare their support.

Remember that agile is a thing you are, not a thing you do. Revolution is disruptive, which is a good thing - but people don't always like disruption. Understand that what you're doing, and particularly how you’re doing it, might disrupt the work of other people and other teams. Try to see things from their perspective. See if you can help them.

Respect existing roles and processes. This follows on from the point above. Just because you're agile, it doesn't mean that you can expect the rest of the organisation to bend around you. That will never happen. So make a point of learning how they do things already, and how they've done things for the last 10 years. It's fine to ask "Why is it done that way?" but don't say "That's a daft way of doing it, you should do it like this instead."

Use language your non-agile colleagues will understand. It's fine to use the language of agile (words like "sprint" and "standup" and "iteration") within your team, but when talking to colleagues in the wider organisation, make a point of using the language they normally use.

Until they come to you, take things to them. Make that extra effort to ask for time from busy people, and go to them with a demo. Over time, and as your team's work shows its value, perhaps those people will start coming to you.

Be agile with a small "a". Show you can be trusted to get work done. Do small, frequent changes and show how they're making a difference.

Grow organically. Grow with the thing you're making. Scale the team carefully, and only bring in new people when you need their skills and experience.

Show the thing. Invite people to show-and-tells, do demos at every opportunity, give presentations, print out screenshots and put them on the walls. By showing the thing, you let it speak for itself. That alone can get you plenty more support.

But I still need help ...

Even if you follow every one of those tips, it might still not be enough. I get that. I’ve seen it happen before. Transformation is as much about changing processes and culture as it is about digital services, and processes and culture are much more deeply ingrained. Changing stuff like that is hard.

So let’s work together on it. Join our cross-government agile community, and let’s get everyone to share their knowledge and experience. Make things open, it makes them better. Something that worked for one team could work for another.

If you’ve tried all the tips above - or as many of them as you feel comfortable trying - and you’re still struggling, perhaps joining that community of like-minded people will help. If you’re interested, contact me directly: adam.maddison@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

Agile is less risky

Sometimes, large organisations are so large that even good change can get overlooked and misunderstood.

Even then, don't give up. Remember the greatest asset of being agile: it lets you see value delivered sooner. It greatly reduces the risk of not delivering anything at all. It means you deliver the right thing, the thing that meets user needs. Your focus is on outcomes over deliverables.

Often, you'll get there faster too - not always, but often. It's true that an agile work might take just as long as non-agile work, or it might even last longer. But when you're agile, you get to test your assumptions much earlier. You get to spot the false ones sooner.

Agile sounds more risky, but actually it's all about reducing risk and getting more control.

Once your colleagues and management working in the wider organisation start to see that happening, and see the results that working agile brings, they'll start to see things from a different perspective.

That's when the real change starts happening.

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We’ve talked about registers as authoritative lists you can trust, but what do we mean when we say “register”?

Across government we manage and hold data that we need to deliver services to users and to inform policymaking. We make that data in a variety of ways — from bespoke online tools, dumps of databases, through to published lists. A question we’re often asked is:

What is a register, how is it more than just a database, a statistical report, or a simple list?

To try and answer this question we’ve started to collect a list of characteristics based on the things we discovered during our early discovery and alpha work.

Some of this gets a bit technical, but we think that’s a good thing. Getting the technical stuff right at the start is an important first step.

These characteristics will be refined in the coming months as we learn more by working with people to build beta registers, but here is our first attempt to list them.

1. Registers are canonical and have a clear reason for their existence

A register is the only authoritative list of a specific type of thing. It is the source of that information, kept accurate and up-to-date. For example, the company register administered by Companies House should be the single, authoritative place to go to find data directly related to a limited company such as the date it was formed and the date it was dissolved and a link to the registered office.

The purpose of a register should fall within the bounds of a registrar’s public task — its core role or function.

2. Registers represent a ‘minimum viable dataset’

A register only holds the data it was created to record, and nothing else. It never duplicates data held in other registers. Registers link to data in other registers to avoid the need for any duplication.

To make those links work, each record in a register must have a stable, unique identifier. For example, registers should use the ISO-3166-alpha-2 country code to unambiguously reference a country, relying upon the country register to hold the country’s official-name, local-name and other information for the code.

Registers are long-lived because services and other registers depend on them. A register is just the data. It is the role of services to present data in a variety of different ways which make sense to users.

3. Registers are live lists, not simply published data

Registers are digital and may be accessed or searched by humans or machines using an API. The same data may already be periodically published as a document on a website, but that is not the same as operating a register.

For example, it would be difficult for a developer to use the PDF of sports governing bodies as a selection on a visa application form. They would have to notice when the document is republished and repeat the same work of downloading and processing the document whenever it is updated.

Making changes to a register shouldn’t take long; at most a matter of hours to give custodians the opportunity to check a new entry and guard the register against fraud and error.

Registers should have a standard interface for reading and querying their contents, which follows the API principles set out in the service manual.

There should be a clear process for challenging data held in a register with high standards for transparency, adjudications, and the processing of other issues discovered by users with register data.

Register data should be available in a variety of different standard representations, including JSON for Web developers, comma-separated values (CSV) for people working with tabular data tools like spreadsheets, and RDF for those with needs for linked-data.

A register API should be highly available. Public register data should be cacheable by intermediaries and web clients to enable the incorporation of the register directly in live services, as well as being easily downloaded in bulk for offline applications, and updated using a streaming API.

4. Registers use standard names consistently with other registers

Wherever possible a register reuses standard names for fields to enable discovery — find all registers containing a “company” field, and search — find all the records in all public registers containing “school:1234” or “company:9876”.

The data held in a register may evolve over time: new fields may be added to new entries in a register so long as they have a sensible default value for entries, and existing field names are not used for a new, different purpose.

5. Registers are able to prove integrity of record

Each individual entry in a register is immutable, addressable using a ‘fingerprint’ which may be used by a user as a digital proof of record.

A record in a register is a series of entries sharing the same identifier. The latest entry being the current value for a record. Older entries for a record must remain addressable, but their contents may be removed if instructed by law.

The record of changes made to a register is transparent and independently verifiable.

6. Registers are clearly categorised as open, shared or private

The privacy of a register should be clear, and either open, shared or private:

• open registers are public. The data may be accessed, copied and derived freely, by anyone, either as single register entries or as a complete register, with clear licensing terms designed for reuse
• shared registers allow access to a single register entry. There will be some form of access control, such as having an access token, paying a small fee, or signing-in in with GOV.UK Verify
• private registers contain sensitive information which cannot be accessed directly by services. They may be able to provide answers to simple questions, subject to access control such as “Is the registered keeper of this boat over 21 years of age?” without revealing further details about the individual
• a closed register contains data private to a single organisation, is locked away, and not connected directly to a digital service

Following the Identity Assurance Principles means we don’t anticipate a single register of people, but registers may list people against specific roles. For example, DVLA should continue to maintain a register of drivers and a register of keepers of a vehicle.

Public registers should not reference private registers. For example, whilst the headteacher of a school may expect to appear in a public register of educational establishments, and have their name appear on a sign outside the school, they wouldn’t expect their passport, driving licence, tax reference codes or National Insurance number to be made public.

7. Registers contain raw not derived data

Data held in a register should be factual raw data, not informational content, or counts, statistics, and other forms of derived data.

8. Registers must have a custodian

A register should directly meet a user-need or legal obligation.

Someone is responsible for each register, as with The Public Guardian, The Chief Land Registrar and The Registrar General.

We'll be refining these characteristics as we continue our work on registers and we'll keep you updated on our findings.

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We’ve previously blogged about the work we’re doing to make payments more convenient and efficient. During the alpha phase of our project we developed a prototype that helped us do user research and test our technical ideas. We've now started the beta phase where we’ll take real payments. We’ve also given our project a proper name: ‘GOV.UK Pay’.

Working with partners in government

A cross-government platform can’t be developed in isolation. It needs collaboration, business process analysis, and lots of user research. We’ve already talked with many of our colleagues across government to find out how they currently take payments and how that could be improved. We’re now starting to intensify that research and focus on taking credit and debit card payments for some online transactions of our partners:

• Companies House
• Environment Agency
• Home Office
• Ministry of Justice

We’d like to say thank you to all those teams for collaborating with us to develop this beta phase. Their contribution is vital - we can’t (and we won’t) launch anything until we’re all certain it meets user needs and achieves the highest security standards.

In the coming weeks we’ll collaborate with these partners to make sure we fully understand the needs of citizens using the payments service and the civil servants administering the payments. The developers in our team will also start pairing with our partner’s developers to focus on technical integration.

Future plans: Direct Debit

In parallel to doing the development work, we’re also going to start exploring the user needs associated with Direct Debit payments. DVLA has recently successfully implemented the Direct Debit payment method, and we’re excited to have them help us kick off the research. We plan to start the actual development work for a Direct Debit payment method early next year.

If you’re interested in our project please get in touch.

Does this sound like the kind of problem you'd like to work on? We’re currently hiring developers and web operations engineers. We’re 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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I'm Mark, and I'm a User Researcher at GDS. But I haven't always been.

After the financial crash of 2007/8 I lost my job in pension and investment sales so I needed to go and sign on at the Jobcentre. When I got there, an absolutely excellent adviser told me “you could work here, if you like …”.

A month later, I started as an adviser for long-term unemployed 18-24 year olds and I loved it straight away. Every day, I met loads of fascinating and witty people and I was often struck by the complexity of their lives. I don’t think I met a single person who didn’t want a job, but it was rarely that simple. Some of these people were genuinely disenfranchised and I heard a lot of harrowing stories.

Helping people to fill in repetitive and complex benefit renewal forms, and often being on the sharp end of their frustration, I spent a lot of time thinking about what the experience was like from a client’s perspective. There was the bi-weekly ritual of signing on, but I also thought about what their lives were like and how I could help them within the constraints of the benefits system. I was thinking in terms of user research but at the time I had no idea that this could be my job.

So I joined the Digital and Technology Fast Stream

I found out through a colleague that the Digital and Technology Fast Stream in the Civil Service was open for applications - I had to apply. I’ve always loved I.T. and digital work and I’d been heavily involved in these areas in my other jobs. The application process was thorough - it took nine months and I think I scraped through by the skin of my teeth.

Throughout the process, I heard a lot about GDS, GOV.UK, and agile ways of working so when I saw a chance to do a placement as a user researcher on the Digital Marketplace team at GDS, I leaped at it. I wanted to learn about agile in action, but most of all I really wanted to be involved in building something.

Best. Move. Ever.

In my first two weeks, I found out that user research is the name given to everything I’d been thinking about when I was at the Jobcentre. More than that, it was the opportunity to learn how to crystalise these thoughts and really, properly, make things better for people. Even better, I found myself working with people who passionately (and vocally) felt the same way, delivered something all the time, learned from it and did it better again next time.

I wouldn’t be here without the fast stream, and when the opportunity arose to become a full-time user researcher at GDS, it took less time to think about it than it did to make a cup of tea. There was no way I could stop doing this.

I’ve been part of the Digital Marketplace team for more than a year now, and we know a great deal about our users, but there’s so much still to do. It’s our job to balance the complex process of buying things for the public sector while making it easier and safer for everyone involved. I’m confident in the team’s ability to meet the challenge and we’ve never wavered from two driving factors: put users first, and fail fast then fix it.

Utopia? No, of course not, there’s no such thing (the dishes don’t magically wash themselves in the morning, folks…). But the GDS team continues to inspire and intimidate me in equal measure. It’s a joy to be here.

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Find out more about the Digital and Technology Fast Stream, the Civil Service's graduate recruitment programme which offers talented graduates an accelerated route to leadership within the Civil Service.

We’ve always said that transforming government’s approach to digital and technology would save money, and it has.

The published figures are impressive: last year the Cabinet Office helped government save £1.7 billion through digital and technology transformation.

In the spirit of transparency and openness, I wanted to explain how we did that: by managing government’s digital and IT spending requests, transitioning websites to GOV.UK, and by transforming public services. Let’s break down the numbers a bit.

Saving more each year

Digital and technology transformation has been gathering pace since 2012, according to figures jointly curated by Crown Commercial Service (CCS) and Government Digital Service (GDS). Against a 2009/10 baseline, within government’s savings totals, the amount saved from transformation was:

• £891 million in 2012/13
• in 2013/14, this increased to £978 million

This year's figure increased to £1.7 billion, bringing the combined total saved over these three years up to £3.56 billion.

That’s a direct result of work done across government, by departmental teams building digital services and making better use of technology.

Savings from GDS

More than £600 million of this year’s £1.7 billion figure was through the work done by GDS itself. Here’s where it came from:

• spend controls saved £391 million - as part of the standards assurance team, the spend controls group works with departments to ensure their digital transformation is in line with the government’s Technology Code of Practice. They encourage government teams to build better services for less, to disaggregate contracts, and build prototypes instead of writing long procurement documentation
• the Public Service Network saved £103.8 million
• GOV.UK saved £61.5 million
• the savings from the two-year transformation programme, not counted elsewhere, were £7.3 million by making simpler, clearer, faster digital services like Carer’s Allowance, Make a lasting power of attorney, Book a prison visit, and Register to vote
• GOV.UK Verify saved £36.5 million

Digital transformation made this possible

These savings were only possible because digital transformation made them so. Digital has helped us rethink the way we do things, but we’re only at the start of that journey.

It’s good that we’ve started redesigning and rebuilding individual digital services, but transformation goes so much deeper; it means re-thinking the whole organisation and how it works. Our work to date represents the tip of the iceberg, and that iceberg is as deep as government is complicated. Digital thinking is a good thing for all of us, and we can make the most of it through collaboration and putting users first.

This is just the beginning

Departments and agencies across government have made significant advances in implementing digital transformation over the last parliament:

• over 98% of driving tests are now booked online
• 85% of self assessment filing is done through online channels
• 2 million people have registered to vote using a new digital service

These are notable achievements. They have come about through hard work, collaboration, and by a growing digital capability that largely didn’t exist a few years ago. They’re a solid base to build upon in the months and years ahead. Across government, we’ve already saved £3.56 billion over three years, and we’ve barely begun.

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GOV.UK Verify recently passed one year in public beta. Programme Director Janet Hughes talks about what the last year has involved, and why the team is focusing on the months ahead.

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Transcript

GOV.UK Verify
One year of public beta

It was kind of low key hitting a year because our big focus is about getting from here to live, so we’re not really measuring time on the clock, we’re measuring performance and improvement and iteration and getting to the point when we’re ready to say services can rely on this and they can start turning off alternatives. And that’s what it means to go from beta to live, which we’ll do next April.

Getting ready to go live

We’ve gone from no users to 300,000 users, we’ve gone from one service to 13 services using Verify, we’ve grown the team now so that we’ve got a team capable of taking the service from beta to live. One of our big priorities is improving the completion and success rates for Verify so that more and more people who want to use it can use it. A year in felt like most of the other days, we’re just looking at how can we go on and improve the service today.

The GDS Common Technology Services (CTS) team was set up following the Cabinet Office Transformation Programme. We want to explore the best ways to run technology transition projects in other government departments.

The Home Office is a big and complex department, employing approximately 32 thousand people. Its shape frequently changes, with teams moving, merging or in some cases becoming a completely separate body.

The team responsible for the Home Office transformation wanted to better understand the needs of their staff by exploring their daily tasks, how they work throughout the organisation, and how they would like to work in the future.

To answer these questions, the Home Office and CTS created a cross-departmental user research team to start the discovery phase.

How user research fits in

When researching such a big and dynamic organisation we couldn’t afford to be too granular in our findings. We had to find similarities and differences in how people work across the organisation. The divisions existing in government are rarely stable so we wanted to produce outcomes that will outlive these changes.

What we did

Our team of user researchers spoke to staff in a variety of roles throughout the Home Office. We visited them in many locations, from offices, to border controls, to out in the field (literally!).

We took cameras, recording equipment, and a discussion guide of the topics we wanted to cover. We listened to people’s stories about the way they work, how they use technology successfully, and where it lets them down. On our return we discussed our experiences with each other and shared our findings with the rest of the team. By the end of our fieldwork we’d spoken to over 400 members of staff, visited nearly 40 Home Office locations across the country, and called many more employees.

User profiles

What became rapidly clear is that staff were working in similar styles and facing similar challenges regardless of their team, role, seniority level or location. We could often describe people in terms of their ways of working throughout any given day. This included the degree to which they had to move around an office location, multiple locations or to different  places around the country.

Other common themes were the predominant use of off-the-shelf applications (like email, Microsoft office suite, and publishing tools) to accomplish tasks, or dependence on departmentally owned bespoke tools (like admin applications, case work tools, expenses and intranet).

We were able to group the people we spoke with into these, and other repeated themes, which became the core dimensions on which we could build our profiles.

We’ve come up with seven profiles (so far): Behind the Scenes, Office Everywhere, Speedy Checkers, Out and About, Front of House, Technologist and Always On. These each have their own unique pattern, which represent the way that staff at the Home Office currently work and use technology.

For instance a ‘Speedy Checker’ staff member spends much of their day mobile, responding to events as they occur and interacting with a wide range of people. The border staff checking freight at a port are a good example. Whereas a ‘Behind the Scenes’ staff member works from a fixed location, processing information in a predetermined fashion in order to achieve a business objective, for example processing a Visa application.

An example of the dimensions for the Speedy Checker profile

Next steps

The project in the Home Office finished this summer (2015), but this doesn’t mean the outcomes of our work have been forgotten. Currently the profiles are used by CTS at GDS, but the goal is to see whether the profiles are replicable in other departments - do ‘Office Everywhere’ employees exist in other departments too? If so, in what proportion to other profiles?

This is not a final collection of profiles. We think that some of them may end up merged and that new profiles will become evident. We want to build a coherent understanding of cross government users and find out how these profiles look on a bigger scale. The user researchers at CTS are engaging with other departments and our aim is to support any technology transition discovery work that is kicking off across government.

By discovering the way people work across government - what is successful, what is a blocker - we, at CTS, can suggest solutions to remove barriers and preserve the good work already being done. Not all of the CTS solutions will be technical, sometimes they will be a policy change or a service design solution. They will, however, always put the user first.

You’ll be able to follow our work on this blog and other government blogs: Government Technology and Home Office Digital. Also, if there are any departments and agencies looking to start or expand on their own user research in technology you can contact us via ask.cts@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

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