Government as a Platform (GaaP) was created in order to solve the most frequent challenges across the public sector. By addressing these issues once and creating common, commodity-like components that can be used across the public sector, service teams can get to building their services quicker than ever.

This idea has taken on even more importance during the COVID-19 crisis and using GaaP products has made it quicker, easier, and cheaper to create the essential services the public need. Over the last few weeks, the GaaP team have supported teams to get started hosting and designing services, sending messages and taking payments.

If any of the challenges below sound familiar and you want to try something similar,  then get in contact - we are on hand to help.

Standing up essential services quickly

The GOV.UK Notify team recently wrote a blog about how it is reliably sending text messages to users at this time and we have seen demand soar. Among other things, the service has been used for NHS text message support for the extremely vulnerable and those isolating at home, business continuity messaging for public sector staff, and FCO travel alerts for those overseas. To put the increase in usage into perspective, around 2 million SMS messages were sent using GOV.UK Notify on a single day in March, compared to a daily average of 150,000. Daily messages across all channels (SMS, email, and letter) have been up by as much as 600% – as high as 8.6 million per day. Having a platform like GOV.UK Notify where services can get going in hours not weeks or months, has enabled critical messages to be delivered when people are in real need.

I just want to say [GOV.UK Notify] has been amazing - both people and technology. Even our engineers have been impressed, and they’re a tough audience. Please thank all of your team for their help.

- Senior Product Manager, NHS Scotland

GOV.UK Notify is not the only GaaP product that has been used in the Government’s response to COVID-19. There have been a number of critical new services launched on GOV.UK using the GOV.UK Design System: enabling teams to use its styles, components and patterns to rapidly create applications that are usable, accessible and consistent with GOV.UK. This goes a long way to generating trust in users when they are interacting with a new and sensitive service.

Getting support to those that need it the most

One of the critical applications to have gone live is the offer coronavirus (COVID-19) support from your business service. This service allows businesses to tell the government how their organisation might be able to help with the response to coronavirus. The team that developed this service were able to go from the first line of code to production in less than 4 days. 4 days to make a service that was reliable enough to instantly be propelled to one of the most popular on GOV.UK. 4 days to make a service that takes potentially life-saving information and get it securely to authorities so they can plan accordingly. Truly incredible work from an incredible team. 

This was only possible in that time frame due to those engineers knowing they had quality products they could rely on ‘off the shelf’. This meant using the Design System for creating a front-end application consistent with GOV.UK, hosting it in the cloud using GOV.UK PaaS and being able to scale the number of application instances instantly to cope with demand and integrating with GOV.UK Notify to send urgent updates.

Knowing that we had an easy-to-use platform [in GOV.UK PaaS] that we could use to host services securely gave us the confidence to deploy important new things in an extremely short timeframe.

- GOV.UK Lead Developer

The support that business can volunteer includes things like medical equipment; protective equipment for healthcare workers, such as masks, gowns, and sanitiser; and hotel rooms for frontline staff. 

Quickly start taking payments online

Some services need to stop taking cheques or reduce reliance on call centres, as offices close and call centres have fewer staff. GOV.UK Pay has been able to help these services start taking payments within a day and keep important services running.

The Home Office has added GOV.UK Pay’s standalone payment links to invoices to support payments typically taken over the phone by staff at the Shared Service Centre. Normally these payments are taken using hand held terminals, which required staff to physically be onsite to deliver the service. GOV.UK Pay’s payment links can be set up in minutes and require no technical integration. They are hosted on GOV.UK so users know they can trust them, and tell the user what they are paying for. The Home Office team have added the payment link to email replies, enabling customers to pay online for invoices for the first time.

Using the payment link functionality allowed the Home Office to stand up an online payment portal within weeks, all done remotely. We have reduced the need to have staff in the office and protected key services. It will also improve the customer experience by offering them the chance to pay online without having to speak to an agent.

- Home Office Finance Lead

Some local authorities have set up services on GOV.UK Pay the same day in order to securely take donations for crisis funds and food banks to support their communities.

The payment link option was extremely useful to quickly set up a fast means of helping residents securely donate to the charity fund with confidence.

- Surrey County Council Developer

The GOV.UK Pay platform is free to use, and services aren’t locked into a contract, making it useful when there is a lot of time pressure.

How can we help?

We continue to get approached by organisations who are looking to build or adapt their operations in response to COVID19. All of the GaaP products have scaled their production efforts to be able to meet these increasing demands and are all operating reliably.

We encourage those public sector organisations that might need to quickly design a service, safely collect payments online, securely send urgent messages or host and run an application reliably to try out the products themselves or get in touch.

Further information

The @GOVUK Twitter account is one of the most popular Twitter accounts run by a central government organisation with 1.7 million followers. For context, @HMRCgovuk has 392,800 followers; @hmtreasury has 416,800 followers; @ukhomeoffice has 959,000 followers; and @foreignoffice has 975,700 Followers.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) had a significant impact on people using @GOVUK to find out more information. From mid-March to mid-April, in contrast to the previous reporting period, we saw a huge increase of people engaging with @GOVUK. Our total engagements, the number of interactions on a post, increased by 12,500%; total followers grew by 3.3% with the largest increase of 6,312 in one day; and people tagging @GOVUK into messages increased more than 5 fold from 11,000 to 70,000.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) manages @GOVUK in line with our Social Media Playbook. We respond to queries by linking to guidance on GOV.UK or to other government Twitter accounts. We use Sprout Social to track user queries.

Here we share how we changed our community management techniques to cope with the huge increase of user queries and what our top tips to other organisations are.

Creating standardised responses 

We already had a standardised set of responses to user questions, such as passport renewal queries or advice for Fast Stream applications. This helps ensure consistency in messaging and tone of voice.

From early March 2020 we saw a huge increase in user queries. A peak came on 24 March, after the Prime Minister’s address to the nation, where @GOVUK received nearly 5,000 messages in one day. We quickly realised we needed a specialised set of responses related to COVID-19, that were agreed with cross-government colleagues, accurate, and able to change depending on policy announcements.

We did this by categorising our user queries and found the responses fell into 7 groups: protecting yourself and others, employment and financial support, business and self employment, consumer rights, benefits, housing, and scam and hoaxes. We worked with the central COVID-19 communication response team in Cabinet Office to create and agree responses. It was critical we had quick sign off and a good relationship with this team to work at pace. 

There are now more than 70 responses to standard queries, such as guidance on pregnancy and the virus, and more information on being furloughed.

There were 2 peaks of similar numbers on 30 March and 2 April. After the initial peak, we were more prepared for these queries and able to put out proactive messaging quickly.  

Proactive messaging

Alongside standardised responses, proactive messaging was also needed.

We have a clear and distinctive GOV.UK style. It is minimalist and uses simple icons. We adapted these after discussions with our cross-government colleagues for coronavirus messaging, to a question and answer format.

We also worked with colleagues across government to run paid-for activity from the account.

Upskilling colleagues

It was also clear that this huge increase in workload could not be managed by one person. So, we upskilled other colleagues in GDS’s Communications and Engagement Team on community management.

We ran a training session on how to use Sprout Social and how to respond to queries. As the COVID-19 response continued and GDS moved to be a completely remote organisation this training had to be tailored to be virtual. This was important as more people had to be trained as we moved to weekend working.

However, as this was outside people’s normal day jobs we set clear expectations. Shifts are 2 hours long to let people continue with their normal work, people volunteered on the rota so it was a time convenient for them and it was completely fine to leave queries that were complex to someone more experienced.

At times of crisis there is also an increase in derogatory comments. A dedicated Google Hangout was set up for people to share concerns about abusive or abrasive imagery and messaging. This also helped keep up morale as seeing these posts relentlessly can affect a person’s wellbeing, so it was important to support colleagues.

Top tips for community management during COVID-19

For other organisations doing community management during coronavirus, here are some of our top tips:

• create a standardised set of signed-off responses 
• know who you need to sign off content and make sure you have clear communication lines to them 
• keep up morale in the team, as it can be disheartening to be on the receiving end of negative comments or graphic imagery 
• create a channel for community managers to feed back concerns or queries 
• be responsive to your followers’ needs, monitor the queries coming in so you can be flexible in your responses

This is a changing situation as coronavirus develops. We will continue to be creative, reactive and resilient to best help our followers. And, we will be updating our Social Media Playbook in the next few months to take on these learnings.

On 5 May 2020, GOV.UK Notify sent out its one billionth message. The government’s messaging tool, which sent its first notification in May 2016, is now used in more than 2,500 services across the public sector.

Organisations that use the product include fire services, NHS trusts, central government departments, local authorities and more. It's used for services like passport applications, patient notifications and rota updates.

Most recently, GOV.UK Notify has been used to help the government’s response to COVID-19. This includes services like the NHS text message support for the extremely vulnerable and those isolating at home, and Foreign & Commonwealth Office travel (FCO) alerts for those overseas.

In May’s episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast, Pete Herlihy, Lead Product Manager at GDS, talks to Laura Stevens, Creative Content Producer at GDS. They discuss the product’s history, its growth, its use in the UK and abroad, and what the team has done to help the services responding to COVID-19.

The episode also hears from 3 guests who talk about how they use GOV.UK Notify in different contexts:

• Silvia Grant, Senior User Researcher at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) who works at the Environment Agency on their flood alert service 
• Bryan Willey, Product Manager at the Canadian Digital Service (CDS), who manages Notify, a tool built using GDS’s open source code 
• Darren Curry, the Chief Digital Officer for the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), who works on NHS services responding to coronavirus

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

In November last year I posted about our plans for the future of GOV.UK. We want to provide trusted, joined-up and personalised interaction for users, so that we can provide the right things to the right people, in the way they want to use them.

Since then a lot has changed. GOV.UK has been at the centre of the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing vital and up-to-date information and services. GOV.UK has repeatedly seen record demand, peaking at over 132m page views in a single week (and that’s just of those who consent to analytics tracking - true number approaching 300m?). We have worked across the public sector, including with colleagues in the NHS and local authorities, to build and launch services - from scratch - in just days, to help people receive essential supplies and to help organisations offer their support.

In fact, departments across government have delivered 69 live user facing services since the start of the coronavirus emergency so far. Another 46 such services and products are in the pipeline for delivery too.

This COVID-19 response has required the GOV.UK team to respond rapidly to people’s needs, while providing robust and resilient digital infrastructure.

It wouldn’t have been possible for GOV.UK to work in this way without the work we’ve done in the past - building the tools, platforms and working practices that have enabled our response. And without excellent collaboration with colleagues from across government, of course.

And, more than that, GOV.UK’s current role at the centre of the coronavirus response shows how vital our plans for trusted, personalised and joined-up interactions are. Right now we’re providing clear advice and services in a fast-moving and complex situation - making things simple for users.

And now we’re looking ahead to the continued response for coronavirus and what it will mean for people, and how this will overlay with the Transition period ending.

Here’s how we’ll build on our work so far:

Proving the value of personalised services

GOV.UK began its life about 8 years ago by bringing together government digital estate of websites into a single one, with a consistent brand. Almost as soon as we did this, we started to join up the information published - so that it was less a grouping of flat content (e.g. static pages) and more a coherent collection. This ran in parallel to transactional services meeting spend control and design standards, ensuring that the quality improved overall.

Related to the publishing platform, our work on findability and developing our smart answers format has put us in a strong position to quickly build and deploy services - something that has been vital in recent weeks.

Subsequent projects like developing our Step by Step pattern and our work to help users navigate complexity at scale - which led to the Brexit (now Transition) checker have shown the opportunity for us to join our content together to help users navigate complex situations.

The work GOV.UK is doing in response to coronavirus builds on this and has a particular focus on supporting people who have critical needs as a result. Previously GOV.UK ran the publishing platform and provided join-up upon it using no data, or extremely limited anonymised data, like the Transition Checker. Departments provided (and continue to provide) transactional services on specific issues, like renewing a passport, getting a driving license or paying your tax.

GDS is now providing transactional services too, but ones that sit across departmental boundaries. This is about getting the right support to the right people across complex processes and larger topic areas, and working to remove silos in service delivery. For example, businesses are now able to register that they wish to help the coronavirus response by submitting their details on GOV.UK, and people who are in the ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ category can indicate on GOV.UK if they need a free food parcel, a priority supermarket slot, or similar.

To enable us to build some of these services, GDS has stood up service teams to fulfil the delivery, recognising that as part of this we need to be able to safely and securely use, exchange and parse data across (for example) health, local and national levels, in order to provide the right level of service, complying with all data protection standards. 

Using data to better meet user needs

So let’s take stock: years of work to bring coherence and join up across flat content, we evidenced at scale the value of personalisation in a government context through the Brexit Checker. Now we're replicating this in our coronavirus response, and extending such an approach to also provide transactional services that sit across departmental boundaries, which involves making better use of data.

That next level of scale is about being able to offer information and services relevant to a user's need more generally in this way. So we’re looking across the next steps in the coronavirus response, and what’s ahead as the Transition period comes to an end. And very quickly, given what both of these events cover, this just starts to look a lot like interacting with the government more generally.

So we’re working through questions like: if we made better use of data, what might a meaningfully different level of service and interaction look like? What’s the minimum set of data we would need to know to deliver this? And do we start with something very basic and build over time, or do we focus on a complex topic area (like Transition) or user group (like SMEs) to begin with?

Obviously, GOV.UK will also work to ensure that such data is not a prerequisite to getting something, or finding something out, from the government. This is more about making it as easy as possible for users to personalise their interaction with the government online, via GOV.UK, if they want to.

What this means for the future of GOV.UK

On GOV.UK we have a responsibility to help users navigate complexity when interacting with the government. This is what GOV.UK was set up to do in the first place and it continues to be our first principle.

And this is obviously not just about emergency moments either -  responding to coronavirus just makes the need very clear. We need to support users to do the things they need to do as quickly and easily as possible, so they can then get on with their lives. That means our change in approach - personalisation at scale - needs to be persistent and make better use of data in an appropriate way. So we’re looking at our options now for how we provide that persistence.

Users currently have ‘accounts’ on transactional services that the government provides (such as a tax account), however users' needs often sit across transactional service boundaries as they form part of a larger process or interaction with the government. GOV.UK is looking at ways that it could help users understand what whole topics mean for them, guide them through complex processes over time, or perform transactions that currently span multiple services and departments, or rely on data from one service to be presented and used in another.

It is extremely important that if we are to organise and personalise GOV.UK more effectively that we provide the right level of security for a user (and for the government).

This is the ultimate aim of our personalisation work. It’s not about sending people to different parts of GOV.UK in order to keep them on the site for longer (like some websites might do) - it’s the very opposite. It’s about helping people navigate the site as quickly and effortlessly as possible and ensuring we can proactively support their needs, without them needing to understand the structures of government, or explicitly know what they are looking for.

Achieving this will take a huge cross-government effort to see through, but firstly with Brexit and now with coronavirus we have demonstrated how essential it is. Government - and GOV.UK - must find a way to support users at all times.

To mark the ninth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), the Government Digital Service (GDS) did something it had never done before. We set up a full day virtual conference on digital accessibility. On 21 May 2020, we hosted 6 webinars, in partnership with accessibility experts from a range of public sector organisations and government departments and created a resource pack for people to organise their own events. 

In this blog post we share the recorded webinars so that anyone can learn more about accessibility. We also reflect on our learnings from running the event. 

What happened 

There were 2 strands of events happening on the day itself. Firstly, GDS hosted its own GAAD agenda. We had almost 4,000 registrations across the 6 events in the lead up to the day. 

Secondly, we created a downloadable resource pack that public sector digital teams could use to deliver internal workshops in their organisations. 

There was lots of activity online about GAAD. Here is a snapshot of what people were saying:

View this post on Instagram

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day! There’s lots of guidance on GOV.UK to help you make your digital work as accessible as possible: - Service Manual - Accessibility in Government blog - Guidance on accessibility regulations Find out more from the link in the bio #GAAD #AccessibilityRegulations

A post shared by Government Digital Service (@gdsteam) on May 21, 2020 at 1:58am PDT

Watch the webinars

All the webinars were recorded on Zoom and are now available on the GDS YouTube page. 

• An introduction to digital accessibility regulations by Richard Morton, Head of Accessibility for Government, and Joseph Jones, Policy Officer at GDS
• How to avoid common accessibility statement fails by Chris Heathcote, Product Manager at GDS and George Rhodes, Accessibility Consultant at Home Office
• How to carry out basic accessibility checks by Beverley Newing, Frontend Developer at Ministry of Justice, and James Buller, Senior Accessibility and Inclusion Consultant at Home office 
• Building digital services that work for everyone by Oliver Byford, Senior Frontend Developer at GDS
• Making accessibility accessible: the secret to engaging your workforce by Helen Wilson, Digital Designer at Worcester County Council
• What would Marie Kondo do? How to clear your website of inaccessible PDFs by Lammy Jones, Content Strategist, and Sally Boyes, Website Project Manager, both at Leeds City Council 

What we learned from the event

Our GAAD activities were planned in just 3 weeks. Our daily standups were the golden thread to our planning. These 10-minute catch ups allowed us to allocate responsibilities and a detailed project plan, to make sure the event ran smoothly. 

We found that people were keen for a full day of events. Usually attendees drop off throughout the day, but all our sessions were at full capacity from 9am to 4pm. Our most well attended events were on PDFs and the introduction to the digital accessibility regulations, suggesting there’s appetite for more information on this. 

As with all events, especially fully remote events, no matter how many run-throughs you have - the technology can still play up on the day. There were some issues with users accessing sessions via their browser, so this is something we are looking into. 

Also, the scale of the event in terms of attendee interest was far greater than we anticipated. In future, we will look at other technical solutions that might be better suited to big audiences. We also saw some comments on our initial blog post about people not being able to sign up to events that were full, so we will make it clearer next time the capacity limit on each event. We will also work harder to promote that the sessions will be recorded so those who can’t join on the day have reassurance that they will be able to access the learning.

The day’s popularity also tells us that there's an appetite for more information on digital accessibility so we will certainly consider running this event, or similar, again.

What’s next

Learning about accessibility is not just for one day of the year. The downloadable resources pack will remain on the GDS Blog, so you can set up events at any time to increase awareness in your organisation. 

Our help and guidance on meeting accessibility regulations is another place to find out what public sector organisations need to do to meet the upcoming compliance deadlines of the regulations. 

Thank you to everyone who worked on the event and joined in on the day. All your efforts make government easier for everyone to interact with.

The digital world is rapidly changing, and with it, our users’ expectations of how they should be interacting with government services and information. Last year, Head of GOV.UK Jen Allum set out the GOV.UK vision on how we will meet these expectations and she recently posted on the future of GOV.UK. At the heart of this vision is transforming the way we use data on GOV.UK.

We have always used data to develop and improve our products and services across GOV.UK. This includes:

• quantitative data, in terms of volumes of users, key pages and page interactions
• qualitative data, in terms of working with real users to test our developments and get direct feedback

Our use of both qualitative and quantitative data underpins the Government Design Principles.

More recently we have worked across government to understand user experiences more widely, which means understanding how people move across content and services at scale. This will enable us to better understand our users in order to improve their journeys and interactions with government.

Anonymised data enables us to make informed decisions, so that we can focus on solving the most important problems. Working with data can be complex but the benefits are substantial. In order to do this properly, we have brought our data science and user-centred design disciplines together into the GOV.UK Data Labs.

This focused effort helps us work out what problems to solve, identify what things we can automate for us and for the public, and help us understand trends and peak periods of demand for certain services. And it’s about doing all of these things at scale across the whole GOV.UK domain.

The goals of the GOV.UK Data Labs, then, are to:

• make better use of anonymised data, and data science, to improve users’ experience of government by optimising content, journeys or services as a whole
• ensure that teams across government keep users at the heart of their plans by delivering relevant access to anonymised performance data
• explore the idea of consent-based personalised experiences on GOV.UK
• empower colleagues in GOV.UK by democratising data insights and improving data literacy

What are we working on?

GOV.UK Intent and Feedback Explorer Tool (GIFT)

During the COVID-19 crisis, GOV.UK has received an unprecedented amount of feedback from users who need to interact with government. On average we have seen 1,000 comments per day on everything from food deliveries to furlough schemes to the easing of lockdown. These comments, together with our analytics, can provide a valuable indicator of potential user needs for product teams, and evidence for possible policy changes.

However, the time-consuming nature of manual tagging and analysis, and its lack of scalability, means that it cannot be used with enough regularity to improve services on GOV.UK.

This was where GOV.UK Data Labs came in.

We built the GOV.UK Intent and Feedback Explorer Tool as a way to bring together the various disparate qualitative and quantitative sources of feedback into one place, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning to categorise, theme, and present trends in feedback over time for a page, service, group of services, or a topic like Brexit or COVID-19.

Currently, we are looking at journeys and data associated within the primary GOV.UK domain (www.gov.uk) but we want to bring in external data sources like Google Trends, or data from other government departments and public bodies. 

govGraph - our ‘knowledge graph’

After the success of the related links work that we introduced in 2019 (scaling our provision of related links on key content items), we continued to explore graph technology and its potential uses on GOV.UK.

A 'knowledge graph' is a representation of real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings. Graph representations enable us to infer new relationships and patterns within our data that we might not have spotted otherwise, ultimately leveraging our data to help users.

We brought together different data sources and ran some quick experiments to determine where value lay. An example was opening the knowledge graph up to content designers to use it as a way to ask questions of our content and users, such as “give me all the content that mentions [date], [department] or [thing]”. This has been invaluable during COVID-19 as our content colleagues can self-serve answers to tricky questions like, “give me all the COVID-19 content published by the Cabinet Office after 1st March”, for example.

We’ve identified many opportunities where this technology could be applied, including question answering, supporting GOV.UK content with search engines and other third parties, cross-platform sharing of our content, and as an analytical tool for disciplines like content and service design across government.

But there is still much work that needs to happen before govGraph is a full knowledge base. Our goal for it this year is to have a dynamic representation of our content, augmented with metadata (entities, supertaxons), structured data and content, and cross-domain service analytics data and content.

Enriching and structuring content on GOV.UK

One thing that the GOV.UK knowledge graph (‘govGraph’) relies on, is having rich and structured content on GOV.UK. There are many uses for structured content that will be covered in an upcoming blog post, but from Data Labs’ perspective, this is vital.

Currently, the graph contains content attributes including page-level HTML, the topic a content item is tagged to, the publishing organisation, document type, and dates, but we need to be more granular and detailed. Attributes like things (such as passports), people (like ministers), places (such as Ireland) and eligibility criteria (like costs and age) need to be identified and added to our content for the graph to be really valuable for government.

We’re looking at adding attributes to around 450,000 bits of content on GOV.UK, but this is not something we can do manually. Instead, we are using an AI process called Natural Language Processing, specifically entity extraction and information extraction. Through these processes, GOV.UK content is reviewed and any mentions of things like people, places, objects and costs, or services like 'renewing your passport', are automatically tagged with relevant descriptors. Our goal is to develop a corpus of government terms and to develop a semantic graph that can be added to govGraph, and can be used more widely across GOV.UK and government.

The future of Data Labs

In 2019, we saw data science thrive in GOV.UK. We began experimenting with, and then fully automating, a recommendation engine to automate related links on content pages.  

In 2020, we aim to:

• grow the team
• further progress the provision of insights for colleagues
• work hard with colleagues on the testing of personalisation, developing ideas around solving whole problems
• develop the infrastructure to help realise GOV.UK’s future strategy of proactive, joined-up and frictionless interaction with government

We finished the experimental first phase of the GovTech Catalyst. This phase helped us learn where emerging technologies can add value, and where we are better using established technologies. We learnt this in collaboration with smaller technology companies using Innovate UK’s Small Business Research Initiative. In our next phase, we will see prototypes develop into products that can be tested with wider groups across the public sector.

What we learnt from running Phase 1 

Start with user needs

We need to meet user needs using emerging technologies. We need people from many disciplines to work together as a team. With support, teams understood this. They were then able to design and test prototypes to learn how to meet user needs in just 3 months.

We adopted the government Service Standard to develop solutions that meet user needs. This helped suppliers know what we expect from them. For many, using the standard has been a steep learning curve. Most public sector teams were already immersed in users’ problems. But it’s not always easy to transfer that knowledge to suppliers.

Many teams struggled to understand the language used by digital specialists. We’re mostly working with policy and operations teams. They have minimal digital experience. Also, many of our suppliers are specialists, and aren’t used to collaborating across disciplines. For example, satellite data processors. We had to adapt our support to help teams understand how to meet the Service Standard.

Learning from quickly testing a wide range of prototypes

In Phase 1, our public sector partners were able to rule out certain approaches. The ambiguous became obvious. They found this out with quick prototypes. This will allow more focused investment later on.

Each challenge had 5 different supplier teams. They often designed 5 completely different prototypes. They focused on different parts of the problem and evaluated various emerging technologies. This made for good Alphas.

Having 5 teams is different from the usual single Alpha team. This helps to tackle problems from different angles, and develop a more competitive market of solutions.

Small businesses help the public sector to innovate

Smaller companies showed agility. They designed and adapted cutting-edge technologies to meet user needs.

With Leeds City Council, suppliers used artificial intelligence (AI) to predict which homes most needed maintenance. This allows them to service homes before they get into disrepair.

Leeds were able to access the latest technologies. But the SMEs spent more time understanding the challenge than the technology. This would have been much harder if Leeds were working with a larger supplier. Larger suppliers may be less incentivised to adapt technology to the needs of residents and council staff. With a big tech company, a local authority would be just one of thousands of customers. We designed the GovTech Catalyst to get the most from SMEs.

When working in the open, central and local government can learn a lot from each other

Phase 1 helped use emerging technology to tackle challenging policy areas. It has also helped policymakers learn more about the delivery of policy.

One of my highlights was a Whitehall policymaker joining a show and tell. As well as listening, they asked great questions. “What are the policy blockers to making better use of data in local planning?”

They found out about the show and tell because we encouraged working in the open. This connected different parts of government to discuss shared challenges.

We could see policy changes emerge from the GovTech Catalyst. That would be a big change from the usual separation between policy and delivery. Central and local government are also collaborating more.

The Catalyst is a big commitment

Being part of the GovTech Catalyst is demanding. We ask a lot of our partners, but they feel it’s a good investment. We learnt this through user research. This helped us improve our support.

The GovTech Catalyst funds go to suppliers, not the public sector. Public sector teams have had to work on the Catalyst on top of their day jobs. We had to help our partners find the right balance. The greatest value in Phase 1 came when our partners that realised the Catalyst could not be a side project.

We asked our partners to work with suppliers collaboratively. We did this by using the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI). Many teams weren’t used to working so closely with suppliers before. But attitudes changed. Some became advocates of the SBRI. Collaboration helped get more value out of their suppliers.

What’s next

We have told teams whether they will receive £1 million in funding for Phase 2. Some of the teams have started Phase 2 already, while others will be starting later in the year.

One team at the Home Office finished at the end of Phase 1. Findings suggested that development could continue in-house. The team decided to take this approach rather than progress to Phase 2. Continuing development in-house meant government could keep the intellectual property rights from a technical, security and commercial perspective.

Our other partners will use the next round of funding to work with up to two suppliers. They'll test their products in daily use with a wide range of users across many organisations. By the end of Phase 2, they'll be getting ready to launch products and services. We’re looking forward to seeing these adopted across the whole of the public sector.

We are reflecting on the impact of our experimental first phase of the GovTech Catalyst. We found promising solutions to some of the hardest public sector challenges. The Catalyst has connected private sector innovators with the public sector, using Innovate UK’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI). After a successful first phase, we have started releasing £1 million of funds to each of the public sector teams starting Phase 2.

Promising prototypes that help solve public sector challenges

We designed the first phase to help the public sector discover emerging technologies. We wanted to help them learn whether private sector technology would help solve their challenges. Phase 1 exceeded our expectations. 100% of the 75 supplier teams developed prototypes in just three months. By comparison, the 2019 UK average for startups in accelerators was 91%. We hadn’t expected this level of success doing it for the first time.

We saw the rapid development of prototypes. Some were promising. Testing showed the teams have a high chance of solving real public sector challenges. These include improving social care, reducing loneliness, improving recycling, protecting firefighters, and detecting illegal substances in parcels.

As a result, we have started releasing £1 million of funds to each of the public sector teams starting Phase 2.

Helping smaller businesses grow the GovTech sector

We wanted to show the value of the public sector working with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The government wants to increase the proportion of spending with SMEs. This will help to boost the economy and create more jobs. We hope the public sector will be able to learn from our approach using the SBRI. We were happy hearing from one of our suppliers:

“GovTech Catalyst has been defining for us an organisation. It was our first ever client project. We have since attracted a few large contracts creating around 10-20 full time jobs.”

The SBRI was designed to give smaller businesses their first case studies that show their value to other potential customers. That feedback from one of our suppliers shows how the Catalyst has used SBRI to grow the GovTech market.

During Phase 1, we awarded more than 90% of our funding to SMEs. Central government awarded 26% of its contracts to SMEs between 2018 and 2019. Many of our suppliers have never worked with the public sector before. 60% of them are based outside London and the South East. As a result, Phase 1 created new opportunities for businesses across the whole of the UK.

Helping to deliver the Government Technology Innovation Strategy

The Catalyst is helping to deliver the 2019 Government Technology Innovation Strategy. We’re doing this by nurturing the conditions for innovation.

Our public sector teams are learning how to use data more effectively. At the London Borough of Waltham Forest, they are collaborating with teams across the public and private sectors. They are using their research to improve geospatial data standards. This will help make planning more data-driven. Increased data capability is helping teams address challenges now. It will help them solve future problems too.

Teams are also becoming more experienced at collaborating with smaller technology suppliers to address public sector challenges. There has been a marked change going from buying solutions to buying outcomes for users. Teams are already seeing the value. The Catalyst has embedded the SBRI’s challenge-based approach in organisations across the public sector. This will help to cultivate technology innovation in the future.

We’re supporting a growing community of interest around public sector technology innovation. In another post, we shared our learnings from the first phase of the Catalyst. Sharing our successes and failures helps to evolve our community.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) launched the Local Digital Declaration on 4 July 2018. The declaration is a set of guiding principles and helps local government deliver user-centred digital services. And, 2 years on, more than 220 organisations have signed up.

In June’s episode of the GDS Podcast Lisa Jeffrey, Regional Relationship Manager at GDS, and May-N Leow, Head of the Local Digital Collaboration Unit at MHCLG, talk about the declaration’s impact.

Laura Stevens, Creative Content Producer at GDS, also talks to 2 signatories to the declaration: Lisa Trickey, Service Manager for Digital Strategy and Design at Dorset Council, and Paul Fleming, Director of Digital and Business Change in Blackburn with Darwen Council. They talk about how the declaration helped transform services in their organisations. 

The functional model was introduced in 2015. This model organises government into 14 different functions to help to join up experts, align processes across departmental boundaries, and reduce duplication of work. 

What is a functional standard?

The functions represent priority areas of common, cross-departmental activity which require central leadership. These include areas such as human resources, debt, analysis, project management, legal, and for us, digital.

To support the functional model, every function has written a standard that describes, at a high level, what they do and why.

These are standards to guide people working in government. The government is trialling them during 2020. They exist to create a coherent and mutually understood way of doing business within organisations and across organisational boundaries. They also provide a stable basis for assurance, risk management, and continuous improvement.

By setting and assuring functional standards, a function defines what organisations need to do, and why. Functional standards are not about setting new expectations, but about bringing together and clarifying what you should already be doing. 

Functional standards should help you to:

• do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way – find the right balance between effort and risk 
• save time and money by asking the right questions and to avoid duplication  
• empower professionals to share learning and improve ways of working

What is in the Digital, Data and Technology Functional Standard?

The standard sets out how government should use digital, data and technology. This will make sure that government provides the public with quality digital services and that departments have the correct tools and infrastructure to deliver their objectives.

The standard includes the fundamental tenets of digital, data and technology including aligning with government policy and meeting clearly identified user needs. It also covers governance, how to deliver digital services and technology, how to manage live services and technology, and information on DDaT professions and non-specialist staff.

Strengthening the existing digital data and technology standards

The Digital, Data and Technology Functional Standard codifies what government should be doing and simply ties together all of the current standards and policies we already have. Sometimes that means stating the obvious things that organisations do not usually write down.

GDS already has a number of standards that it's spent a lot of time developing. For example, government uses the Service Standard to assess digital services and the Technology Code of Practice in the spend control process. GDS and CSG designed the functional standard to fit in with these well-established standards.

Functional standards do a different job from technical standards like the Technology Code of Practice and Service Standard. If functional standards set out what functions should do and why, technical standards describe how to do it. This functional Standard provides grounding and context for the existing digital, data and technology standards.

The aim is that, taken altogether, the full suite of standards will provide a clear explanation of all the common functions of government. They do not go into detail like technical standards, which makes them useful introductions to new staff, particularly senior leaders who are new to government.

Understand what you need to do next

You should use the Digital Functional Standard to find and implement any gaps or changes in your current processes. Some areas are compulsory, but you should consider how to meet the recommended areas as well.

There will soon be a centralised page for all the functional standards and related guidance. 

Sharing, implementing and iterating the functional standard

GDS has shared the Digital, Data and Technology Functional Standard with the DDAT Functional Leaders Group and the Technology and Digital Leaders Network. These groups will make sure the standard is shared across government. GDS also plan to help raise awareness of the standard by including it in GDS Academy courses and senior civil servant inductions where possible.

The Digital Functional Standard is being published for internal government trial. GDS is looking at how to assess organisations against the standard in the future. But the aim is not about compliance, but about promoting best practice and consistent behaviours across government.

GDS will continue to iterate the Digital, Data and Technology functional standard. This will include adding extra content about data to drive adoption of data standards and standardisation of data practices across government.

As GOV.UK Pay approaches a new milestone by onboarding its 300th service, we want to take a chance to share what we’ve been up to over the last year. In a year, the number of services using the platform has more than doubled. This platform makes it easier for government services to start taking payments, with a better user experience. More growth is good news - it leads to better services and saves millions of pounds for taxpayers.

During 2018-19, we focused on deepening the card payments functionality we offer, including making it possible for services to start taking payments in a day with no prior contract or integration, offering Apple Pay and Google Pay, and a host of other features. So what have we been up to during the last year?

Working with large services - proving our reliability

We're already taking double the number of transactions from last year, and seen increases up to fivefold in a day, proving our ability to scale. We’ve onboarded some very large services:

• as DVLA’s failover payment provider for Vehicle Tax, the UK Government’s highest volume service, Pay can comfortably scale to meet their demand
• we now process payments for fishing rod licenses, of which about a million are purchased a year
• online passport application payments are now also processed via GOV.UK Pay

We’ve done a lot of work to ensure we can scale and continue to provide excellent service to large services. For example, we have increased the size of transaction reports and created single reports that consolidate transactions from multiple services.

We use Service Level Objectives to keep us honest about the state of the system, and have adapted these from a reliability focus to reflect the user experiences we think are most crucial - for example, to maximise the number of payments where a user can successfully complete their payment.

We also think it’s really important to be leaders in accessibility. With WCAG 2.1 AA criteria becoming mandatory for public sector sites, we’ve ensured the service is compliant. We’ve gone beyond that to test the service with people who have a range of accessibility needs - visibility impairment, dyslexia, physical and motor disabilities, and many more. This includes testing in our labs and home visits. We are building learnings into our backlog.

Working with small services - moving payments online

Many services which have started to use GOV.UK Pay in the last year are local authorities (LAs), police forces and the NHS. We have also supported smaller central government teams, particularly those who currently rely on cheques or call centres to take payments and have been affected by coronavirus (COVID-19). Organisations with smaller digital teams often have different needs from larger, central government services. For some, Pay is the difference between being able to take online payments or not.

We’ve continued to build on learnings from our pilot with LAs and a collaborative project with LAs and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to understand whether GOV.UK Pay could be used widely by local authorities. We’ve ensured that GOV.UK Pay solves some of the hardest problems for small services, including not having to do a technical integration to start taking payments, and not having to procure a contract to process payments. This recently enabled Surrey County Council to start collecting payments for their crisis fund within a day.

Over the past year, we’ve improved reporting functionality for smaller services. Services can collect additional data, like a cost centre code, to make reconciliation easier, and we’ve added new reports showing all the payouts that have been made into a service’s bank account. It is also now possible to take Mail Order Telephone Order (MOTO) payments using GOV.UK Pay. This means services can start to take payments over the phone in a payment card industry (PCI-DSS) compliant way. 

What does the future hold?

We’ve been doing a lot of in-depth thinking over the past year to develop our future strategy. We’ve also been researching and testing new payment types, such as Open Banking, to see the potential it has for government taking payments.

Across government, we’re working closely with the Government Shared Services and Government Finance Function to look at how we can support finance teams to handle invoices and other ad hoc payments, and make reconciliation into finance systems much easier.

We’re also excitedly following as Barnsley Council develops their own income management system and other MHCLG funded projects.

The Digital, Data and Technology Fast Stream, also known as the DDaT Fast Stream for short, is one of 15 different Civil Service Fast Stream schemes. As a DDaT Fast Streamer, you participate in a 4 year-long scheme made up of 6 and 12 month-long placements. GDS is one of the organisations in which DDaT Fast Streamers are placed.

In July’s episode of the GDS Podcast, Vanessa Schneider, a Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS, talks with 7 DDaT Fast Streamers past and present: Lewis Dunne, James Lovatt, Daniel Owens, Jennifer Sleeman, Clare Robinson, Maxwell Riess, and Jordan Testo. They reflect on their experiences in the scheme and provide advice for anyone interested in applying.

In the past 4 years, the public sector has sent 1.5 billion emails, text messages and letters using GOV.UK Notify. We built Notify to make sending messages easier. Now we want to improve the messages we send.

Better content design means a better user experience. A well-written message makes things easier for the recipient, but it can also save the sender time and money.

We’re running a short discovery to help us work out how Notify can support better content design.

Over the next few weeks we want to learn:

• how teams write content that meets the needs of their users
• what challenges they face
• how they measure the impact of the messages they send
• what support they need

If you work for a team that sends emails, text messages or letters and you’d like to take part, let us know. Perhaps you’ve already found ways to improve the messages you send, or maybe you need advice and support. Either way, you don’t need to be a Notify user to volunteer.

How we’ll measure ‘better’

What is ‘better’ and how do you measure it? Well, we’re not sure yet - that’s one of the things we want to learn.

Our hypothesis is that better means shorter, easier to understand and more engaging. When it comes to sending messages, these are all things that can save departments time and money.

A shorter text message takes less time to read and costs less to send. An email that’s easy to understand means fewer people will phone your call centre for help. An engaging letter is less likely to be ignored, so you don’t need to send a second reminder.

We’ve already heard from one team who used to get a phone call for every letter they sent, asking what it meant. This is a good example of how bad content design frustrates users and costs more in the long run.

Using data to plan our research

To help us work out what research questions to ask, we did some data analysis.

First we looked at how different parts of the public sector use Notify. We compared the average:

• number of emails, text messages, and letters sent
• length of text messages and emails
• number of replies to text messages

We’ve already seen some trends that we need help from our users to fully understand. For example, a third of teams that let recipients send them text messages never get any replies.

Until we know if the senders actually expect a reply, we can’t say for certain whether this is a good or bad thing.

There are other limits to what we can find out from the data. We know if an email was marked as spam by the recipient, but we don’t track email open rates and click-throughs. Tracking users without their permission could breach General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

How we’re going to help our users

We want to know if our team has a part to play in improving the content of messages sent using Notify. If we can identify a common need, we’ll run an alpha to test some of the ideas that come out of the discovery.

Maybe we’ll write some new Service Manual guidance. Maybe we’ll design some reusable content patterns for Notify message templates. We could even pilot a Notify content support service or set up a community for Notify users to help one another.

There are a lot of possible outcomes for this work. But before we start thinking about how to help our users, we need to understand their needs – and that’s where you come in.

This is my first blog post for Government Digital Service (GDS) and I have a number of exciting developments that I want to share with you.

Right now the UK Civil Service faces some of its greatest challenges in a generation. As the country manages the coronavirus pandemic and prepares for EU Exit, we look ahead to the opportunities to innovate and build afresh.

The Civil Service Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) function will be integral to this work, both at the centre, and across departments and in agencies, as the Government has set an ambition to make UK Government digital services the best in the world, exceeding the benchmark set globally by the best public or private sector standards.

Firstly, I want to tell you the news that we are today beginning the recruitment of the Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO) role at Permanent Secretary level.

The GCDO will be the professional head of HMG’s 18,000 strong DDaT profession, oversee GDS and lead the DDaT function. They will be responsible for shaping and delivering HMG’s innovation and transformation strategies to overhaul government’s legacy IT systems, strengthen our cyber security, improve capability, and ensure government can better leverage data and emerging technologies to design and deliver citizen-centric services that enhance HMG’s reputation as the world’s most digitally-advanced government.

That recruitment exercise starts today, 24 August 2020.

We sought out candidates for a similar role last autumn. Since taking up my post as Chief Operating Officer for the Civil Service I have taken the opportunity to review the role and person specification, in order to reflect the government’s high ambitions for transforming digital services and use of data, and the key part this role will play in realising that ambition. We have also clarified the levers and support that the GCDO will be able to draw on to make a full success of it.

Secondly, I can also tell you that the interim Director General at GDS, Alison Pritchard, has been successful in securing a new role at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Alison will begin her new role as Deputy National Statistician and Director General for Data Capability in October 2020.

The Director General for Data Capability at ONS will drive the transformation of data services available to analysts, decision-makers and the public, mobilising data held by departments and providing an authoritative and compelling public face for this agenda.

Alison will be responsible for leadership of all aspects of data capability at ONS. This will include the delivery of digital services including utilising data from across government and the private sector to enable the production of better statistics, the delivery of technical platforms which are efficient and resilient to support digital services and the transformation of business processes.

I am grateful to Alison for the direction and leadership she has provided to GDS over the last year. It has been a challenging 12 months during which GDS has performed a vital role at the centre of the Government’s preparations for EU Exit and the ongoing response to COVID-19 - under considerable scrutiny. Alison was an integral part of the team to secure investment in data programmes as part of the 2019 Budget, including the new Data Standards Authority, and we can look forward to collaborating with her further on this critical agenda.

I’ve invited Fiona Deans, the current Chief Operating Officer at GDS to take on the leadership role in the interim. Fiona was a founding employee of Arts Alliance Media (AAM), which was one of the companies that spearheaded digital transformation in cinema technology in the UK and overseas and I’m absolutely certain she will steer us well through the months ahead.

I will be writing again in the next few weeks with further detail on the process for recruiting a permanent successor.

The August episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast is all about content design. This is the process of distilling complex information in a clear, unambiguous and easy to understand format. A content designer’s work makes sure that user needs sit at the heart of all government services.

Amanda Diamond, Head of GDS Content Design and Head of the Cross-government Content Community, and Ben Hazell, Content Product Lead (GOV.UK Programme) at GDS, are this month's guests. They tell Laura Stevens, Creative Content Producer at GDS, about what content design entails, its origins at GDS, how its evolving as a discipline and their work.

The episode includes a clip from Agnieszka Murdoch, Content Learning Designer at GDS, on the Introduction to content design course. The online course launched in May this year following a pilot in 2019. An incredible 11,000 learners signed up to the first course, and it will run again this September.

Earlier this year, we did our first public run of the ‘Introduction to content design’ course hosted on FutureLearn, and we had more than 11,000 learners sign up. This month, we’re doing a second run of the course and you can register now for the 21 September start.

‘Introduction to content design’ is great for those starting out in the content design profession, those who would like to move into it, or those in related disciplines who think content design can improve the way they work.

In this post, I’m going to talk about why and how we built the course, what people learnt from it, what surprised us and what we’re doing next. If you prefer, you can watch an extended version of this post in video format.

Pre-online learning times

Until 2019, the content community team at the Government Digital Service was delivering 2-day introduction to content design training to colleagues in other government departments.

We quickly found that our training model wasn’t scalable. There was a limited number of people we could train face-to-face. We had to be there in person every time, which was time-consuming and costly.

We also knew that classroom-based learning limited the potential for knowledge sharing. Any ideas that came up during sessions would be taken away by only a limited number of people who may or may not share them with others. Content design practices evolve constantly, though, so the best way to share them is to connect the whole community.

And, finally, we knew that there was demand for learning about content design beyond the traditional content design community, for example, among our communications colleagues or others who believed content design principles could improve their work.

So, there were some clear user needs that we needed to meet. And to do that, we knew we needed to scale our approach. We decided to explore online learning.

Making online learning social

Online learning seemed like the obvious choice to address our challenges. The thing about traditional self-study online courses, though, is that they don’t always allow for interaction, discussion or sharing of ideas. And we knew that that was something our community needed. Content designers would regularly get in touch to ask for opportunities to learn and share. We also ran a test through our newsletter to see how many people would be interested in signing up for a course if we made one.

So, we decided to go for what’s called ‘social online learning’ – an environment where learners can interact with us and with other learners, have discussions, comment on things, share their own experiences and learn from other people’s experiences.

We built a closed pilot for 150 learners in 2019.

Earlier this year, we iterated the course based on what we learnt during the pilot, and we opened it up. We had more than 11,000 learners sign up.

Getting our learners to do the work

The course ran for 4 weeks and included things like the principles of content design, user research and testing, performance analytics and accessibility.

We taught the basics but also some more advanced tips that many people were not aware of, such as creating prototypes in the browser.

We designed the activities in a way to help our learners apply their knowledge. For example, we asked them to share their own user stories or prototypes, and hundreds of examples were shared.

We had polls and discussions to keep our learners engaged more than video or written content would. We also used quizzes and tests to test their knowledge and help them consolidate their learning.

What people learnt

In terms of outcomes, we had learners say they’re starting projects to improve accessibility on their websites, including more types of user personas in their user research, doing user research for the first time, or working on systems for reviewing and archiving old content.

It was great reading about these things. If we can help even one organisation make their content clearer and more accessible, that’s a success for our team.

What surprised us

We learnt a lot from the first public run of the course, which helped us prepare the next iteration of the course ready for the September run. Here are some of the things we learnt.

Content design is not just for content designers

We knew that people in related disciplines would be interested in the course but we hadn’t realised quite how diverse our learners would be. We had communications professionals, media managers, designers and website managers sign up.

If your job doesn’t include the term ‘content designer’ but you think your work could benefit from content design principles, you should definitely join the course this month.

Content design principles are universal

We discovered that content design principles are adopted and often well established across different sectors and even in different countries. Our learners shared many examples of this, such as using style guides that are very similar to the GOV.UK style guide, or following similar processes for getting content published.

Learners like stories more than theories

Our learners liked the many practical examples and stories we shared in the course, and they preferred them to just being presented with theory.

We felt that using stories and examples of real work can help our learners better understand the rationale behind the different principles.

Experienced or not – everyone can benefit

We found that the course’s level of challenge was right despite our learners’ varying levels of knowledge and experience. Some people who joined the course were completely new to content design, which meant they could learn the basics. Others were very experienced but still told us they’d benefitted from the course as it showed them different perspectives and applications of the theory. They also benefited from the discussions – from reading other people’s comments.

What we’re doing next

As I mentioned before, we’re running the course again this month and you can sign up now. We will be doing another run early next year.

We’re also working with other communities of practice, running pilots and exploring areas that may lend themselves to the social online learning model.

If you work in government and you’d like to find out more about our work and learn about new courses as they launch, sign up to the content community newsletter.

Oxford Insights have been working with the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) Global Digital Marketplace Programme and the Prosperity Fund Global Anti-Corruption programme, led by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), on public procurement reform.

The GDS Global Digital Marketplace Programme is helping to reform public procurement. Globally, government spending is colossal, approximately one-fifth of world GDP amounting to almost $13 trillion. These enormous sums of money drive economies through investment in every industry, from Artificial Intelligence to Zoology, including spend on digital and technology.

Public money builds infrastructure and stimulates markets through jobs and investment in research and development, boosting innovation. This money flows through the community and it is why public procurement is so important. ‘How’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ governments buy from suppliers impacts the quality of public services, national infrastructures and social cohesion.

The UK’s GDS has created a programme specifically focused on helping countries buy better information and communications technology (ICT). Through the Global Digital Marketplace Programme, GDS recognised the importance of examining how procurement can affect gender equality and social inclusion (GESI), including how government buyers can mainstream GESI throughout their practices.

Gender equality and social inclusion goes to the very heart of what I call ‘social purpose digital commissioning’, which can be a catalyst for achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Digital government transformation - of which internet-era approaches to public procurement of ICTs is critical - is a cross-cutting and enabling element of inclusive, equitable, resilient and sustainable economic reform.

(Warren Smith, GDS Global Digital Marketplace Programme Director)

GDS commissioned a team from Oxford Insights to conduct user research into best practices and to make recommendations on how to be more inclusive throughout the procurement lifecycle. In our Global Report, we make 3 key recommendations for procurement reform:

1. define the terms ‘gender equality and social inclusion’ so that all parties are clear about what these terms mean and to which people they refer
2. use the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to promote gender equality and social inclusion in ICT Procurement
3. require buyers to engage with women-owned and minority-owned businesses throughout the procurement lifecycle to maximise inclusion of marginalised groups

GESI-responsive ICT procurement

While conducting the research we found that neither GESI nor GESI-responsive ICT procurement had been clearly defined. We felt it was important to establish a definition to ensure all users, from procurement officials to citizens, could easily understand what we meant. We tested this with interviewees, adding to it as we were provided feedback.

We defined the terms like this:

• gender equality is about transforming the distribution of opportunities, choices and resources available to women so that they have equal power to shape their lives and participate in the process
• social inclusion refers to the process of improving the conditions of disadvantaged individuals and groups - such as those living with disabilities, migrants, indigenous peoples or other minorities

GESI policies and practices need to be implemented throughout the ICT procurement lifecycle, so that buyers and suppliers are actively incorporating GESI in decision-making. Examples of good GESI practice would be to:

• examine a contractor’s supply chain and ownership structure
• review existing processes to encourage tenders from a diverse range of companies
• gather and report diversity data
• ensure diversity within procurement teams on the buyers’ side
• use quotas to enable women and minority-owned businesses to more easily win tenders
• require bidders to demonstrate a commitment to GESI principles within their own organisations and supply chains
• reduce internal inequalities through greater partnerships with service teams 

Employing good practice in procurement should also lead to buying digital and technology products which adhere to GESI standards. These products or services should be accessible to all. Examples of what this would look like in practice include ensuring computers and software meet all accessibility requirements for a variety of users. Similarly, government authorities should consider the accessibility needs of all users when designing public services including those with physical or mental disabilities.

Our research shows that GESI principles are important to ICT procurement as there is strong evidence that better representation of women, ethnic minorities and other marginalised groups throughout the procurement process results in redistribution of power and financial resources to historically disadvantaged communities.

Inclusive procurement brings concrete economic and social benefits for the government, both nationally and at a local level. It provides investment in communities, supports jobs, reduces un- and under-employment and is a key factor for economic growth. As well as fostering innovation and competition, inclusive procurement also gives governments access to a wider choice of goods and services and shorter, more flexible contracts.

Key findings

GESI values should be integral to all digital and technology procurement 

Our research and analysis reveals that GESI principles should be mainstreamed at all stages in the procurement lifecycle. All too often they are an afterthought or not considered at all. To open up public procurement opportunities to a diverse supply chain, particularly locally owned businesses and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), GESI should be a guiding principle of good, inclusive procurement practice.

This includes engaging with suppliers from diverse communities to support their participation in public tendering. The GDS Global Digital Marketplace Programme will work with stakeholders to ensure gender equality and social inclusion is not just ‘nice-to-have’, but an integral feature of digital and technology procurement.

GESI mainstreaming should be intersectional

GESI mainstreaming requires paying attention to the ways in which intersecting structures of inequality can be replicated and reinforced through ICT procurement. The GDS Global Digital Marketplace Programme’s understanding of GESI principles in ICT procurement pays attention to gender as well as disability, race and class.

Attention to intersecting areas of difference within holistic procurement models can ensure that GESI goals are mainstreamed and consistently at the forefront throughout the public spending lifecycle; from digital and technology investment planning and appraisal, through to procurement and contracting, and during service delivery and implementation.

Next steps

Streamline definitions and use of terms ‘gender equality’ and ‘social inclusion’

One significant way that the GDS Global Digital Marketplace Programme seeks to align all of its work with GESI principles is through concrete and consistent use of the terms ‘gender equality’ and ‘social inclusion’.

Research suggests that a vast array of stakeholders, including government buyers and civil society suppliers, were uncomfortable and unfamiliar with GESI language. GDS will use a simple and accessible definition of GESI when talking to stakeholders, to ensure clarity between different stakeholders and promote awareness of GESI issues. Our soon to be published Global Report contains more discussion on definitions of gender and identity.

Watch out for the risks posed by COVID-19

The ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis may prevent or even reverse progress towards gender equality and social inclusion within digital procurement. Governments around the world have shifted to emergency buying, rather than taking a strategic procurement approach. Emergency buying is likely to lead to governments paying less attention to the perceived ‘nice-to-haves’, such as gender equality and social inclusion in the procurement process.

The pandemic should be seen as an opportunity to reform, a “portal” through which governments can examine the flaws in their public procurement processes and imagine ways to bring about much-needed change. Sustainable Development Goal 12 explicitly advocates sustainable procurement reform as a means to advocate social and economic development. By embedding GESI principles throughout the procurement process, governments can prevent further exclusion of marginalised suppliers, and actively promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development.

Use the GESI MEAL Indicator Framework

As part of its work that's supported by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union 'United for Smart Sustainable Cities' (U4SSC) initiative, the GDS Global Digital Marketplace Programme team is developing a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for internet-era approaches to public procurement of ICTs. The GESI MEAL Indicator Framework that we've developed forms part of this broader set of KPIs, and GDS will be talking more about that soon.

We are really only at the beginning of making public procurement more inclusive. As leaders of market reform, governments can be a catalyst for driving innovation, competition and redistribution of wealth to marginalised communities. The COVID-19 pandemic represents an opportunity to buy smarter, not default to emergency buying practices. We need public authorities to review existing practices, capture and measure procurement data and commit to inclusive reform. There is clearly still a lot of work to do and our research shows the huge social and economic benefits that GESI procurement offers across all communities.

The UK government’s rapid digital response to coronavirus (COVID-19) was a result of 10 years of investment in people, governance and technology. The ability to respond quickly and effectively was a result of the existing digital leadership and processes that already existed thanks to the work of the Government Digital Service (GDS).

A function is a priority area across government that requires central leadership, for example human resources, legal, and project management. Our position as function leaders meant GDS had a central role in coordinating the digital response to coronavirus. GDS’s work on the pandemic demonstrated that one of the benefits of agile digital government is the ability to respond rapidly and flexibly to meet urgent needs.

Here’s what we did, how we were able to do it and what we’ve learned so far.

Coordinating the DDaT response

In March, GDS set up the DDaT COVID-19 Working Group. It is a single, high-tempo forum to articulate needs, risks and issues. It met twice a week from March to May, and weekly since then. Members are from the devolved administrations, all departments and the Parliamentary Digital Service.

So what did it help solve? Interoperability was a challenge faced across the public sector. Different remote organisations could not talk to one another due to inconsistent rules on video conferencing software. The Working Group solved this through Project Unblock. GDS worked with the Government Security Group (GSG) and National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), to publish guidance on secure video collaboration and tested how the most widely used tools work across different departments. As well as helping civil servants, our work helped facilitate the first ever virtual Cabinet meeting.

Another shared obstacle was the increase in remote working. To tackle this, the Working Group shared GSG and NCSC approved Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies. The group also facilitated hardware supplies making sure laptops were available to those in government that needed them most.

Alongside the Working Group, GDS created the COVID-19 Resource Hub. The hub dealt with more than 300 requests for assistance and provided information or deployed experts where they were needed most. The hub placed 250 DDaT specialists into critical roles, many who created services to help some of the most vulnerable in society.

Without GDS, we would have needed to rely more heavily on contract support in key roles. As a relatively new unit, we are still building our DDaT capability so the Resourcing Hub was able to support us at a crucial time. I particularly valued their in-depth understanding of the DDaT Profession which meant our needs did not require translation and that in turn led to better matching.

- Nayeema Chowdhury, Head of Digital Transformation at NHSX

GDS also made and ran the DDaT COVID-19 services dashboard. This provided a detailed live picture of what was happening across government in its digital, operational and user-facing activities. We used this information to help collaboration, avoid duplication of work and identify any blockers.

Welsh Government has been an active member of the COVID-19 DDaT working group established by GDS and was instrumental in helping establish the devolved administrations/GDS/Cabinet Office comms collaboration group. We have found both groups an invaluable source of help during the current pandemic. Establishing these groups has set the groundwork for more effective intergovernmental collaboration.

- Caren Fullerton, Former Chief Digital Officer, Welsh Government

The collective power of the DDaT teams

The DDaT Function built more than 150 new and augmented COVID-19-related services, to date. Teams created high profile services at pace that met security, data and design standards, stood up to record traffic and that required cross-functional collaboration.

One example is the Vulnerable People Service. The service enabled the delivery of over 4 million food boxes to clinically extremely vulnerable people by early August. It required collaboration between central government, local authorities and the private sector. Taking a function-wide approach meant the right people were in the right place to make decisions, set up data sharing agreements and make sure help reached the people it needed to.

Another prominent service was the Business Support Tool. It let private sector companies offer support to the government, and took just 4 days to establish and recruited 40,000 offers of support.

The DDaT COVID-19 Working Group’s efforts facilitated the creation of these services by making sure DDaT experts had the right tools to build the services, the right channels to talk to one another and access to the right information. 

Our digital response was 10 years in the making

Digital is at the heart of the government’s response to coronavirus because of our existing strong digital foundations. Since 2011, GDS has created digital tools, products and policies, and developed DDaT capability - all infrastructure and talent that was leveraged during this crisis.

For instance, the GOV.UK Design System - a library of GOV.UK styles, components and patterns - meant accessible services were designed rapidly.

Already in place were GDS’s suite of Government as a Platform (GaaP) products. These tackle common challenges that service teams face - like how to communicate with users or take payment. GOV.UK Notify, the government’s communication tool, saw a 700% increase in usage, with organisations like NHS Business Services Authority using it to send 17 million text messages to vulnerable people in its initial coronavirus response. Another GaaP tool - GOV.UK Verify, which lets people prove they are who they say they are - saw a 900% increase in demand. And, GOV.UK Pay let some local authorities set up services the same day in order to securely take donations for crisis funds and food banks.

The UK government has had a single trusted domain since 2012: GOV.UK. It became the centrepiece of the government’s communication campaign for coronavirus. It held up to record traffic - peaking at 132 million page views in a single week - cementing the importance of having one canonical source of information. This figure is only counting users who accept cookies that measure website use, so the true figures would be even higher. The UK’s digital policies and governance were also already in place to enable this rapid scaling.

And, all of this response would not have been possible without the huge effort of the people who made it happen. The response relied on digital capability and expertise to make policy into reality quickly - often going from concept to live in just a few days. Like the GOV.UK coronavirus landing page, a page that received 750,000 views in its first 24 hours of going live, and was set up in under 5 days. 

What we learned

Coronavirus has not disappeared and our digital response continues.

We can look back on our initial work to see what we’ve learned. GDS’s position in the Cabinet Office lets it take a holistic and systems approach to digital transformation and means it can enable interoperability, let services be set up quicker and solve common problems.

It’s important to continue to build digital capability, work in the open and share learnings to make sure this is addressed. What is shared across organisations - the digitally mature to those at the start of their transformation journey - is this desire to share experiences and learn from others.

The importance of user-centred design (UCD) should not be underestimated. Our users need clear, simple and trusted services to help them in hugely challenging times. Its value is recognised across the Working Group and it's clear the difference it has made.

We want to retain the collaboration that happens when everyone is working together towards one all encompassing issue. It makes government work better for users when conversations happen across different teams, organisations and sectors to continuously refine our shared understanding of the user needs we must meet.

We’ll keep working hard to make sure digital teams across the public sector can deliver and improve the critical services needed and relied upon by millions of people during coronavirus.

How it started

A mission team in the Digital, Data and Technology team (DDaT) at the Department for International Trade (DIT), supporting Data Hub (DIT’s customer relationship management system), has been working to improve the accuracy of the information that Data Hub holds about businesses.

We’ve helped users save time that would otherwise be spent manually updating records by linking company records in Data Hub with trusted external registers of businesses. If a user cannot find a good match in the list of existing company records on Data Hub, then they are invited to submit an investigation. This investigation is then forwarded onto a third party data supplier.

The process explained

Every night, Data Hub produces spreadsheets containing the new record requests created that day. Data Hub then emails the spreadsheets as a .csv file to the data supplier. The information in the spreadsheets is used to check that the business exists and, if it does, the data supplier creates a record for that business.

The new information is then added to the spreadsheets, including a unique ID, and they are sent back to the Data Hub team by email. These unique IDs are added to the relevant Data Hub company records, establishing the link with the new company records. This link enables us to automatically update the company records by API.

Driving innovation through communication

DIT uses the GOV.UK Notify service to provide the .csv file to the data supplier customer service team. When suppliers downloaded these files, they were being saved as .txt files. However, the third party data supplier cannot interpret a .txt file. So the DIT development team approached their counterparts in GDS using the cross-government Slack channel and had a conversation!

The .csv files being saved as .txt files was a known issue to the Notify team, also affecting other users. It was in their enhancement backlog but unfortunately not in scope to work on any time soon. The DIT team developed and proposed a solution which required 4 pull requests (PRs) across 3 different repositories. It required collaboration between DIT and GDS developers and the Notify content lead. 

Delivery of the project

The code has now been deployed and DIT can email the files in a format that is helpful to conduct an investigation. All users of the Notify service can now send .csv files successfully as a result of this enhancement too - you’re welcome!

View our code

The beauty of government working is that we code in the open, so if you want to see the initial proposal through to the result then please look at our documentation on Github.

Our last update to GDS’s Social Media Playbook was in 2018. Since then, new entities have emerged (TikTok only came to the UK in August of that year), and existing players have evolved. We wanted to make sure the GDS Social Media Playbook reflected the current landscape and the things we’ve learnt since 2018, so we thought it was high time we updated it and shared it with you. You’ll find our research and learnings in the playbook itself, but I’ve picked out a couple of changes for you below.

Don’t skimp on security

Earlier this year, a number of verified Twitter accounts experienced takeovers by hackers. In this instance, the hack was perpetrated by exploiting insecurities within Twitter itself, but it’s important that you minimise risk and any vulnerabilities on your end too.

In a newly-added section, we highlight the measures we take to ensure all of our social media profiles are as safe and secure as possible. For instance, we use 2-factor authentication on all platforms, as well as the tools we use to manage our accounts.

Your Information Assurance team will be happy to assist you in making these types of changes - why not send them the playbook and schedule a catch-up to talk through how to sharpen up on your cyber resilience?

Social media is for everyone, so keep your content accessible

GDS has the mandate to ensure the public sector is accessible to everyone, and that includes social media presences! We have collaborated with the Government Communication Service (GCS) to produce in-depth guidance on ensuring your social media content is accessible, and have integrated that best practice into the playbook as an introduction to the principles we apply day to day. Trust me, building in accessibility is easy when you know what to do!

One particular thing that stands out to me is the use of emojis, which has been popularised by the casual nature of conversation on social media platforms. You should know that emojis shouldn’t be used like punctuation, because people using screen readers (tools that read out loud what is on the page) will read each emoji individually, making it harder to understand what you’re actually trying to say.

Look out for your colleagues when you look out for your users

We gave our community management section a bit of a make-over as well. There have been several events over the past months that have led to an increase in users reaching out to the GOV.UK Twitter account, which we manage. Because we want to ensure that users have the same quality of experience as previously, we had to make sure that our colleagues who were responding to users were well cared for.

The section on team wellbeing and resilience covers the kind of measures we put in place in order to take the pressure off our colleagues, such as avoiding back-to-back shifts, and arranging workplace assessments as part of encouraging healthy working practice. This may be the nudge for you to get together with other colleagues across your organisation to look into what’s possible, and check in on how those who are on the frontline of your social media channels are doing.

What does the future of social media hold?

We don’t have crystal balls to gaze into (how easy would our jobs be otherwise!) but we’ve noticed one thing at least: social media may be built for one purpose, but once users get a hold of it, it can be diverted into a totally different purpose. It’s an incredible power that both platforms and users possess, so it’s important to stay alert to these things. The most important lesson of them all is to stay engaged and up to date - we’re doing the same.