Sprint is GDS’s flagship event. It brings together people working across government to learn more about how digital transformation is improving people's lives.

Sprint gives us the chance to talk about the work we’re currently doing to solve the hardest problems. It’s also an opportunity to look at how government will work in the future.

Last year’s Sprint 18 event was held at London’s Southbank Centre. People from across the public sector came together to share their progress and learn more around the themes of transformation, collaboration and innovation.

This year will be bigger and better as we’re holding not one, but 5 Sprint events around the UK:

• Sprint: Edinburgh at EICC on Wednesday 8 May in partnership with the Scottish Government
• Sprint: Cardiff at Cardiff City Stadium on Tuesday 14 May in partnership with the Welsh Government
• Sprint: Leeds at The Queens on Friday 17 May in partnership with Leeds City Council
• Sprint: Belfast at Titanic Belfast on Tuesday 11 June in partnership with the Northern Ireland Civil Service
• Sprint 19 at the Southbank Centre in London on Thursday 19 September

Why we’re taking Sprint around the UK

From training Scottish civil servants in new skills in the Scottish Digital Academy to looking at how emerging technology can help make firefighters safer in Wales, impactful work is happening across the whole of the UK.

So for Sprint this year we’ll be in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We will celebrate successes and discuss how we'll work together to build a world-leading digital union.

We’re also working with our colleagues at Leeds City Council to look at how local authorities are approaching digital transformation.

Sprint 19 in London

In September, we will bring Sprint to London’s Southbank Centre once again.

The London event will showcase some of the things we’ve talked about in the Sprint events across the country so we can see the best in digital transformation.

We'll show how emerging technology is tackling some of the hardest problems in the public sector and we’ll look at how we can collaborate to deliver end-to-end services for users.

If you would like to attend the Sprint events in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Leeds or Belfast there are 2 separate forms to register your interest - a registration form for civil servants and a registration form for people in the wider public or private sector.

If your organisation does not allow access to Google forms, please email the Sprint team for more details, stating whether you are a civil servant or in the public or private sector.

If you’re interested in attending the London event, you’ll be able to register your interest in the summer.

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GOV.UK Verify, government’s digital identity programme, aims to ensure that users can create, use and reuse digital identities across public and private sector services.

As the recently appointed Director of Digital Identity at the Government Digital Service, it’s my role to ensure that this happens, and to shape the role of GOV.UK Verify in the future. It’s a big challenge and one I feel privileged to have joined.

Here’s what I’ve been up to so far and my priorities for the near future.

Data, innovation and investment

Before joining government, I spent most of my career in start-up organisations, including as a Director for the online learning platform Coursera, Chief Operating Officer at venture capital firm Mustard Seed Impact, and Managing Director of education technology company Avado Digital.

And prior to joining GDS, I led the efforts across the Ministry of Justice to make the system and decisions as data-driven as possible, including as Director of Analysis and Interim Chief Scientific Advisor.

These experiences are highly relevant at this point in time for digital identity, as we also need to consider the incentives of, and ensure tech works for, both users and content/identity providers. We need to innovate smartly and with user needs at the heart. And we need to act with urgency on opportunities that will unlock further investment in this market.

The importance of digital identity

I’ve been at GDS for about a month now and there are several things that have struck me that I thought were worth sharing.

Digital identity is a collaborative project

GDS is increasingly focused on more collaborative relationships with government departments, including by being involved in solving problems earlier. For example, if we want to solve the issue of connected data and user journeys, we need to look at identity as well.

We are also focused on partnering with the private sector to innovate and open up new markets. Digital identity and the GovTech Catalyst, which links private sector innovators with public sector challenges, are two prime examples of the impact GDS can make in this area.

We need to get this right for people

Digital identity is a vital issue not only for government transformation – as has often been our focus – but also for users who benefit from a safe, effective and  functioning digital economy underpinned by strong digital identity solutions. People will rely on a robust digital identity system in order to access critical services. They also need to know their data is safe and being used in the right way. And they expect a level of simplicity that they can navigate and understand.  

These are things I care deeply about and why I have signed up for this challenge.

Make things open, it makes things better

So far, what I have found in my first month at GDS is:

• incredible talent, including world leaders in the digital identity space
• a lot of good work that has not been well understood nor externally communicated as openly as we would like, which is one thing I plan to improve in the future
• a number of challenges and opportunities that we are actively tackling in order to build a sustainable, long-term solution

Critically, I have found that culture in GDS and very much in the Verify team is one of honesty and responsibility, which makes it easy to solve problems quickly and get to the root of issues.  This is not something I take for granted.

Our priorities

We have a lot to deliver in a very short timeframe. Currently we have 3 main areas of focus:

• rapid alignment around our future-state plan
• engagement with identity providers and others in the market, to ensure we are supporting the growth of this market
• delivering an excellent service that meets user needs, supports government and has the flexibility needed to grow with future plans

I look forward to being able to share more about our work in the near future.

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Government is for everyone

Designing inclusive services is really important. One of government’s core roles is providing services that meet people’s needs, and because government is not a shop, we can’t pick and choose who uses those services, and users don't get a choice of government services.

Last year we carried out research to find out what it takes to provide inclusive government services. We found that people tend to focus on certain types of inclusion, such as accessibility, digital inclusion or team diversity.

We found that, in turn, government has developed a good understanding of how to make websites accessible for people with disabilities, or help people to do something online.

Looking at the whole picture

But building accessible and effective end-to-end services requires a more holistic approach to users and the barriers they can face.

Public services may never be perfect for everyone, but we must make sure barriers are as small as possible, and that none are insurmountable.

Here are some things we’re working on to reduce these barriers.

A framework of universal barriers

We’re developing a framework of ‘universal barriers’, to help service builders identify and minimise all the barriers that any user might face.

We’ve identified 11 barrier types that encompass all the reasons why any person might struggle with any task, from opening a can of beans to using a complex tax-related online service.

User journeys can be complex and include a range of offline channels including telephone services

We’re currently doing research to understand how the universal barriers framework can be applied to people’s work, and what tools, guidance or artefacts we might need to make to support them.

The framework is part of  GDS’s work to support the government transformation strategy by helping government build whole services that are better for users, and more joined-up, whole and cost-effective to provide.

Service Communities and the Service Standard

GDS is also supporting Service Communities – networks of people from across the public sector, working together to design and deliver end-to-end services. We’ve also created a step-by-step navigation to show users, for the first time, everything they’ll need to do to complete an end-to-end task, like learning to drive or employing someone.

Building to this scope is vital for inclusion, as it helps all the interactions, channels and organisations that users require to be designed in a more joined-up way.

We’re updating the Digital Service Standard to reflect this more joined-up approach, and have provided new guidance on working across organisational boundaries and making services more inclusive. We’re also updating assisted digital guidance to be clear it’s just one part of ensuring service inclusivity.

We’ve been working with Citizens Advice, who collect data on the people they support and the advice they need, to share this data with government’s service builders, to inspire and inform improvements.

Inclusivity across government

It’s not just GDS doing this work – many other teams across government are looking at how to make services as inclusive as possible. The Tax-Free Childcare service team is informing a whole-service approach by creating a ‘mental model’ of users’ whole journeys.

The Oneteamgov movement joins up public service people across professions, government departments and non-government organisations.

The Ministry of Justice has a user-centred approach to creating policy, helping make policy and delivery the same thing.

What’s next

We’re now working with service builders to understand what tools, artefacts, guidance or support they might require to build services that enable users to overcome all the possible barriers they may have.

We’ll be blogging more about this work in the coming months.

If you'd like to hear more about Service Communities, or help develop the universal characteristics framework, then please email us.

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In the latest episode of the Government Digital Service podcast, we speak to people from across the public sector about how digital has affected their lives, their careers and the organisations they work for.

March 2019 marks 30 years since Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal on information management, which would lead to the World Wide Web. To mark this anniversary, we spoke to senior people from across the digital public sector.

Those who contributed to this episode are:

• Kevin Cunnington, Director General of the Government Digital Service
• Sally Meecham, Head of Digital Data and Transformation for UK Research and Innovation
• Caron Alexander, Director of Digital Shared Services for Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance
• Matthew Cain, Head of Digital and Data from the London Borough of Hackney
• Caren Fullerton, Chief Digital Officer for the Welsh Government

You can subscribe to the GDS podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms.

You can read a transcript of the podcast on Podbean.

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GOV.UK Verify is a way to prove you are who you say you are online. By doing this, you can access government services, such as checking your income tax or state pension and viewing your driving licence information.  

As these are services that contain confidential data, we are committed to making sure our users’ digital identities are secure.

We work with a list of identity providers who will check your identity and confirm it to the government service you are using. This means the government service doesn’t know which identity provider you have chosen and the information is not stored in one place.

Our work protects user data and means criminals cannot masquerade online as someone they’re not. With identity fraud costing the government between £1 billion and £4 billion a year, we must continually evolve and grow our security measures to counter identity crime.

We are keeping GOV.UK Verify secure through cross-government collaboration and sharing knowledge with selected private sector organisations that are facing similar challenges.

Mitigating identity crimes  

We have written before about the kinds of fraud our identity standards prevent and how we keep data safe on GOV.UK Verify.

As more people sign up for digital identities and the Verify programme evolves, we need relationships with others facing the same challenges, to counter crime caused by identity misuse at the earliest stage possible.

The Counter-Fraud and Threat Intelligence team sits within the wider Verify team and specifically works to counter identity-enabled and identity-dependent crime and fraud.

Identity-enabled crime and fraud refers to traditional criminal activity which is exacerbated by the misuse of identity, for example identity theft. Identity-dependent crime can only be committed by the misuse of identity.   

Keeping GOV.UK Verify secure

Working with the cyber security community

We have formed an Identity Misuse Group on the National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (CiSP) platform. If you work in government or industry and are interested in preventing identity misuse, you can join the group via CiSP’s website and request to register your organisation if you’re not already a member.

Learning from academia

We have created an Identity Risks and Identity Standards Consortium, which is made up of leading UK academic institutions and chaired by Professor Tim Watson from the University of Warwick. We hold quarterly meetings to share knowledge and expertise.

Collaborating across government

It is important that we work across government to make sure we counter shared threats and ensure security information is shared with relevant departments.

Collaboration is done through workshops and meetings with teams in other organisations. We ran one such workshop earlier this month. Attendees included staff from central government departments and a wide range of public sector organisations.

Sharing our knowledge with the Verify programme  

As part of the Verify programme, we can gain insights from our colleagues working at GDS. And, our team of specialised identity crime and identity fraud experts can feed back information into the government’s identity standards, which helps make them as robust as possible.

Ongoing work

The use of digital identities will increase as GOV.UK Verify is opened up to the private sector.

This means we must keep working to counter identity crime and fraud. By spotting fraudulent transactions early, we save the government money and we protect our users.

All our work within government, and also with the wider private sector and academia, will help counter fraud and reduce the misuse of identity.

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In the latest episode of the Government Digital Service Podcast, GDS Director General Kevin Cunnington talks about his time so far in tech and digital government and discusses GDS’s plans for the future.

In an interview with GDS Senior Writer Angus Montgomery, Kevin talks about his background studying computer science and artificial intelligence and his career before he joined government.

He discusses his time at both the Department for Work and Pensions and GDS and looks at GDS’s priorities for the next 12 months.

You can subscribe to the GDS podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. 

You can read a transcript of the podcast on Podbean.

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At GDS we regularly invite all of our staff to celebrate what we have achieved and what is coming up for us next.

As well as having monthly all-staff huddles, where we gather and the members of our executive team share news, we usually hold off-site events every 6 months where we have a full afternoon together.

But these off-sites don’t always give people the chance to interact and there isn’t much time to focus in depth on a lot of areas of work.

Staff had told us that they wanted to hear more about what their peers were working on so I proposed that we replace one of our off-site events with an unconference-style all staff.

How we ran our event

At a typical unconference, the agenda is decided on the day of the event. Attendees stand up and pitch what they would like to talk about. People then vote on which talks they would like to attend. The most popular sessions take place.

But I wanted our unconference to be as inclusive and accessible as possible. I knew not everyone would be working in the office that day, so wouldn’t be able to join in with voting in person, and that pitching to a large group wouldn’t appeal to everyone.

I also wanted a reasonable amount of time to plan the agenda, to make sure the popularity and format of sessions best matched the size and layout of rooms. Making sure the event met user needs was my priority over running an unconference in the ‘proper’ way.

So a small project group prepared a blank agenda, with 4 session slots of 30 minutes each, across 16 rooms. We left time in between for people moving between sessions, and scheduled a welcome and close from MCs at the start and at the end of the day.

Two days before the event, we invited people to pitch using a Google form, and after a day of pitching, people had a few hours to vote on the ones they were interested in attending, using Sli.do. We displayed live voting on a screen in our social spaces to encourage people to get involved and to build the energy of the event.

Once voting closed – the afternoon before the event – we matched pitches to rooms, and shared the agenda with everyone, so that the people who had been pitching knew when and where they were presenting the following day.

What people talked about

Across the day, 59 sessions took place, some of which were repeats of the ones that got the most votes. Everyone was free to attend whichever of these they wanted. If they found the session they hoped to attend was full, they were encouraged to try something different.

We made some sessions available on Google Hangouts so that remote workers could participate. And we asked someone in every session to take and share notes so that people could read afterwards on the sessions they hadn’t attended.

There was a huge variety in the topics covered, including: the future of GOV.UK, career progression, making data accessible, artificial intelligence, better collaboration, and wellbeing.

Members of GDS’s Introverts’ Network participated in the event with an online Q&A on Slack, which all staff were welcome to join. They had discussions on how to enjoy a busy unconference, what is good about being an introvert at GDS, and how to make meetings better for introverts.

The MCs closed by bringing everyone together into our main space and invited people to share what they had learned during the day.

What did we learn?

I sent a feedback form to everyone who attended so I could find out what people thought worked well, less well and what they took away from the day.

Overall people said very positive things. Many enjoyed the change from the usual style of all staff event and liked the variety of topics covered. More than half said they want to try out something that they learned on the day. 100% of people said they would recommend pitching and presenting at a future event of this kind.

Hopefully, we will run another unconference, but there are changes that we will consider making. Lots of people said they would have liked a 5th session slot because there were more than 4 they wanted to attend. Some said it would be great for them all to have been filmed so that people could watch what they missed. Others said they would have liked the agenda to be shared earlier, so it’s good to see that our decision to not follow the structure of a typical unconference, by pitching and voting on the day of the event, was a popular one.

I’m now speaking to the presenters of the sessions we ran to find out if they have any actions or outcomes from the day that they plan on taking forward, to make sure the momentum and energy from the day isn’t lost.

The aim is to engage our staff more widely with those, so it’s not just the attendees from each session who will be involved.

I'll also be thinking about how to make the next GDS unconference even better. If you have any ideas or tips for running successful unconferences, let us know in the comments below.

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The Scottish Digital Academy exists to build capability to deliver digital transformation; we want to equip people with the right digital skills. The Scottish Digital Academy is working in partnership with the GDS Academy.

Since its launch in January 2018, we have grown from a team of 1 to a team of 7, delivering training to 34 Scottish public sector organisations to date. We run 7 different courses but our work doesn’t stop there – we support public sector organisations in a range of different ways.

In this post, I look back at how the Scottish Digital Academy has transformed into its current form, from beginning over an informal chat over coffee in Leeds to having over 900 graduates.  

The beginnings

It all began when we had a discussion at the Digital Academy, which was what the GDS Academy was formerly known as.

We met the team there as part of a discovery to understand how other public sector organisations were upskilling their employees in digital skills.

It was quickly agreed that trialling Digital Academy courses at the Scottish Government would be of mutual benefit to both organisations and a great example of cross-government collaboration.

The key aim of the trial was to see if the courses met our particular user needs and if the Scottish Government should and could set up its own Digital Academy.

Trialling the concept

Over the next 6 months, we trialled venues and courses through the Digital Academy to see how our users would respond to a Scottish Digital Academy.

We had lots of positive responses from participants and realised it was clear that this was something that was needed and wanted in Scotland.

We also discovered challenges during these months. These included us needing to have our own distinct identity as the go-to Digital Academy in Scotland, while still collaborating with the GDS Academy to ensure consistency and best practice was maintained.

What we needed to get started

We found the following things were crucial to setting up:

• staff: we had to recruit our own agile coaches to deliver courses in Scotland
• venue: we wanted a flagship venue with plenty of wall space and room to move so a number of different places were trialled
• branding: we needed to ensure the look and feel of the course materials and any marketing made it clear that we were the ‘Scottish’ Digital Academy
• local case studies: the training had to be relevant to the participants so we looked for specific Scottish examples to use on the courses
• collaboration: it was essential to continue with the cross-government collaboration already developed, while being mindful of adapting training for Scottish organisations and their user needs
• reach: we needed to ensure we reached organisations across the breadth of Scotland – from Shetland to Berwick, and beyond

We officially launched as the Scottish Digital Academy in January 2018.

Where we are now  

After the trial, and since our launch, we now offer a range of courses on a monthly basis. They range from a 1-day Discover Digital and Agile course to a 10-day accredited Digital & Agile Foundation course.

Our team of 7 work across Scotland and deliver courses and workshops in different locations. The team includes 3 agile coaches who deliver training in the classrooms, develop the programmes and help participants throughout the process. We are now looking for 2 more coaches to join our team.

We’re not just focused on delivering training in the classroom. We work with programmes end-to-end, from having initial consultations to understand their training needs, advising on the best approach to training, right through to helping our graduates embed their learning and providing post-course support.

We offer a consultancy service, where our coaches can provide tailored courses and deliver on-site training for organisations.

We have also had growing requests for ad hoc coaching activities in digital transformation teams, where agile coach expertise can add a lot of value in a very short space of time.

All of our team have attended a Scottish Digital Academy course, so they can understand what we have to offer, and we work in an agile way.

We are now also running working-level courses for business analysts, delivery managers and product managers, after identifying a growing need.

It’s been fantastic to see the Scottish Digital Academy grow, and there are exciting plans ahead to expand our proposition.

Measuring our impact

It’s important for us to be able to measure the impact of the Scottish Digital Academy training and support on participants, who subsequently are delivering or leading on digital transformation programmes.

That’s why alongside the usual management information collated, we are looking to build case studies to show how we have helped across the public sector.

We’re also working to make sure we have the support of leaders within the public sector. Without leaders on board to understand new ways of working and support their teams when they complete training, the culture change needed to drive digital transformation may never happen.

That’s why it’s great to see some of our senior leaders like Sarah Davidson, Director General Organisational Development and Operations, and Anne Moises OBE, our recently retired Chief Information Officer, attend our leaders course and feed back very positive comments on their experience.

Learn more

We will be giving a workshop at Sprint: Edinburgh on 8 May. You can follow the hashtag #SprintEdinburgh on Twitter to find out more.

We are currently looking to expand our proposition to offer Digital Transformation training on one platform, supporting not just the Digital, Data and Technology profession, but all those working in the public sector, too.

You can tweet us on @ScotDigAcademy, visit our Scottish Digital Academy website or, for questions or to discuss your requirements in more detail, email digital.academy@gov.scot.

Since we first talked about updating the Service Standard, we’ve run workshops up and down the country and been through a number of drafts. All of this has helped us get to what we’ve just published: the updated Service Standard. You can download a poster of the updated Service Standard here.

The updated Service Standard comes into force at the end of June. From this point anyone starting a new discovery will need to work towards it.

At some point we think it makes sense for services that are already in progress to transition to the updated Service Standard. We’ll be consulting on this, but in any case it’s unlikely to happen before early 2020.

The start of something exciting

We’re really proud of the impact the Digital Service Standard has had. It’s contributed to the growth in digital maturity across government, to the extent that the best government services are now among the simplest, most accessible services around.

But we think things can get better still – and that the updated standard is the first step on an exciting journey to making that happen.

It’s the start of a conversation about services that cut across departmental boundaries and work brilliantly no matter which channel you use to access them. And, where relevant, help to solve an underlying policy problem – as well as working on their own terms.

That’s better for users because they get the thing they need without having to understand the structure of government or a department’s internal processes. And it’s better for government, because it means we spend more time helping people and less time dealing with problems caused because it’s not clear what we’re asking them to do.

We’re already seeing teams across government doing really interesting work in these areas: we hope that the updated standard will help make that the norm.

Now it’s for everyone

Another exciting aspect of the standard is that we’ve written it with the wider public sector in mind.

The standard might have started life as a tool for central government teams working on public-facing transactions, but now you can use it if you’re, say, working in a local authority – and we’ve made it easier to use with internal or non-transactional services too.

You can read more about how and when to use the Service Standard.

You’ll recognise lots of it

It’s worth saying that, despite the exciting new stuff, the updated standard isn’t a grand departure. In fact, the vast majority of the underlying intent is the same.

We still care about things like building services iteratively, delivering value to users as quickly as possible, open-sourcing your code and using common platforms.

And the trigger for assessments hasn’t changed: you’ll still need to come and talk about the digital service you’ve built, but you’ll be asked some extra questions about the wider landscape around it.

That wider ambition reflects commitments in the Government Transformation Strategy, as well as recognising the increased digital maturity and capability across government.

Drawing on the expertise of others

Some of those extra questions will relate to things that aren’t within a digital service team’s  direct control. For instance, you might be asked about the offline parts of your service when you come in for assessment.

We’re not asking digital teams to take responsibility for these things: we’re asking digital teams to make sure they’re talking to the right people, and for the organisation as a whole to support those conversations.

Operational experts probably have more direct contact with users than anyone in a digital team – so you should be talking to them and encouraging them to play a full part in shaping the government services of the future.

Maintaining services in a sustainable way

Government runs a lot of services. Developing those services so they meet user needs and are fully accessible takes a lot of work, money and people. We know it’s not realistic to expect you to commit those resources over the entire lifetime of every service.

Instead, we’ll be asking you to keep the performance of your live services under review and come back to them periodically to improve and iterate them. Which is why we’ve put more emphasis on running a service and published some accompanying guidance on working out where to allocate your limited resources.

What we’ll be expecting from service teams

It’s important to point out that we’re not expecting you to start building completely joined-up services that work seamlessly on all channels overnight.

That should be the long-term aim. In the meantime, you should take reasonable steps towards those goals.

For example, you should absolutely start small by focusing on a particular touchpoint or transaction, getting a version of that transaction in front of real users as quickly as possible and iterating as you learn. As long as the transaction is scoped so it makes sense to users.

Not all services are part of a wider journey for the user. But if yours is, you should have a plan to iterate towards an end-to-end service that solves a problem the user would recognise.

You can read our guidance about the alpha phase to see how you might approach some of these issues.

What we’ll be doing to support you

We realise teams will need support transitioning to the updated standard. We’ve published lots of new Service Manual guidance, which should help address a lot of queries.

We’ll also be giving people the chance to ask questions and talk about the things that matter to them.

It’ll take us a while to get to everyone, but we’ve mitigated against that by talking to assurance leads across government. They’ll be able to deal with lots of your queries.

And there’s a Google group if you need help with something.

Watch this space

The updated Service Standard is a signal of things to come, and of a government that works as one organisation, across channels and departmental boundaries, to provide great services to users.

Download the new Service Standard poster.

Public sector service teams can now use GOV.UK Pay to take payments from Welsh language speakers.

GDS common components have been built to meet the needs of all users, including Welsh language speakers. We are committed to working with service users within the devolved administrations to meet and incorporate their requirements for Welsh language functionality and support.

We have recently done some work to make GOV.UK payment pages available in Welsh.

First government service to use GOV.UK Pay in Wales

GOV.UK Pay lets businesses and citizens pay for government services online. It is used by 138 services across the public sector. Last month, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW) started taking online payments using GOV.UK Pay payment links, which made it the first service in Wales to adopt GOV.UK Pay.  

Using GOV.UK Pay in Welsh and with custom branding

Last year, GOV.UK Pay introduced payments links. These allow services to easily create pages to take online card payments and issue refunds to their users.

The HIW team got in touch with us. They wanted to move away from cash payments, but did not have a digital service or a technical team to support it. They asked if GOV.UK Pay could offer payments pages in Welsh and were keen for them to incorporate their own branding.

Custom branding on payment links is valuable for any organisation that doesn’t use GOV.UK branding (such as local authorities), and making payment links available in Welsh means that Welsh government organisations can now use them.

We built on the pre-existing feature to provide payment pages in Welsh, so now the entire payment links journey is available in Welsh. We did the same for custom branding.

Like our previous work, we internationalised these pages so we can easily add more languages in the future.

Now, HIW can use payment links in Welsh with their own branding.

Stuart Fitzgerald, Director of Strategy and Engagement and Senior Responsible Officer for the HIW Change Programme said:

The introduction of online payments to HIW is bringing huge benefits to both independent healthcare providers, who can pay registrations quickly and easily, but also to the organisation, through streamlining and automating the payment process.

GOV.UK Pay has provided a free and secure solution customisable to both organisational branding and – for the first time – for the Welsh language, enabling a smooth user journey for users in both languages.

Colleagues in the GOV.UK Pay team have been really accommodating in working with us and achieving this important part of our wider change programme.

How to use GOV.UK payments links

Teams that have a live GOV.UK Pay account can set up and use online payment links (in English or Welsh) right away. We published more detailed instructions and further information on the GOV.UK Pay features page.

A GOV.UK Pay staff admin tool screenshot showing how government services can choose payment pages to be displayed in Welsh.

Anyone with a public sector email address can set up their own test account by visiting the GOV.UK Pay product page. You need to contact the GOV.UK Pay team to be able to test the payment links feature from the test account.

Teams wanting to integrate with the GOV.UK Pay API can also use Welsh – our documentation explains how to do that. We have also recently published a technical blog post where we explain how we built this feature.

Contact the GOV.UK Pay team if you have any questions.

Sign up to the GOV.UK Pay newsletter to receive updates about our new feature releases.  

Sprint: Cardiff takes place on 14 May. You can follow the hashtag #SprintCardiff on Twitter to find out more.

Over 150 local authorities use GOV.UK Notify to send emails, text messages and letters. These organisations often have to deliver complex public services with limited resources.

Here are 5 examples of teams that use Notify to save time and money, and build better services.

Sending one-off messages at short notice

Bracknell Forest Council started using Notify in April 2018. As well as council tax and local election reminders, they’ve also used it to send one-off messages.

When 7,400 Direct Debit payments were unexpectedly delayed, the council sent a text alert. They quickly set up a new Notify template and uploaded a list of the phone numbers of people who were affected.

Using Notify to keep residents informed helps to improve customer satisfaction. In this case, warning people in advance about the delay reduced the number of phone calls to the council.

Saving money by sending text messages instead of letters

Dacorum Borough Council uses Notify to text people who forget to pay their council tax. If residents pay after receiving a text, the council does not need to follow up with a formal letter.

In one 3-month period, Dacorum sent 3,000 fewer letters, saving them £5,000 in printing and postage. They also issued 400 fewer court summons for non-payment of council tax. Dacorum estimate that this saved residents over £22,000 in legal fees.

Based on this success, Dacorum’s waste collection team has started using Notify too.

Providing a free service for people affected by air pollution

The Sussex Air Quality Partnership (SAQP) uses Notify to warn people about air pollution. Residents can subscribe to airAlert, a free service that sends them a text when local air quality is poor.

Because they send fewer than 25,000 texts a year, it’s completely free for SAQP to use Notify. This means they can invest the money they save in other projects instead. For example, reducing nitrogen dioxide emissions from idling vehicles.

SAQP also uses Notify to run 2 text alert services for extreme temperatures – coldAlert and heatAlert.

Reducing the number of missed appointments

Each month, Gravesham Borough Council makes an average of 232 bulky waste collections. If residents forget to put their rubbish out, they have to pay £27 for a new appointment.

In November 2017, Gravesham used the Notify API to set up a text message reminder service. When residents book a collection, they can sign up for a reminder too. Reminders are automatically sent at 7pm the evening before collection day.

Each month, 77% of people ask for a reminder when they book and there has been a 50% drop in missed appointments.

Other teams at Gravesham Borough Council have started using the Notify API too. The taxi licensing team uses it to send reminders for vehicle, MOT and licence checks.

Sending personalised emails in high volumes

The School Admissions team at Buckinghamshire County Council uses Notify to send personalised emails to parents. The email tells them when to expect school offer letters and waiting list positions. They also direct parents to the website for further information.

The council has sent 96,000 emails with Notify since April 2018. During that time the number of phone and email enquiries has reduced.

Medway Council also sends school admission test results through Notify.

To send a bulk email to 3,500 parents and guardians, they upload a list of email addresses and test results. Notify merges the data with a reusable message template, then sends an email to everyone on the list. Once the emails have been sent, the council can check which, if any, could not be delivered.This report is useful in case of an appeal by a parent or guardian.

Medway Council is now planning to use Notify to send reminders about all school placements.

If you work for a local authority and you need to send emails, text messages or letters to your users, visit www.gov.uk/notify.

If you’re already using Notify and you’d like to share your story, let us know or leave a comment below.

New regulations mean that public sector websites and mobile apps will soon have a legal duty to meet accessibility requirements. You’ll need to:

• carry out an evaluation of how accessible your websites and mobile apps are
• fix accessibility problems (when you’re required to do so)
• publish a statement saying what’s accessible, what’s not – and why

You’ll need to do this by 23 September 2019 for newer websites (those published later than 22 September 2018). There are later deadlines for older websites and mobile apps.

We’ve blogged about this a few times over the past months; here’s the latest on what’s happening.

Updated guidance on meeting accessibility requirements

We’ve updated the guidance on making your public sector website or app accessible.

We have:

• split the information that was there into two guides – one that’s focused on understanding your obligations and one that’s focused on the practicalities of making a plan to identify and fix accessibility problems
• added more detail on evaluating your website or app so you can publish an accessibility statement saying how accessible it is

And we’ve published a sample accessibility statement you can use to help you write your own. Thanks to colleagues at AbilityNet, JISC, Nomensa, the University of Kent and others for their help with this.

Monitoring and enforcement

We’ve had some questions about how compliance will be monitored and how the regulations will be enforced.

A central monitoring team at GDS will assess a sample of public sector websites and apps. The aim of monitoring is to help and encourage the public sector to make timely improvements to websites and apps – making them accessible to as many people as possible and avoiding the need for enforcement.

The sample will be chosen based on a number of factors, including:

• how many people risk being excluded
• where there are known or suspected problems (for example, because there have been complaints)

If the monitoring team discovers accessibility problems with a website or app in the sample, they will notify the website or app owner and signpost them to support to help resolve the problems.

The monitoring team will be overseen by the Cabinet Office and supported by an independent panel of stakeholders.

Assuring compliance with the regulations will, in part, fall within the existing enforcement powers of the Equality Advisory & Support Service, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland.

GDS – acting on behalf of the Minister for the Cabinet Office – will assess whether accessibility statements meet legal requirements.

The Equality Advisory & Support Service provides individuals with information about discrimination and their rights as users of public services.

We’ll publish further information on monitoring and enforcement processes in the future.

What’s next

Most public sector organisations will want to consider getting help from an external accessibility expert to evaluate their websites and apps. But for organisations that genuinely can’t afford to do that, we’re working on a simple approach to self-evaluation. We will aim to publish this soon.

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In December 2018, we blogged about what’s next for Verify. The programme's main aim continues to be to help users create, use and reuse digital identities across public and private sector services.

One way we do this is by publishing and maintaining identity standards. In response to feedback, we're now improving the standards to make sure they are easy to follow and use.

That's why we've rewritten the government guidance on identity checking.

To do this, we worked closely with the cross-government Identity Standards Working Group, threat intelligence experts on the Verify programme, identity experts on the Verify programme, identity experts from other countries, and private sector organisations.

Why the identity standards are important

While the Service Standard helps the government create and run good digital services, the identity standards help public and private sector organisations know that their users are who they say they are. This minimises fraud and error that can cost organisations, and the taxpayer, significant amounts of money.

Providing a standardised way to check identities means an organisation can feel comfortable reusing identities that another organisation has already checked.  

This also means that, soon, a user could have just one identity account that they use to access multiple public and private sector services. For example, it could be possible for a user to use an identity account they created to access a government service to also access their online bank account.

It will also help build trust between users and organisations. The user can be sure their identity will be checked securely, which makes it less likely that someone else could pretend to be them.

GOV.UK Verify is an example of a product that was built to meet the UK’s identity standards. It gives users a way to create a digital identity which they can then use to access multiple government services.

Why the identity standards needed to be updated

To encourage more organisations to follow the identity standards, we decided to make them more comprehensive and easier to understand and use.

We started by trying to understand how people use the existing identity standards, which are made up of several pieces of guidance, known as Good Practice Guides (or GPGs). Perhaps the most important piece of guidance is GPG 45, also known as 'Identity proofing and verification of an individual'.

We published the first version of GPG 45 in 2012 and carried on updating it until 2018. However, we wanted to expand on some parts of the guidance, such as biometrics and how to check someone's identity remotely.

We also wanted to find out how people use GPG 45. We spoke to users of the guidance from a range of departments, agencies and private sector organisations across the country.

Making the guidance easier to understand

Our research showed that the guidance was difficult to understand and interpret. This is because it was written using a lot of technical language. This supports what we already know about how technical language and jargon can slow down both expert and non-expert users. For example, research into legal communication, by Christopher Trudeau, professor at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan, found that the more complicated the subject, the greater the reader’s preference for plain English. It also found that the more educated the person, and the more specialist their knowledge, the greater their preference for plain English.

That’s why we rewrote GPG 45 in plain English. A content designer pair-wrote the new guidance with subject matter experts to make sure it was both correct and clear.

The guidance was previously only published as a PDF, which made it harder to find, use and maintain. More importantly, PDFs can often be bad for accessibility and rarely comply with open standards.

So, the new version of the identity standards has been published in the HTML publication format.

Helping more services and organisations meet the standards

We've added a lot more ‘identity profiles’ to the new version of GPG 45. Identity profiles are combinations of different parts of the identity checking process which help users get a level of confidence in someone's identity. Thanks to the additional identity profiles in the updated guidance, there are now more ways for services to meet the guidance and get the level of confidence they need.

We've also added guidance on how to check someone’s identity remotely and worked with the National Cyber Security Centre to explain how to use biometric information for identity checks.

What's next

The new version of GPG 45 has been published on GOV.UK, but the work doesn’t end there. We’ll continue to iterate the guidance based on users’ feedback and technical advancements in identity checking.

As part of our continuing improvements, we're looking at what other standards and guidance could be helpful for services that need to trust and use digital identities. We'd like to know if you or your organisation have experience designing, running or taking part in standards-based frameworks – please email isf@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

We’re also designing a new tool to help services check whether their existing identity checks meet the identity standards. Email isf@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk if you’d like to take part in the user research we’ll be doing for this work.

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In the latest episode of the GDS podcast, senior writer Sarah Stewart talks to Chantal Donaldson-Foyer, Head of Product, and Warren Smith, Programme Director, about the Global Digital Marketplace.

Corruption in government procurement around the world costs an estimated $2.6 trillion. That’s more than the combined economies of Australia and Indonesia.

Chantal and Warren explain how the lessons learned from improving procurement in the UK are now being shared in 5 countries to help tackle corruption.

You can subscribe to the GDS podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms.

You can read a transcript of the podcast on Podbean.

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In this post, Dean Vipond, lead designer at NHS Digital, describes how they adapted the GOV.UK Design System for use in their health and care services.

The GOV.UK Design System helps teams in government to efficiently design and develop services for GOV.UK.

It does this by providing guidance, code and examples that teams can reuse in their own services.

Everything in the Design System has already been tested for usability and accessibility, so teams can use it with confidence.

Because the Design System is an open source project, other organisations are also able to use it as the basis for their own work, saving them time and money.

A design system for health and care

The NHS has recently adopted a more user-centred approach to designing services for health and care.

This has resulted in the need to prototype and trial new types of services, as well as ambitiously rework existing ones.

Faced with this challenge, it was a natural decision for us to look to the work already done over the past few years by GDS – particularly the open and accessible GOV.UK Design System.

Taking a proven approach, as well as the publicly available design and code, as a starting point, gave us a huge head start, both in terms of design practice and stakeholder approval.

Adapting the GOV.UK Design System

People’s relationship with and perception of the NHS is very different to that of government.

The NHS identity is widely recognised. It’s essential that our users trust our services, so we had to understand how best to express the NHS identity through our design system.

We spoke with GDS early on in development. We sought advice on graphic design and typography, as well as how best to manage something intended to be used by many distributed teams.

Our GDS colleagues understood our reasoning for diverging from the GOV.UK Design System, and helped us figure out the best way to retain links with its foundations, without being bound to it.

For example, we consciously decided not to automatically inherit new updates to the GOV.UK Design System, because some may not be appropriate to the needs of our users, or match the NHS identity.

Instead, we have a process of considering each new GOV.UK release, and adopting those which make sense.

This allows us to continue to benefit from the research, design and code that goes into the GOV.UK Design System, while maintaining full control of our own.

Sometimes we had to adapt parts of the GOV.UK Design System to better meet the needs of our users.

For example, our research showed that sometimes users needed content on one long page, covering everything about, say, a medicine or a condition. On pages like this, users tend to scan, looking for particular pieces of information or advice.

We adapted the GOV.UK Design System grid (used for laying out pages), adjusting the measurements and breakpoints slightly, to suit our corporate font, and ensuring a comfortable reading experience for longer articles on mobile phones as well as larger screens.

We also designed new NHS-specific components for guiding people to different methods of care (for example, GPs and A&E) as well as other signposting.

Testing and re-testing

The NHS is for everyone, so accessibility was central to our design approach. Not just because we should, but because it is the law.

We knew that the GOV.UK Design System components were already very accessible, so we were able to repurpose things like their buttons and text boxes, before doing our own usability and accessibility testing to check that they also worked for our users.

Starting from scratch would have taken much longer than the few weeks the team needed to do this work.

Feeding back to GDS

We were grateful for all the support, components and code we were able to take advantage of, but we wondered if we’d ever be able to feed back into the GOV.UK Design System.

We were playing a few years’ worth of catch-up in terms of the maturity of our design system. However, there is one particular area where we have had the opportunity to investigate further.

Like the GOV.UK Design System, we have a prototype kit that lets designers and developers prototype using the latest version of our design system.

We learned from our GDS colleagues that some users find installing the prototype kit a challenge.

A small team in NHS Digital did some dedicated research around the installation process of the NHS prototype kit.

They worked on documentation to guide novice users, and learned about the limits of different types of computers (for example, standard-issue corporate PCs).

Our findings and documentation have now been shared with GDS, so they can use it as the basis for updating the documentation of their own kit.

So now, it is not simply a one-way relationship of taking GOV.UK work and repurposing, but a community of knowledge sharing, that benefits all.

If you’d like to see how we are developing our system, all the documentation, assets and code is on the NHS Digital service manual.

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In the world of service design, there hasn’t always been an answer to the question of  ‘what does a good service look like?’. Our service design training shows aspects of it, and we do have examples of what we mean, but we don’t have one complete picture.

Lou Downe, GDS’s former Director of Design, identified this problem and suggested an initial answer to the question of ‘what do we mean by a good service?’.

We wanted to turn this into guidance for the Service Manual to show users across government what a well-designed service looks like.

Using the wisdom of the crowd

Given that we were defining the fundamentals of a topic, it seemed important to incorporate as much knowledge as we could. And there are a lot of people out there who know a lot about service design.

Lou Downe, and Ben Tate – the current Joint Head of Service Design and Standards at GDS – started this off with senior civil servants working in policy, operations and delivery. At one of the Transforming Together events focused on the future of the public service, they asked people to describe the best and worst public service experiences that they’d either seen or could imagine. Lou's initial blog post was based on this feedback.

Then, we asked a lot of designers for their thoughts on what a good and a bad service looks like. We did this in workshops, at conferences, in training sessions and through an open Google doc.

Gathering wide-ranging and detailed feedback was like an experiment in crowdsourcing as much expertise as we could.

It’s worth saying that this isn’t how all Service Manual guidance is produced. We only have 2 to 3 content designers working on it, and we wouldn’t get much done if it was!

Iterating the content

We took our draft content to meetups, such as the cross-government service design meetup and the service community day organised by the Department for Work and Pensions.

We asked people to share their thoughts on what they understood by each of the characteristics of a good service. We also wanted to know to what extent their services had those characteristics.

People had a chance to think about how they might use the new guidance, and how we could make the content even better.

The topic seemed to strike a chord. At one of the meetups, people even skipped the coffee and biscuits so that they could continue their discussions in the room.

A version of these exercises is now part of the service design training, where people have also told us about the barriers and challenges they might face when trying to improve the different service characteristics. This has helped us improve the guidance even more.

We also took iterated versions of the content to wider audiences at meetups in London and even conferences abroad – in Brazil, Germany and the US – to ask for feedback and make sure the latest rewrites were clear and easy to understand.

Turning everything into Service Manual content

Most of the Service Manual is about how to do things, not what things look like. It covers topics like how to make your service accessible, how to do user research well and how to apply the principles of agile working.

But we thought this content could work well as an introduction to service design – a set of starting points, with links to places where you can find out more.

The editing took time. We went through all the feedback in a series of 2-hour workshops, using a pair writing approach.

Getting lots of feedback also meant answering lots of questions.

When we tested the content out, people had questions about how it related to the Service Standard and other sets of principles in the world of government service design.

This helped us more clearly define it as guidance on ‘the characteristics of a good service’.

Now there is also a translation for German public servants. And Lou Downe is writing a book about good services. During Services Week, Lou also spoke about the past, present and future of good public services, illustrated with service examples for each of the characteristics. You can watch a recording of the talk on YouTube.

Help us make Service Manual content better

It’s great that as a design community, we’ve described what the characteristics of a good service are. What we need now are examples from real services to really bring the content to life.

Do you know of a service that has some of the characteristics we’ve described? Have you faced particular challenges while trying to deliver services that have these characteristics? How did you overcome those challenges?

We’d love to hear from you. Email us and tell us about the services and challenges you’ve come across. You can also leave a comment below.

Over the past year, innovation has been a big area of focus for me, as it has been for the team here at GDS and for Minister for Implementation, Oliver Dowden.

Transformation cannot be achieved without innovation. As an organisation, we should look at how we can continue to transform government, by giving people the tools, structures and skills they need. We’ve done some great work so far: from the publication of the technology innovation in government survey to the delivery of the GovTech Catalyst programme.

The new Government Technology Innovation Strategy, developed by GDS, and the guide to using artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector, developed by GDS and the Office for Artificial Intelligence (both published earlier this week) mark a significant step forward for us.

While developing the strategy, we worked hard to ensure that the views of academics and technologists in the private sector and from across the public sector were addressed, particularly what they believed blocked innovation and what enabled it in government.

The strategy rightly identifies people as an enabler of innovation. This is something I’ve believed for a long time. It’s all too easy to think that developments in technology make people less important. With every year and every job I’ve had in digital, I become more and more convinced that the reverse is true. It’s people that make the greatest contribution when it comes to emerging technology in government.

As head of the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) profession, I’d like to share what the Government Technology Innovation Strategy means for our people.

People progress so far

In the 2017 Government Transformation Strategy, we set our ambition as ‘creating one of the most digitally skilled populations of civil servants in the world’.

We’ve made great progress, and this will undoubtedly support the work we do in the future with emerging technologies in government.

To begin, we created the DDaT Profession Capability Framework, which helps to improve recruitment by ensuring that there’s consistency in job roles.

Before, there were many job roles across government – many of which were identical but with a different label. This meant that it wasn’t easy to move jobs between departments and it was confusing for those who wanted to join government.

As part of building the digital and technology profession, we created a clear structure of job roles. We reclassified and reorganised job roles across departments into a new taxonomy of nearly 40 job roles.

This has been used to create consistency and alignment across departments.

This means a more visible route for career progression and a better grasp of the huge scale of job opportunities for specialists across government.

The DDaT Fast Stream programme and our apprenticeship schemes give people the opportunity to join the Civil Service in specialist roles. Last year, the programmes received 3,000 applications.

And, of course, the GDS Academy continues to go from strength to strength. We’ve trained 10,000 students, which is a fantastic achievement. The GDS Academy  provides in-house training to any public servant who wants to update their digital skills. We run courses on agile methodology for practitioners and policy makers.

The GDS Academy’s recently launched Emerging Technology Development Programme offers in-depth training in subjects like artificial intelligence, virtual reality and biotechnology. We also launched GDS Academy masterclasses, which are a series of talks by world-leading academics and industry experts about the new technologies impacting public services.

To make sure these courses are available to anyone who needs them, we have created additional pop-up academies in Birmingham and Wales. We also helped Scotland set up its own digital academy.

We also work closely with colleagues in the Major Projects Leadership Academy to make digital a core part of their teaching as well.

Supporting people: next steps

The strategy sets the direction for how we will work to support our people.

The Data Science Partnership, lead by GDS and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Data Science Campus is currently undertaking an audit to understand the current picture of data science capability across government. When the results of the audit are known, we will explore training opportunities for data specialists and those new to data.

We’ll also look to expand the courses available through the GDS Academy. We want to enable more secondments. We will develop a mechanism for seconding people from the tech sector into government and vice versa.

The strategy also outlines our continued commitment to working with academics through the Open Innovation Team (OIT).

We’ve identified that leaders need more support. We want leaders to fully understand what emerging technologies can do for their organisation and for citizens. We want them to feel empowered to take proportionate risk when it comes to experimenting with new technologies. We will focus our energies on understanding exactly how we can enable this.

The team at GDS (and those of you who attended the Sprint events we have held so far) know that my big ‘themes’ are: transformation, collaboration and innovation.

I’ve addressed transformation and innovation in this post. So in terms of collaboration: I hope that you’ll take the time to read the strategy, and to take a look at the AI guide published alongside it, which is designed to help public servants in government realise the potential of artificial intelligence. I hope (if you haven’t done already) that you’ll join one of the GDS Academy courses. And I hope that this strategy will help us all work together to build a government that is truly innovative.

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The GovTech Catalyst is a £20 million programme that connects private sector innovators with public sector organisations to solve some of the government's hardest problems. Challenges are chosen by a cross-government board, and then they are turned into competitions, which suppliers bid to solve.

One year ago the first GovTech Catalyst competition was launched.

Since then, it’s been a busy year for the team. We’ve chosen 15 different challenges and awarded £2.75 million of funding to 55 suppliers to work on innovative solutions to the chosen problems.

The challenges are incredibly diverse; they include finding technological solutions to keep firefighters safe inside buildings, tracking waste across the UK, and reducing loneliness and rural isolation.

We’re proud that we’ve awarded more than 90% of our funding to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), helping us achieve our goal of growing the UK GovTech sector.  

While the fund is a cross-government initiative, it is run by a multidisciplinary team of 7 people at the Government Digital Service (GDS). Alongside my role, there are 2 engagement leads, a content designer, a service designer, a technical architect and an operations manager.

Over this past year, as the GovTech Catalyst has moved firmly into its delivery stage, the whole team has learned a vast amount from working with a diverse set of suppliers and public sector organisations.

Scaling up innovative technology solutions

We’ve grappled with the hard work to scale up the suppliers’ new technology, integrate it with legacy systems, govern the safe transfer of data and limit the scope of each new intervention.

To solve these issues, we worked with each challenge owner to find the right digital, data and technology standards for their individual problems. This ensures each new technology component is compatible with the organisation’s existing infrastructure.

Diverse organisations require tailored engagement

The 93 submitted problems came from across the UK, with the majority from local government, devolved administrations and arm’s length bodies. We provided detailed feedback to each organisation that applied, as we chose the final 15 applications to become competitions.

Once these had been selected, we quickly realised there was varied digital capability in the organisations chosen and each one needed individually tailored engagement. We’ve varied the time that different members of the team work with challenge owners, depending on the extra help they need to define and launch their competitions. We also travel a lot to offer guidance in person to both challenge owners and suppliers through show and tells, workshops and presentations.

Suppliers need support to work with government

Suppliers are extremely keen to work with government with an average of 40 suppliers bidding per competition. However, some needed help to understand how best to work with the public sector. We realised that many did not know about the Service Standard and the Technology Code of Practice, which are critical to building and buying technology and digital services in government.

So, we highlighted these standards in pre-launch and midpoint sessions with suppliers and worked with them to help them understand how to apply the standards to their solutions. Now more suppliers are engaging with the standards proactively from the beginning of each project.

Service teams need support too

Since launching, it became clear that some competition owners needed help defining the scope of the issue they were facing. It was not enough to fund private sector companies to work on the problem, we also needed to support service teams in articulating what needed to be solved in the early stages.

We did this through providing service design support. We ran user journey mapping workshops with everyone involved in providing the service, from front-line support workers to back-end technologists. We used these sessions to define user groups and explain how to identify research questions – all tools that these organisations can use on other projects. It also has the additional benefit of getting entire delivery teams to buy into the work that is being done to solve the issue.

Iterate, iterate, iterate

We are learning by doing and constantly improving all aspects of the GovTech Catalyst as we go. For example, we regularly iterate a process map that we give to competition owners to guide them through the process in response to feedback.

By working across the UK with a wide range of suppliers and public sector organisations, we learn how all these different teams can be supported in unique ways.

As the final competitions are opened, we will continue to work in the open, share our knowledge and remain flexible as different challenges and opportunities arise.

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When I joined GDS as Director General nearly 3 years ago, I said I wanted to strengthen and accelerate our work to help transform government and improve public services for citizens.

For me personally, it’s mission accomplished. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved during my time here. We’ve helped government to realise more than £1 billion of benefits through scrutinising technology spending. Our common components are now used in more than 660 services across the public sector.

Thanks to the work of GDS, the UK is consistently ranked as a world-leading digital government. I want to build on this standing in my new role, as Director General of the new International Government Service (IGS).

The IGS will work with governments around the world to share our experiences and expertise. This includes our digital expertise, so I’ll continue to work closely with GDS to tell its story and show how we’ve achieved success.

Alison Pritchard, who is currently GDS’s Director of Transformation and EU Exit, will take over as interim Director General of GDS.

And as I prepare to leave the organisation, I wanted to share some of the many highlights from my time here.

The people behind transformation

Transformation is all about people. I’m particularly proud of the work we’ve done at GDS and across the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Profession to help build one of the most digitally skilled populations of civil servants in the world.

The GDS Academy started 5 years ago in a room above a Jobcentre in Fulham. It now runs from 4 permanent locations – as well as pop-ups around the UK  – to give all public servants the skills and capability they need to transform public services.

The academy has trained 10,000 people so far in courses including the Digital and agile foundation course and the ‘Introduction to artificial intelligence in government' course’. Last October we started running GDS Academy masterclasses taught by world-leading academics and industry experts.

The DDaT profession comprises around 17,000 digital specialists in government. By establishing the profession, and the connected DDaT Profession Capability Framework, we’ve brought a common set of roles, skills and career paths to all these people - meaning there is  consistency in roles, career progression and pay right across government.

Reflecting the society we serve

Teams across government should reflect the society they serve. An inclusive and diverse workplace will help the UK government work better for everyone.

GDS has changed a lot over the past 3 years: we’ve doubled in size, we moved our office to Whitechapel, we now have a gender-balanced management team.

Diversity and inclusion has been a particular focus of mine and I’m proud of the work that has happened so far and that will continue to happen. We held our first Breaking Down Barriers event in October last year - aimed at increasing ethnic minority representation at senior levels in the DDaT profession.

We also held our first Let’s Talk about Race event at Civil Service live, which was open to anyone interested in increasing Senior Civil Service ethnic minority representation in the DDaT Profession. Attendees came from more than 15 government organisations, including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Cabinet Office, Ministry of Justice, and the Department of Health and Social Care, with representation from staff at all levels. We also had attendees from Parliament.

Spreading the word

Speaking at events has given me the chance to really showcase our work.

Sprint, our flagship event, has been a triumph. For the first time, we took it around the UK. We collaborated with the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as Leeds City Council.

Sprint gives us an opportunity to share the great digital transformation projects happening across the UK. It also allows us to strengthen and form closer links with our partners across the UK so that we can continue to collaborate to help improve things for everyone, whoever, or wherever, they might be.

Innovators for government

GDS published the Government Technology Innovation Strategy last month. It builds on the ‘Technology Innovation in Government Survey’ which we commissioned the previous August.

We wanted to understand where people were using emerging technologies in government and what they were doing. It equipped us with the information we needed to develop the strategy.

The development of the strategy was a great example of private and public sector collaboration. We held a series of roundtable discussions with academics, tech leaders and practitioners. The strategy captures the common problems when using, procuring and selling emerging technology across government and set out solutions.

By identifying the ‘blockers’ to innovation, we can now go about overcoming them.

We also published a guide to using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Public Sector. It is designed to help establish if using AI will help to meet user needs, how the public sector can best use AI, and how to implement AI ethically, fairly and safely.

Furthering our international reputation

From left to right: Kevin Cunnington, Director General, Government Digital Service; James Dipple Johnstone, Deputy UK Information Commissioner ICO; Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratna, The Republic of Singapore; Yeong Zee Kin, Deputy Commissioner, Personal Data Protection Commission, Singapore; Kok Ping Soon, Chief Executive, GovTech Singapore.

We continue to be in the top 5 of the UN’s E–Government Development Index and we’re ranked number 1 on the Open Data Barometer.

Our work is respected around the world and we’ve been privileged to work with governments around the world to share our expertise and learn from international colleagues to improve services. We’ve now hosted over 200 delegations.

GDS signed 5 international memoranda of understanding (MOU). Most recently, we signed a MOU with the Singaporean Government (pictured).

Building on the success of the Digital Marketplace (we helped the Australian Government to launch its own just 5 weeks), we launched the Global Digital Marketplace, which is now working with 5 countries: Mexico, Colombia, South Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia  to tackle corruption in procurement which is a $2.6 trillion problem.

The GDS Academy has gone global, too. We were delighted to see that after our visit there, the Canadian government announced the creation of its own Digital Academy.

So farewell, team

GDS has always had ambitious aims. Achieving those aims has been challenging, exciting and rewarding. I’m grateful for this. It has prepared me well for this next chapter.

I hope that GDS continues to show what good looks like, do the hardest things, reflect the society we serve and continue to help government transform.

All that remains is to thank the team for the work they’ve achieved while I’ve been in post, for their motivation, their unwavering commitment to making things better for everyone and for the support they’ve given me.

In June’s episode of the GDS Podcast, Kate Ivey-Williams, Service Designer, and Sam Dub, Product Manager, speak about their roles in developing step by step navigation on GOV.UK. 

Step by step is a way of breaking down the complex tasks that millions of people use GOV.UK to do, such as getting married or divorced, into clear and complete user journeys. There are more than 40 step by step journeys live on GOV.UK. 

In May, the team won a D&AD Award for Service Design. In this episode, Kate and Sam tell GDS Writer, Laura Stevens, about how the navigation was created and iterated and how this work helps enable the transformation and improvement of government services.  

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