I last posted back in June about our plans for GOV.UK. We want to help people navigate GOV.UK as quickly and easily as possible, and ensure we can proactively support their needs, without them needing to understand the structures of government or explicitly know what service they are looking for.

Today, I can share more information about what this work looks like in practice.

Changing users’ needs and expectations

GOV.UK is built on the principle that you shouldn’t need to know how the government works to use government services. We do the hard work to make things simple for users. That means we make interactions with the government easy, effective and accessible, for example by using language that’s familiar to our users instead of complicated legal terms.

The progress we’ve made means that GOV.UK now generally works well if you know what you need to do and if it is a discrete task or transaction.

Now we need to do the next major iteration in how we provide public services online. We’ll do that by attending to complex interactions that happen over time and across several services - like understanding the end of the Brexit Transition period, or starting and sustaining a business.

Why now?

The way people interact online has changed a lot over the 8 years since GOV.UK launched. Services like shopping, banking or entertainment are increasingly personalised. These services typically combine some data about the user with data about their ‘thing’. As a result, they can provide an experience that is tailored and relevant.

So users now expect services that can be all of the following:

• personalised and proactive
• low friction
• available on multiple devices

At GOV.UK we want to keep up with users expectations and make the most of changes in technology to provide the best possible public services. This matters because it is efficient for government, and efficient for the user - getting the right things to the right people at the right time.

We’d like to simplify journeys to: 

• proactively offer information and services to users based on their needs and what they’ve told us about themselves 
• reduce friction for users so that they don’t have to give different parts of government the same information multiple times 
• link together services to make user journeys simpler

And we need to do all this while making sure users understand how their data is being used, so they can consent (or not) to those arrangements.

A GOV.UK account

To provide this kind of interaction and experience, we need an account infrastructure for GOV.UK. This idea isn’t new. There are already lots of government accounts for specific services - we’ve recorded over a 100 places that a user could login already, and that trend will only continue.

We want to unify this experience - not to create an ‘uber CRM’ for the government - but to give users continuity, so that they don’t need to start from scratch each time they need to do something with the government.

A centralised GOV.UK account will be new to people, and there are valid concerns about data use and privacy. We’re working to get a better understanding of how users feel about the government providing a service in this way. With early prototypes we have found that most people assume that data about them is already held centrally in government and that accounts are - or should be - linked.

You might ask whether people really interact with GOV.UK enough to warrant this kind of investment. We’re validating our figures further on this, but we believe that current interaction with GOV.UK is equivalent to everyone in the UK visiting at least 22 times per year - nearly twice per month. A number that is only going to grow as digital interactions with government increase.

This is about using data to make services more efficient, delivering policy to users quicker, radically improving support over time, and being able to communicate directly to users. It is about keeping pace with how people expect to receive service.

Prototype

This vision is ambitious and, like everything we build on GOV.UK, we want to develop it iteratively so that we can learn about what works for users as we scale up. Before we start linking to lots of transactions, we want to learn about how users choose to interact with an account, and what works and what doesn’t.

We’re planning a series of experiments now. These will give us the opportunity to test different functionality and understand how users interact with the government. They will also give us the chance to test some questions we’ve been considering. Questions like:

• how can we be as transparent as possible about how we’re using people’s data and allow them to change their consent preferences?
• how might GOV.UK accounts handle the relationship between people’s personal and professional interactions with the government?
• how can we provide users with personalised information without limiting their access to other information that might be of use to them?

GOV.UK is the trusted source for government information and services, and we take maintaining our users' trust very seriously. We recognise that a big part of maintaining that trust comes down to the way we approach data privacy and security. Consequently, we are taking a privacy and security by design approach. This enables us to identify potential privacy and security problems early on and to build the GOV.UK account in a way that protects our users' data and privacy. This includes using robust security technologies, giving users control of their data and being transparent about how a GOV.UK account uses data.

It’s also important to make sure we do not exclude users who don’t want to (or can’t), for whatever reason, use an account. Information on GOV.UK will never be locked behind a login.

I am hugely excited for this next phase in the GOV.UK journey, and the benefits that accounts will bring for users. Of course, we have a Comprehensive Spending Review ahead, and this work has many dependencies if it is to be successful. I look forward to writing again with further updates and insights as we progress this exciting project.

The September episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast is about the Data Standards Authority. By creating standards in collected data, government can assure better policy outcomes and deliver more joined-up services to citizens.

Rosalie Marshall, Lead Technology Advisor at GDS, and Tomas Sanchez, Chief Data Architect at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are this month’s guests. They tell Vanessa Schneider, Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS, about what the benefits to data standards are, how the Data Standards Authority improves data in government, and what future work they are planning to do.

The episode includes a clip from Alison Pritchard, Director General at GDS, introducing the episode and what data standards are.

When I accepted the role of Director General at the Government Digital Service (GDS), I knew it would be both rewarding and challenging. I knew GDS was full of incredibly talented people. And, I knew GDS was absolutely committed to using digital to make government work better for users.

However, what I did not know, and could not predict, was quite the nature of the challenges that would test us all during my 13-month tenure as Director General.

Over this extraordinary period of time, from 1 August 2019 to 30 September 2020, GDS stepped up to meet both the expected and the unexpected head-on. We helped tackle coronavirus (COVID-19), supported EU Exit, raised digital accessibility standards, and pivoted to remote working. All whilst leading the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Function and cementing our position at the forefront of digital government.

I am so proud to have led GDS through this time. And, I am delighted to remain in the DDaT family in my new role as Deputy National Statistician and Director General for Data Capability at the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

One blog post is never long enough to list all of GDS’s achievements or recognise everyone. But, I hope my words show what a remarkable year it’s been under extraordinary and testing circumstances.

GDS at the heart of digital government

GDS’s work has cemented the critical role of digital in tackling issues of national importance. People now expect user-centred services with clear and accurate information to be easily accessed online.

Our efforts on GOV.UK are a clear example of this. We launched the Brexit Checker last summer to help people know what they needed to do. The team worked long hours to make sure GOV.UK stood up to record traffic caused by coronavirus, which peaked at 132 million page views in a single week earlier this year (the true figure would be even higher as we only count users who accept cookies that measure website use). The team continues to iterate their work as the pandemic remains a constant in our lives.

The Government as a Platform (GaaP) suite of products again proved their value. By establishing tools such as GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay, teams could quickly and rapidly create or iterate services to provide vital help needed during coronavirus.

As leaders of the DDaT Function, we responded rapidly and with expertise to the demands placed upon digital government by COVID-19. This meant services like the Vulnerable People Service which involved multiple organisations could be set up giving support to those in most need in a matter of days, not weeks.

Leaving no-one behind

At times of acute need, it is more important than ever to build services that are for everyone. While there are now further accessibility regulations in place, it’s also the right thing to do.

We’ve enshrined accessibility in our design principles; this makes sure accessibility is considered in all aspects of GDS’s work. For example, the GOV.UK Design System - a library of GOV.UK styles, components and patterns, means teams can design services at pace with confidence in their accessibility.

We’ve been preparing for the 23 September compliance deadline for the accessibility regulations. We hosted celebrations for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and helped organisations get ready for the change in law.

Digital transformation across the public sector

It’s important that GDS helps make digital transformation happen wherever public services are, whether in central or local government.

One way of doing this is through upskilling people. In May we launched an online ‘Introduction to Content Design’ course, which had 11,500 people enrolled. We’ve also trained nearly 3,000 public servants through the GDS Academy since last August, a figure that reflects lockdown restrictions.

July marked the second birthday of the Local Digital Declaration. Since launching, more than 240 organisations have signed up to the set of guiding principles that help local government deliver user-centred digital services.

We’ve also launched the GDS Location Strategy with 3 hubs in London, Bristol and Manchester, meaning location is less of a barrier when recruiting skilled DDaT professionals. This is aligned with the Cabinet Office’s Places for Growth Programme.

Adapting for the future

In my introductory blog post for this job I wrote, “I have a duty to help land permanent leadership of GDS in a way that we don’t miss a beat and so we can springboard into the future state for digital government”. As I leave GDS, I am pleased at what we’ve set up.

Alex Chisholm, Chief Operating Officer for the Civil Service and Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office, recently blogged about GDS’s leadership changes. Since then, we’ve embarked on recruitment for the Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO) role at Permanent Secretary level and we have opened recruitment for the future Chief Executive of GDS which will replace my role as Director General.

Joined up, trusted and responsive to user needs

In one of my first public engagements as GDS’s Director General I launched the 2030 Vision at Sprint 19 (pictured above) which is that government in 2030 will be joined up, trusted and responsive to user needs.

This remains our vision. All our work this year, including launching the Data Standards Authority and introducing GOV.UK accounts, is working towards this. We will achieve the vision through an ambitious strategy that focuses on product, data and the DDaT function.

Goodbye and thank you

In my decades-long career as a public servant I can safely say there’s nowhere quite like GDS. Alongside the impressive achievements listed above, working here saw me greet a minister in front of a stack of toilet rolls in an underground carpark, have my comedic talents reviewed in the press and chair a meeting from my canoe.

Thank you to everyone who I’ve worked with, all who make this place the unique organisation it is. As I leave GDS, I am confident that whatever expected and unexpected challenges come next, GDS will not be found wanting.

From tomorrow, Fiona Deans, Chief Operating Officer at GDS, is the interim Director General. A key piece of advice I’ve offered Fiona is to ignore the “interim” bit and - as they say on the X-Factor - own it! With Fiona at the helm and an Executive Team with considerable strength and experience, I know I leave behind a strong leadership team prepared for the future.

At GDS, we’ve always promoted the benefits of working in multidisciplinary teams, being co-located as much as possible. Bringing together specialists to work on problems in the same building has clear benefits: interaction is easier, scrum boards and roadmaps are more visible and make coordination more fluid, and collaboration can be kicked off quickly.

But we’re keen on the benefits of remote working too. Teams can choose to work from home, flexibly, as needed, and everyone is given the tools to do so. It means they can get their head down and focus, or do the washing up at lunchtime in between meetings. People can find a balance between work and life that works for them.

All that changed in late March when everyone shifted to working from home by default. We wanted to take advantage of the change to try new working practices in GOV.UK Pay, inspired by a blog post about how they communicate asynchronously at Automattic.

So we tried to have a week where there was nothing that demanded that people be in a certain place at a certain time and making sure our messages were clear and comprehensible, giving people time to think and respond, and having more agency over how they spent their time.

Getting rid of meetings

The biggest change was to get rid of work meetings. Meetings force people to do a specific thing at a specific time, potentially disrupting their flow. We wanted to see what happened when there were no meetings in the calendar.

For our trial, there were some exceptions:

• meetings with people outside Pay, which might have been unavoidable
• community and line management meetings, which aren’t relevant to a team trial
• meetings for pair programming or collaborative work, to do something together rather than to decide something

Several team ceremonies we would have usually held in a meeting, such as retrospectives (retros) or sprint planning, were substituted by colleagues providing their own updates on collaborative tools, such as team Slack channels, Google Docs or Trello boards. Tasks were assigned in similar ways.

There wasn’t a team show-and-tell scheduled for the asynchronous week, but we could have explored sharing pre-recorded segments and discussing them on Slack.

Getting rid of emails

Email is a form of asynchronous communication, but has a few characteristics that would make the trial harder:

• it’s “push” communication, so the recipient can’t opt in and out
• it’s closed, so only the recipients can see the information and the sender needs to pre-empt everyone who might need it
• it’s basic, so things like version control and comment threads get complex fast

Instead, people sent messages on a team Slack channel, or created proposals in Google Docs and shared that.

Keeping things ticking over

One benefit of removing meetings is that we no longer had a reason to say people had to work specific hours. We asked everyone to work the same number of hours that they usually do, but asked them to do them at any time and in any length of blocks that they like. The exception to this was people working on Support, who had to work the times set out in our support agreement with our users.

We scheduled 2 optional social meetings a day to stay connected as a team, with a strict no-work-talk rule (so we didn’t compromise the experiment).

How it went

We ran a retro to reflect on the week, voting on various things, as well as gathering comments. Not everyone voted on everything, so the numbers are inconsistent.

On balance, more people found this way of working to be as good as or better than normal. 8 people had mostly positive feelings about working in this way. 6 were neutral or conflicted, and 2 had mostly negative feelings.

On the whole, we managed to follow the rules: 17 of 18 people broke the rules once or twice at most.

The biggest benefit for most people was having bigger blocks of free time, which allowed them to focus on a piece of work without interruption. Almost everyone found that managing their own concentration levels was easier.

The clunkiest bit of the week was planning. Each team usually spends time on working out what to do next every week, and some teams do so daily.

Most of this could have happened in Slack, but without scheduled meetings, some of it didn’t. Each team did put together a sprint backlog, but it was generally less well thought out than usual. However, 11 of 12 people thought this clunkiness was probably lack of practice, rather than a fundamental trait of asynchronous planning.

One team usually pairs all day. They struggled with the absence of a stand-up to coordinate the pairing in the morning, and to connect with the wider direction of their work.

What we learned

The trial highlighted some things that otherwise weren’t obvious.

We noticed a few instances where a process was usually collectively owned, but without a meeting to force people to engage with it, it didn’t get done. In those instances, a named person or role responsible for the process would have helped. We’ll explore whether we’d work better with a defined owner or rota for those processes, even when working synchronously.

At one point, an urgent piece of work arrived and we tried to adapt asynchronous processes to deal with it, but quickly abandoned that. When the cycle time for sensing a problem and providing a response is short, direct communication and collaboration makes it quicker to deliver solutions.

Some felt less engaged with their team, which is something we’d need to solve if we were to switch to this pattern in the long term.

The benefits people experienced tended to be related to their role. For example, product managers, delivery managers and designers generally have competing priorities for how to spend their time. An absence of meetings empowered them to prioritise freely, rather than having to spend time on whatever felt important when meetings were scheduled. Developers tend to work more directly from a backlog, so felt this benefit less.

Next steps

The way that remote working has blended people’s experience of work and home together is challenging.

Some find it helpful to emulate the experience of going to an office as closely as possible. That might be by doing things like only working during normal working hours, and going for a walk before and after work to replace the wind-down effect of a commute.

However, not everyone works at their best in this way all the time. Some find it easier to work in several smaller chunks through the day and evening, or get up late and sleep late, or take a 3-hour lunch break and extend the day. We want to be as flexible as possible, and reducing the number of meetings in the calendar helps to do that.

A popular idea in the retro was to have dedicated days each week when meetings were banned, and after a follow-up survey, we now have no team meetings on Tuesdays or Fridays. We’ll review this regularly to see if we’d like more or fewer days in the future.

We’ll keep reevaluating our ways of working. Whenever the option of working in the same space is available again, we’ll jointly decide what we want that to look like and how we can accommodate every individual’s needs. Though we’d love to be near each other again, we’ll probably never go back to working exactly how we used to.

I’m delighted to share that the UK has come second in the Digital Government Index (DGI) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The rankings were announced at the OECD’s flagship E-Leaders annual meeting today, which we attended (virtually).

This top ranking is something we are really proud of at the Government Digital Service (GDS), and it reflects the hard work of teams across GDS and the thousands of digital, data and technology (DDaT) professionals across the function.

Why this is important

The Index measures countries across 6 dimensions, which the OECD view as characterising a ‘fully digital government’: digital by design, government as a platform, data-driven public sector, open by default, user-driven, and proactiveness.

The UK got high marks for its work around being digital by design, being user- and data-driven, as well as our Government as a Platform work; all the things that GDS has been championing since it was created.

Other rankings

Along with ranking second in OECD’s DGI Index, we are also currently ranked seventh in the world in the 2020 United Nations (UN) E-Government Survey and first in the Open Data Barometer; so we remain a global top performer.

But it’s all very close at the top. In the UN rankings, there’s only a difference of 0.04 between the seventh and the top spot.

However, there is always more to do and regardless of our rankings we know we need to continue to challenge ourselves if we want to hold on to the top spots.

Our international work

Back in 2016 we created a dedicated team, GDS International, to help deal with the international demand and interest in the UK’s approach and expertise on digital government, generated by our global reputation as digital leaders.

With the team in place, we were able to properly provide the full picture of the UK’s work on digital government and the work of the DDaT function across government, which has helped us secure the top spots in the global rankings. The team is able to play a critical role in facilitating the exchange of ideas between GDS and the rest of the world.

Another exciting and growing role of the team has been to act as a hub of digital expertise and provide support internationally. Our goal is to help governments do digital government better for everyone - citizens, businesses and civil servants.

Since its inception, GDS International has provided advice to around 200 national and subnational delegations. It has also developed longer term peer-to-peer technical consultancy partnerships with around 20 countries, spanning across Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Europe. We help governments understand the shape of their digital challenges: assessing their needs, identifying priorities and opportunities and supporting them to achieve positive change.

Some examples of the types of peer-to-peer support we’ve provided include helping a digital agency in Sub-Saharan Africa implement agile operational processes to manage heightened COVID-19-generated demand, and helping a local government in Southeast Asia be able to share data between agencies to better serve the needs of citizens and businesses in providing digital public services. We draw on expertise from across GDS, while also making sure that the support we provide is tailored to the local context.

We also work extensively with multilateral organisations like the UN, World Bank and OECD on public sector digital transformation. We are members of 66 international working groups, and chair 5 multilateral thematic groups, leading thinking on areas like digital maturity, procurement, service design and digital delivery.

What’s next for our international work

The demand for our expertise shows no sign of slowing, so we’re working hard to make sure we can meet this demand. We’re also continuing to share the UK’s lessons learnt as we see international dialogue as a really important part of keeping at the cutting edge. Most recently our global dialogues have centred around the digital response to COVID-19 and we’re sharing what we’re learning internationally within GDS and across the DDaT function.

Improving procurement globally has benefits for citizens, civil servants and governments around the world. It helps tackle corruption and improves services for users. With the global cost of corruption being more than an estimated US$2.6 trillion every year, and with businesses and individuals paying more than US$1 trillion in bribes every year, it also has potential to save vast sums of money.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is a leader in technology procurement processes. We’ve partnered with national, state and local governments across 5 emerging economies through our Global Digital Marketplace Programme, to make procurement more open and effective. This work is possible through our successes including the Digital Marketplace, standards-based assurance of spend and service delivery, and the Crown Commercial Service buying digital community, which are collectively helping to transform the way the public sector buys digital and technology.

As coronavirus (COVID-19) pushes more governments everywhere towards digital, data and technology solutions and opportunities, it’s imperative that we continue and scale our efforts to improve public procurement.

This is why we have been working to create the Digital Buying Guide, supported by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). It launched in public beta last week at the annual Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) E-Leaders (virtual) meeting.

What the Digital Buying Guide is

The Digital Buying Guide’s aim is to present modern approaches to public procurement that are fair, open, transparent, effective, multidisciplinary, and focused on meeting users’ needs.

This means buying digitally, with social purpose. By working to make procurement open, we’re helping to make governments better. This work is sponsored by the OECD, the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and its United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) initiative.

The Digital Buying Guide is for anyone who buys for the public sector in their country - whether that’s for local, regional or national government organisations. We’ve started by focusing on digital and technology products and services, and information is intended to be internationally relevant and not specific to any particular regulatory environment.

The guide aligns with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and standards and guidelines on corruption prevention and gender equality in public procurement.

The approach we’ve taken

The Digital Buying Guide contains practical steps to take, with a growing collection of illustrative case studies from governments around the world, because understanding and researching in context is important. It’s initially available in English, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia versions, which were prioritised because of GDS’s work in Latin America, South Africa and Southeast Asia.

The Digital Buying Guide beta has evolved from the ‘ICT Commissioning Playbook’ alpha that the Global Digital Marketplace Programme delivered towards the end of 2018, with help from partners and supported by the OECD.

At the beginning of 2020, we began to iterate the alpha. The multidisciplinary team drew inspiration from both the GOV.UK Design System and NHS Digital Design System, as well as other design styles used by multilateral and non-government organisations that work on international development.

We’ve been speaking to lots of users and stakeholders, in national and local governments around the world. This has been mostly face-to-face, but when the COVID-19 situation began to escalate internationally, we switched to full remote delivery. We quickly adapted to using a range of online tools and virtual techniques to support remote research, analysis, user testing and live language interpretation.

The private beta design went through a number of iterations based on feedback gathered throughout the testing with users and stakeholders.

In parallel we also worked with our partners Development Gateway and Oxford Insights, whose research, analysis and recommendations has informed the Digital Buying Guide content and case studies:

• Gender Equality and Social Inclusion in ICT Procurement: Discovery Report
• Resilience by eDesign: Digital Emergency Procurement

In July, the Digital Buying Guide was externally audited for accessibility, and it’s fully compliant to ‘AA’ standard with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1.

What happens next

We’re currently testing the emergency procurement content and developing additional case studies, which will be added to the Digital Buying Guide soon.

Our work with Development Gateway and Oxford Insights included creating indicator frameworks for emergency procurement, and gender equality and social inclusion in public procurement. These indicators can be used to assess maturity and define incremental actions to take for improvement.

Additional user needs have emerged during research and testing. To meet these needs, we’ve a prioritised roadmap to develop new features, including:

• community elements - for officials around the world to connect, share experiences and better practices, and learn from each other
• resources - such as templates for simplified ICT contracts, standards for assuring ICT investment plans and service delivery
• more indicators - for assessing maturity and actions for incremental improvement on a number of digital buying themes

As I said at the beginning, now more than ever, public sectors globally are looking at the opportunities provided by digital, data and technology.

Buying digitally with social purpose is critical to support this, as it helps:

• address people’s raised expectations for simpler, clearer and digital public services
• build trust between governments and their communities
• increase transparency and access to information
• reduce inequalities in society and stimulate local economies by increasing participation of under-represented groups, such as women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
• contribute to successfully achieving the UN’s SDGs

The October episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast is about Black excellence in tech. This episode our guests are Samantha Bryant, Associate Delivery Manager on the GovTech Catalyst team, and Founder and Co-Chair of the GDS Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) Network; Chucks Iwuagwu, Head of Delivery in GOV.UK; and Matthew Card, a Software Engineer and Senior Leadership Team Advisor from the BBC.

They share their career paths, future aspirations and thoughts on how allies can support Black colleagues in the tech industry with Vanessa Schneider, Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS and this month’s podcast host.

If you’re interested in any of the organisations we talk about in the podcast, you can find out more about them on their websites:

• Release D Reality (Matthew can be reached on his email address about his other endeavours)
• Success Through Soca
• Pink Dynasty

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

You can read a transcript of the episode on Podbean.

Over the past year we’ve been writing about the ways in which GOV.UK will develop, in order to continue meeting user needs, as expectations around how and where to receive information evolve.

We’ve talked about offering a more personalised experience for users and delivering information to the channels and devices users expect to find it, whether that’s on the GOV.UK website or elsewhere. And we’ve discussed some of the ways we are looking to support this, through building a more holistic picture of how users use government information and services, developing our data science capability, and introducing early thinking on the idea of a GOV.UK account.

We’re also looking at the role content plays in connecting all of this work and how our approach to content will change as a result.

Where we are now

At the heart of GOV.UK is a publishing platform which, for the most part, is built up of individual pages that are grouped together and made findable through underlying taxonomies. Whether you’re navigating through a menu structure or searching for a term or phrase, GOV.UK helps you get to a page that is relevant to the thing you are looking for.

By taking a user-centred approach, the content on that page is designed to be understood as quickly and easily, and by as wide a range of people, as possible. But it still requires you to read through the whole page (or set of pages) in order to understand the information fully, and then interpret what is relevant to you and your personal circumstances. In other words, we can get you to the relevant page, but often it’s then up to you to find the relevant information to your situation.

We’ve done a lot of work over the years to improve the way users can navigate through complex information easily, working on site-wide navigation and taxonomies, as well as looking beyond these to other ways to access content.

The smart answers format, for example, has played a crucial part in allowing users to access information and services quickly, and continues to do so especially in the wake of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Developing the step by step pattern has provided greater ability to join up content across complex user journeys. And the UK Transition (formerly Brexit) checker has gone even further in giving users a succinct, personalised view of information that spans multiple sets of user needs.

Some of this work has provided opportunities to apply a more modular approach to content, where information is built up using small content components that are designed to be used (and reused) in different ways based on context. But, for the majority of GOV.UK at least, the smallest component of content is currently the single page.

This makes it harder to extract individual pieces of information from within that page and serve it where needed.  An example could be an item of eligibility criteria that is relevant to your circumstances on a page about applying for funding, or a prerequisite task on a page about getting a licence.

Structured information

We’re now starting to explore how we might structure content differently, at scale, so pieces of information can be reused and accessed more easily, both across GOV.UK and beyond GOV.UK.

Structuring content in this way could support personalisation by identifying, extracting and bringing together pieces of content in a new context based on a user’s circumstances. It could provide better exposure of content to third parties, with benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) and channel-agnostic publishing. It could also offer new ways to reduce duplication and efforts in content management. Ultimately, it could allow users to get the answers they need more directly, quickly, effortlessly.

Breaking content down into smaller chunks is only part of the picture, however. It’s also about understanding what characteristics each piece of content has and what similarities, differences and other relationships pieces of content have with each other.

In this way we are thinking about and investigating our content as pieces of data rather than simply pieces of text. And we’re considering what sort of data we need to get out of our content in order to develop new models, and what sort of data we need to add in.

We’ve already made progress on this, through adding structured data markup to GOV.UK content, which has improved the way content appears in search results on Google, for instance. And we’re now using artificial intelligence to increase our knowledge of the information on GOV.UK, helping us start to understand those characteristics and relationships across hundreds of thousands of pieces of content.

An example of artificial intelligence being used to identify characteristics of content.

Thinking big

Hundreds of thousands of pieces of content is, of course, the big challenge here. To implement new models for structured information at scale we will be working through much wider decisions on governance and authorship, publishing workflows, and technical, data and content architecture.

I’m also particularly interested in what skills and capabilities will be needed to support these new content models and approaches. What does the content designer of the future look like, for example? And how can we continue to support them in their work on GOV.UK content?

Many of these decisions and questions will need insight, feedback and collaboration from across government and I’m interested to hear from other teams who have been thinking about these areas. If you’re outside of the UK government and have ideas, I’d love to hear from you too!

Old concepts, new contexts

Structuring information in the ways I’ve laid out isn’t a new concept: online shops and other commercial sites have been using and refining models of structured information for reuse, personalisation and more for years if not decades. But the scale of information on GOV.UK, together with the complexity of users’ needs and their expectations when interacting with government, present new challenges that we are starting to work through.

Structuring content in new ways that go beyond page level, and improving our use of content-as-data, provides us with a structured information source that will better support the GOV.UK of the future. We’re proving the value of going in this direction in a localised way, and so will now be ramping up our efforts. It’s a large and emerging area, covering many topics I’ve not touched on in this post. We’ll be blogging more on this as our work continues.

We’re running a project to see whether organisations outside government can use real-time passport validity checks to build useful digital services.

We’re doing this by making the Document Checking Service (DCS) available to a group of companies until summer 2021.

This project aims to reduce barriers to users being able to do things online - in particular, being able to prove their identity easily and safely.

The DCS helps users prove their identity online

When a user creates a digital identity account with GOV.UK Verify, they can use their passport or driving licence to help prove who they are.

If someone provides these details, they’re checked against government records to see whether they match a valid document. These checks are performed using the imaginatively named Document Checking Service (DCS).

The DCS compares the document details with records held by government agencies, and responds with whether or not a valid record for the document exists. The response is only  ‘yes’ or ‘no’ - no other information is returned or shared.

A DCS check is useful because it lets you check whether a document is valid in real-time without needing to examine its physical security features, such as watermarks or holograms.

It’s hard to check these kinds of security features over the internet. For example, a photo of a passport hologram taken on a mobile phone camera may not be high enough quality to tell whether the hologram is genuine or a forgery.

Document checks are useful combined with other information

A DCS check on its own doesn’t prove someone is who they say they are. Identity checking services (known as ‘identity providers’, or ‘IDPs’) perform some other checks to establish this. For example, they might ask a user to take a short video of themselves on their phone and match the image against the photo on their passport. There’s more information about how to prove a user’s identity online in the publication ‘Good Practice Guide 45 (GPG45)’.

However, knowing that there is a valid record of the user’s passport or driving licence helps the IDP be more confident that the user is indeed the user. For example, if a passport gets stolen, a DCS check will stop someone else being able to use it to create an identity account.

The DCS also limits the amount of data that gets shared about the user’s document. The user provides the document details to the IDP, which forwards them to DCS. DCS returns only a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer in response.

There’s more information about how the DCS works, including the encryption and signing it uses to help keep data secure, in the DCS technical documentation.

Organisations outside of government check against passport data for the first time

Until now access to the DCS has been limited to the GOV.UK Verify IDPs. They’ve also only been able to use it to help users create digital identity accounts.

This is changing with the DCS ‘pilot’ project.

The pilot is a cross-government collaborative project run by teams from Government Digital Service (GDS), the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Her Majesty's Passport Office (HMPO), who all form the DCS team.

Under the pilot, companies are able to use DCS checks as part of their own digital services. 

Some of these services will allow users to create digital identity accounts they can use elsewhere on the internet, while others will use the DCS check to speed up processes that involve checking whether a passport is valid, such as pre-employment checks.

The companies taking part in the pilot are only able to use the DCS to check passport details that users have given them - they can’t access any other data about the passport or find out about other passports in the database. If a user chooses not to give their consent, these companies will have other ways to verify their identity (as mentioned above). All companies taking part had to prove they meet security and privacy standards.

You can find out which companies are taking part in the pilot on GOV.UK.

We want to learn how we might improve this service

The DCS pilot will test the current technological infrastructure needed to provide document checks. We’d like to learn from organisations taking part in the pilot about how we might improve the DCS application programming interface (API), without compromising the security necessary for handling passport details.

We also want to estimate how much market demand there is for DCS checks, see what services are built to use the checks, and find out about how users feel about using their documents in this way.

We received the first live DCS checks from organisations participating in the pilot in October. More will be building working technical connections over the autumn.

GOV.UK Pay is the government’s payment service. It allows service teams across the public sector to take payments quickly, easily and securely. It’s used in more than 400 services in around 150 organisations. These services include Basic Disclosure and Barring (DBS) Service check, Vehicle Tax and online passport application payments.

Over the past 12 months or so, the number of services using GOV.UK Pay has more than doubled. In November’s episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast, Miriam Raines and Steve Messer, both GOV.UK Pay product managers, talk to Creative Content Producer, Laura Stevens, about this growth, the product’s features and how it helps teams across the public sector.

We hear from some of these teams during the episode, all who use GOV.UK Pay in a different context:

• Haroon Tariq, Delivery Manager for the I Want to Fish Team at the Environment Agency 
• Lisa Lowton, Head Functional Lead at the Home Office
• David Farqharson, Developer at Surrey County Council

They talk about how GOV.UK Pay works for them with their different user needs and services they provide. 

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.

Fiona Deans, Director General

Today GDS turns 9. We’ve come a long way since a small team assembled in a government building near Waterloo, tasked with making a revolution in digital government a reality. Since then, we’ve called several UK offices and - more recently - countless kitchen tables, ‘home’.

Hundreds of people helped us to get where we are today. Some have been with GDS from the beginning, others moved on to pastures new. Many, like me, joined somewhere along the way. Together, we’ve grown and matured as an organisation, and have taken up our place to lead the government’s digital, data and technology (DDaT) function at the very centre.

We’re older and a bit wiser, but our mission hasn’t changed. The decision to focus on user needs didn’t just make it onto the alpha project walls - it stitched itself into the fabric of GDS.

It’s a guiding principle, a GDS “golden thread”, that features as prominently on day 3,288 as it did on day 1. It’s there in the Government’s Design Principles that evolved from design rules scribbled on post-it notes stuck to the walls of our first office.

You can see it in the digital leaders who once felt disconnected but now enjoy influence in cross-government networks, and find fellowship among 18,000 members of the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Profession.

And, as recently set out by an Institute for Government report, the impact and influence of almost a decade of digital transformation driven by GDS, and of enablers like our Service Toolkit, can be felt in government’s ability to unblock departmental boundaries and rapidly spin up services during the coronavirus response.

We have a great bunch of people working at GDS (not to mention plenty of alumni doing fantastic work across digital government too). It’s undeniably been a tough year for everyone, and I’m so grateful to team GDS and our DDaT colleagues for pulling together and putting in the hard yards. From supporting the delivery of millions of food parcels to those most in need, to delivering a billion messages using GOV.UK Notify between May and November of this year alone - we should all feel proud of what’s been achieved.

If this last year has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t always predict what’s ahead. But I’m confident that with the lessons learned, the resilience built and the relationships forged in our first 9 years, as long as we keep user needs as our north star - GDS will be up to whatever challenge comes next.

GDS then, now and next - reflections from our people

Later in the month, GDS will publish the next chapter of the GDS Story - our annual, deliberate exercise in institutional memory. Until then, to celebrate our birthday, we asked a handful of GDS’s people - some long-standing and some new starters - to reflect on their experiences of digital government with GDS so far, telling us what they’re proud of now and what they’re excited about in the future.

Chris Watson, Head of Campaigns, Creative and Events - joined GDS in 2011

I joined the communications team in 2011. We were split between borrowed space in different buildings, getting ready to move under one roof at Aviation House to officially launch. It was great being among people with a passion for, and relentless focus on, user needs. Getting to play a part in telling that story was irresistible.

Now, 9 years on and what started as a small dedicated group of people has grown into a big group of dedicated people! Governments around the world have mirrored our work and there’s a global focus on how to transform government to put citizens and their needs at its heart.

So what’s next? I’m looking forward to planning our flagship Sprint event and getting the DDaT profession together to celebrate the great work being done up and down the country. What excites me now is the same as on my first day - our work to put user needs first. It wouldn’t be a relentless focus if it was any other way.

Liz Lutgendorff, Senior Research Analyst, International - joined GDS in 2012

My GDS journey started in January 2012, when I joined to transition ‘Business Link’ to what would later become GOV.UK. We sat in a whole empty section on the 6th floor of Aviation House (if you can even imagine). It was an exciting and busy time, and as my first role in government, I had no idea we were doing something revolutionary - but we were.

Now it’s 2020 and I’ve got deja vu, as we work with other global governments who want to consolidate their web estates to a single domain - just as we did. So much of what still GDS does is revolutionary: spend controls, service assessments, capability frameworks, standards, platforms and GOV.UK. We shouldn’t lose sight of how important GDS’s work in digital government is, not just in the UK, but internationally: we have shown what’s possible for international governments who want to embed digital skills and drive procurement reform. Though more than ever, we’re keeping our eyes on the horizon so we can continue to iterate, and improve.

Next year I’m looking forward to continuing conversations with colleagues from around the world about how to make digital governance work, and how to keep users at the centre of it all.

Christopher Short, Head of Operations, Global Digital Marketplace - joined GDS in 2012

I joined GDS in 2012 to work as a Commercial Manager in the Commissioning team and in 2014 was promoted to lead it. Procuring at the pace needed to support the development of GOV.UK and the 25 ‘Exemplars’ was a real challenge. This was helped by the arrival of G-Cloud and the development in GDS of the Digital Marketplace (which recently celebrated its 6th birthday), which I supported. The beauty of being part of GDS is that you’re able to support areas of development that are linked, but outside your daily work.

Between May 2016 and December 2019 I moved to work at (what was then) Business, Innovation and Skills to help set up their Digital Team, and then at Crown Commercial Service, where I used the skills I had learnt in User-Centred Design approaches to support development of new Commercial Frameworks.

I returned to GDS just before Christmas 2019, and am now working on an international anti-corruption and procurement reform programme - the Global Digital Marketplace. We’re supporting National and Local Governments in Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, and South Africa to make procurement more open and effective, and designing out opportunities for corruption and fraud to manifest.

Helen Wall, National Lead - joined GDS in 2014

I joined GDS in 2014 to work in the digital identity programme. I knew all about GDS, having started my civil service career at Directgov, and I was even the one who got to send the tweet announcing GOV.UK’s launch from the Number 10 account!

It was a super exciting time to be playing in sandbox environments working with everyone from big banks to the shared economy, asking what users’ thoughts were for a government-issued digital identity being used for commercial services - turns out, very happy… unless they were accessing adult material - then they were less enthusiastic…

In 2018 I became the National Lead, and had the privilege of setting up a team looking at levelling up digital transformation across the UK, supported by GDS products and services.

Highlights from my time with GDS include the Local Digital Declaration reaching over 200 local authorities, Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) signed with each of the devolved nations and some really great collaboration work in response to COVID-19.

As a team we feel we’re just getting started, and have big plans on mapping digital maturity of public services, supporting tangible change with supplier relationships and working with colleagues across the devolved administrations.

Louise Ryan, Lead Technical Architect and Head of Technology for Government as a Platform (GaaP) - joined GDS in 2017

I joined GDS in 2017 as a Technical Architect on the Digital Marketplace. From pretty early on I knew it was an excellent place to be. The Digital Marketplace runs 2 procurement frameworks for government (G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes & Specialists) and even though I knew precisely nothing about this complex domain, the team welcomed me with open arms and happily answered my many, many questions about the digital service, and procurement fundamentals.

I’m now the Head of Technology for Government as a Platform (GaaP). For me, this is the best job in GDS. I get to work with several, incredible teams who are diligently, skillfully and continuously improving brilliant services that millions of users interact with every day. It is a privilege.

I’m also a technical service assessor for the Service Standard, which helps teams across government build and run great public services. I really enjoy speaking to other teams of DDaT professionals about the services they’re building (often using GaaP components created by GDS!) and how we can all work together to make government services work better for citizens and Civil Servants alike.

Steve Messer, Product Manager GOV.UK Pay - joined GDS in 2018

I joined Government Digital Service in 2018, having previously worked as a product manager at a small company in Brixton, working on digital products and open data projects for local authorities.

It’s really humbling working at GDS as you have to think about the scenarios people are in when they need to do something with government.

They might be on the bus heading to a job interview, or watching telly at home, or up late at night worrying about their bank balance while paying government for something. It’s our job to help them through those moments, to empathise with the person behind the screen, so that they can finish that task and get on with their life.

Those ‘life moments’ have been important to design for over the last 9 years at GDS, and it will be important to design for those moments in the future too – wherever that takes us, with whatever technology we’re using then.

Chucks Iwuagwu, Head of Delivery, GOV.UK - joined GDS in 2019 

Joining GDS was a dream come true for someone like me, who has been around Agile delivery across various levels of government, from devolved administrations to local government and central government. GDS was the place to be for an Agile practitioner in government, and I’m incredibly grateful that I’ve had this opportunity to work at GDS.

I initially joined as Head of Delivery for the Verify programme, and found it incredibly challenging but also rewarding - mainly because I was working with a group of people whose dedication and commitment was unrivalled in all my experience. They had a complex problem to solve and did nothing but work round the clock to make sense of all the conundrums that this area generated.

I moved after 6 months from Verify to be Head of Delivery on GOV.UK and it would remain part of the most valued decision and experience in my life. GOV.UK is a fantastic programme, like Verify, staffed by people for whom working in GOV.UK is never going to be a job - it’s more like a vocation. I’ve never known a group of people who cared about a service/product as much as people in GOV.UK do.

I think the future for GDS is bright because - to borrow a phrase coined in Glasgow (a city I call second home), ‘People make GDS’.

Nesha Russo, Accessibility Officer, Accessibility Monitoring and Reporting Team - joined GDS in 2020

I joined GDS’ Accessibility Monitoring and Reporting team in March 2020. I’d only worked in the office for 2 weeks, and had just about gotten to grips with finding my desk and the names of the people I’d be working with, when we were told we needed to work remotely. The transformation to a “remote GDS” was automatic and seamless: I felt as connected to my colleagues and as much as part of the team as ever - and that’s testament to GDS’s strong culture.

I’ve had the privilege of working on the accessibility auditing process from the beginning. In true GDS style, we’re iterating and improving things all the time, and I’ve been empowered to define the work, make the process more efficient and contribute solutions to challenges. I couldn’t feel more proud of what I’m doing, as I know it makes a real difference to the lives of millions of people who expect, and deserve, accessible public services.

As a team this is only just the beginning. There’s a long way to go and we're excited for the future. We want to make sure public sector organisations understand the benefits of digital accessibility, and take action to make their website work better for everyone.

Isabella McQuaker-Kajiwara, DDaT Capability Framework Support Officer and Product/Delivery Management Support, DDaT Capability Team - joined GDS in 2020

After taking part in the Summer Diversity Internship Programme earlier in 2020, I stayed on at GDS to work with the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Capability Team. In the short space of time I’ve been here, I’ve really benefited from agile ways of working. As a recent graduate, it’s been refreshing to be surrounded by colleagues that encourage you to use your own initiative on projects, work across teams and take on levels of responsibility you don’t always get at this point in your career.

As someone from a BAME background, I’ve also appreciated being in a department where Diversity and Inclusion is understood and where it underpins every aspect of our work. User needs are at the heart of each project, and it’s been fascinating to learn about the diversity of those needs across different parts of the population, and how digital government works to deliver services to address them.

Going forwards, I’m looking forward to seeing how Communities of Practice grow and develop within GDS and across government. One of my highlights has been exploring the range of different careers there are in the DDaT profession, and these communities are central to that!

Mohammed Shahjahan Ahmed - Service Standard and Manual Support Officer, Community-led Service Standard and Manual Team - joined GDS in 2020

I joined in 2020 through the Summer Diversity Internship Programme (SDIP), where I sat in GDS’s User-Centered Design team. Taking part in the SDIP was a great experience - I was given a high level of responsibility with projects, my team was so welcoming and supportive and I got to work across different workstreams and teams.

That led me to secure a role in the newly-formed Community-led Service Standard and Manual team. We work with people across GDS to create and follow guidance on designing and building public services. We also manage the regulatory guidance in the Service Standard and GOV.UK Service Manual.

As well as working on my own projects, I’m able to complete online courses and take part in shadowing opportunities across GDS. This gives me a better understanding of different career paths open to me in future, and of how my current work fits into the bigger picture of GDS, and Cabinet Office.

GDS represents my values - it’s a place which champions learning and development, and provides opportunities to explore interests. I’ve only been here a short time but I’m excited for what’s next! In particular, exploring data governance and technology policy to deepen my understanding of how policies are shaped, and the challenges around the management of data.

Join us

We hope that you’ll join in our celebrations on our social media profiles: you can find us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. If you have any fond memories of your time with GDS, share them with us on those social media profiles using #GDSTurns9, or here in the comments. We look forward to reminiscing with you, and working on our fantastic future!

The final episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Podcast in 2020 is a look back at what happened over the past 12 months at GDS. 

Host Vanessa Schneider puts Louise Harris, Creative and Channels Team Leader, and Kit Clark, Engagement Manager through their paces in our GDS ‘year in review’ quiz. We find out who has been paying attention and take time to reflect on a wide range of GDS successes in 2020 - and all without a single use of the word “unprecedented”.

Together the trio highlight work such as Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the GDS and DDaT response to coronavirus (COVID-19), and milestone celebrations from across our portfolio of products.

You can also (read about what GDS has been doing in the 2020 edition of A GDS Story.

I last blogged about our digital, data, and technology (DDaT) ambitions back in August, when we launched the recruitment competitions for the Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO) and the GDS Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

Summer now feels like a lifetime ago and much has happened since then. The response to coronavirus (COVID-19) has and continues to absorb our energies, with profound impact on our daily lives and communities. The UK has successfully transitioned out of the European Union and our economy and businesses adjust to a new normal. And we concluded a complex and dynamic Spending Review process that was both conservative and transformative; striking a fine balance between the Government’s ambitions and the uniquely challenging context we find ourselves in.

Digital, data and technology have and continue to be central to those endeavours - as with so much government business. And so I’m delighted to announce the new leadership for our Digital, Data, and Technology profession, and the appointments of Paul Willmott, Joanna Davinson, and Tom Read to the Cabinet Office. These 3 appointments, which the Prime Minister personally approved last week, embody the creativity, discipline, and inspiration that we expect from our profession.

Paul Willmott, Chief Digital Adviser at LEGO Brand Group and former Global Managing Partner and Founder of McKinsey Digital at McKinsey & Co., will join us as Chair of the newly established Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) for Government. Paul is one of the UK’s most talented and visionary digital leaders, with 30 years experience transforming businesses through digital means as an executive and advisor.

While recruiting for the GCDO, Paul was the person that everyone recommended as the best fit for the role. But at LEGO he already has a big, complex and exciting job, and he is committed to his employer. Nevertheless, Paul and I discussed with Ministers his reflections on what success should look like and how to get there, in order to help further focus our search. Like me, Ministers were impressed and, in the knowledge that sometimes we must flex our structures to fit the individual, we explored the potential for other ways to involve Paul, who is instinctively excited by the scale of the challenge and the opportunity for public service. And so we have created the CDDO, to which we are delighted to appoint Paul as Chair.

Situated in the Cabinet Office and reporting to me as Chief Operating Officer for the Civil Service, with ministerial oversight from Julia Lopez, Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office, the CDDO will fulfil the same function and responsibilities that we expected of the GCDO. The CDDO will eventually comprise a council of non-executive experts, appointed by the Minister for the Cabinet Office with the support of Paul, with deep practical experience across the range of DDaT disciplines, from automation to cyber security, cloud and data, product and service design. Collectively, the CDDO will provide professional leadership to the DDaT function, and collectively shape strategy and assure delivery for digital, data and technology across government.

In order to run the CDDO's operations day-to-day, and provide a strong hand on our cross-government activities, we have appointed Joanna Davinson as Executive Director for the next 18 months. Currently Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer at the Home Office, Joanna has 30 years experience of technology enabled transformation, and combines deep technical expertise with the understanding of how our system works, as well as the demands of and pressures on our largest and most complex delivery departments, to complement the external perspectives brought by Paul and Council members.

At a glance, the CDDO will:

• provide professional leadership and support to the DDaT leads of government departments and the wider government DDaT community
• offer expert advice and counsel to Ministers and Senior Civil Servants on the development and execution of digital, data, and technology policies and strategies
• build on the challenge and assurance process piloted at SR20 to establish and implement a year-round quarterly business review process that supports departments to deliver against their technology commitments 
• work with HM Treasury to optimise the government's approach to funding DDaT initiatives
• support the Government Commercial Function and Crown Commercial Services to reform technology procurement processes, and
• support GDS in the development and enforcement of technical standards and strategies to ensure efficient delivery and interoperability of systems.

More detail on CDDO will follow in the weeks ahead but I wanted you all to get the gist of it now.

I’m also excited to confirm that the Prime Minister has appointed Tom Read as GDS’s new CEO. Tom is an experienced leader with a strong background in technology and change. After a period in the banking and media sectors, Tom joined government in 2013 as Chief Technology Officer at the Cabinet Office. Since 2016, Tom has run the Ministry of Justice's (MOJ) 1,000-strong digital and technology operations; one of government’s largest and most complex IT estates, with a variety of essential frontline digital services, used by some of our most vulnerable citizens. This blend of experience at the centre and in the line, combined with his inclusive and progressive leadership style make him an excellent and inspiring choice as GDS’ CEO, and the perfect partner to Joanna as Executive Director at the CDDO, under Paul’s leadership as Chair.

Of course, I must acknowledge here the important contributions of Alison Pritchard and Fiona Deans, whose strong leadership of GDS over the previous 18 months ensures Tom inherits a strong foundation on which to build. Alison has since moved on to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) but I’m delighted to say that Fiona will stay on at GDS, returning to her role as Chief Operating Officer, when Tom starts at GDS next month.

Realising our digital ambitions will not be easy. The challenge is enormous, complex, and the scrutiny is intense. But together, I believe that Paul, Joanna and Tom will provide the inspiration, leadership and vision needed for GDS and the wider DDaT profession as we launch the next phase of digital delivery and transformation so essential to the modernisation and reform of government.

The whole of government has just been through a Spending Review (SR) process, which is where departments work with the Treasury to outline the work they want to do over the coming year (or sometimes multiple years) and to get the money to do this.

Spending Reviews are an opportunity for us to look to the future and to ensure that - among continuing technological and societal changes - digital government can continue to meet user needs.

At GDS, our role is to lead the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) function across government, working with cross-functional partners including the Government Security Group and the Government Commercial Function. At Spending Review time this means working with digital teams across departments to help them best make their case to the Treasury - and also to help Treasury teams understand where they need to invest money.

This is particularly important because we know there are foundational challenges that all departments face - issues like dealing with legacy technology, protecting against cybersecurity breaches and making the best use of the data they have.

These are common challenges where a cross-government approach can help to identify effective, efficient solutions. They are also areas where we can provide subject-matter expertise to help the Treasury identify priorities and to work out which projects to fund.

So, in the run-up to the Spending Review we worked with departments to assure and support their bids to the Treasury and to look for join-ups or areas of overlap. In doing this, we helped the Treasury prioritise over £600 million in funding over the next year to tackle vital legacy technology issues.

Here’s how we brought a cross-government approach to this year’s Spending Review.

Getting a cross-government view of digital

Working with a team comprising colleagues across Cabinet Office, GDS, the Government Security Group and the Government Commercial Service, we brought together a panel of experts from different areas to assess departmental Spending Review proposals. As well as DDaT experts this included specialists from the Commercial and Security functions and senior representatives from the Treasury and the Digital Economy Council. We wanted to ensure we could bring the right insight and fully support departments.

Following these sessions we worked with colleagues from across the Cabinet Office to analyse the findings and to present recommendations to Treasury teams, to help them work out where best to target funding. Doing this meant that -  for the first time - we were able to provide a cross-government view of digital work, spending and priorities.

Enabling targeted funding

As a result of this assurance process, and work that had gone into developing a cross-governmental approach to issues such as legacy technology before that, the Treasury was able to prioritise areas of critical risk and opportunity and target spending towards them. Working with GDS, the Treasury has also updated its business case guidance for agile digital and IT projects, which aims to help departments secure resources for the Discovery and Alpha phases of projects.

Through the SR the Treasury has allocated over £600 million across government towards addressing critical legacy technology issues. This includes an additional £268 million for HMRC, £232 million for the Home Office, £40 million for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and £64 million for the Department for Education.

This investment will reduce the risk of failures, improve efficiency and ultimately lead to a better service for the public. Treasury officials say it would not have been possible to identify all this legacy spend without the insights produced by the assurance process - which would have meant continued risk of failures and legacy technology continuing to block plans for digital transformation.

Our plans for ongoing assurance

The DDaT assurance process has demonstrated the value of expert advice and support to identify and articulate challenges across departments and to help the Treasury prioritise funding. We’ve been able to build a picture of DDaT proposals, priorities and spending across government.

Departments have told us that they found the support from the process extremely valuable. Tom Read, currently Chief Digital and Information Officer at MoJ and soon to join GDS as Chief Executive, who attended an assurance session, says: "The sessions had just the right balance of holding departments to account and supporting in a collaborative way. Although we’ve worked hard to highlight the importance of investing in digital, technology and security, the concerted effort from the Cabinet Office has been invaluable."

To build on this, GDS is now developing detailed proposals for what an ongoing assurance process of departmental priorities might look like, working with colleagues from across the DDaT, Security and Commercial functions, as well as the Treasury. Spending reviews are known events that we plan for constantly, especially when many DDaT projects run for multiple years, from design through to decommissioning.

We will develop our assurance process so that it is easy for departments and Treasury to take advantage of, and so that as many departments as possible can be involved.

We hope that, by doing this, we can ensure that DDaT insights and assurance become part of the normal operating model for Cabinet Office and the Treasury, and can ensure that the right challenges continue to get the right funding.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is a world leader in digital government and leads the UK’s digital transformation, which is built upon principles that reflect the role of digital in supporting an open society. The GDS International team has built partnerships across the globe with more than 30 countries who are keen to implement their own transformations.

GDS International is currently partnering with the governments of Rwanda and Colombia to support them to build their digital capability to deliver more efficient, transparent, secure and inclusive services for their citizens and, in the immediate term, help manage COVID-generated demands. This work is supported and funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), under their Partnership for Development programme.

Since the start of the global pandemic, digital has been the driving force for change in how we connect; colleagues in governments across the globe are working from home and building relationships through screens. As travel restrictions have remained in place, it’s changed how we approach our work in the Partnership for Development programme, moving from working in a country, to working entirely remotely.

Real change, remotely

Strong relationships are the foundation of our work with countries. To keep our relationships strong and the work moving forward, we’ve created regular, predictable ways of working together across different organisational cultures and timezones. It also means that we regularly reflect together on how we can improve the way we work.

Building and maintaining connections entirely online was not always easy. We’ve had to rethink and experiment with new techniques to find the best ways to help partners try out agile practices, such as user-story drafting, process mapping and creating virtual kan-ban boards. We’ve tried and tested new on-line tools to visualise our work in progress and collaborate together finding virtual replacements for post-its and whiteboards on Padlet, and Trello. We have also had to find new opportunities to talk about and do things like user mapping and user interviews so that we can integrate user research into all our delivery plans - all of which we envisage continuing even when travel is allowed again.

In the new year, we’re looking to expand our peer-to-peer partnership model with more countries.

Other areas of our work vary, depending on where partner governments are on their journeys and what their priorities are, as their most important challenges can be different. How and what we share is influenced by areas where the UK has been an early adopter or leader in digital government, and where we have been able to consolidate our breadth of expertise and experience.

Our work with Rwanda

One of our partners is the Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA), which leads the government’s digital transformation agenda, implementing government projects that help digitise services and the civil service in Rwanda.

Over this last year, we've been working with RISA to explore how we can best work together on digital transformation remotely. 

RISA is working in partnership with GDS to further our department’s digital goals and capabilities. Based on the GDS experience and knowledge base, the partnership is contributing to the development of not only useful processes and tools, but also skills and culture change that promote our digital ambitions to deliver innovative services to citizens and organizations we support.

Antoine Sebera, Government Chief Innovation Officer, Rwanda

The value of our work is shown in the strength of the partnerships that we are building and in what we are helping countries to deliver. These relationships have survived, and thrived, in a tumultuous year because we have focused on experimenting and adapting the way we work. Both our partners and ourselves have embraced new tools and techniques to help us adapt to these new operational contexts quickly.

Despite the logistical and operational challenges our goals remain the same: focusing on behaviour and culture change, capacity-building and developing a government’s digital foundations, while increasing transparency and accessibility for citizens.  The UK’s experience as an early leader in digital government and the breadth of Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) expertise means there continues to be a lot to share.

In our next blog posts, we’ll talk more about our work in Colombia, and our support for GOV.CO and Rwanda on User-Centred Design as an essential part of delivery and how it impacts their work and helps governments make better digital services.

Government as a Platform (GaaP) products make it easy for service teams to design and host services, send messages and take payments, making it quicker and cheaper to create the essential services the public need. This has been more important than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This month we’re celebrating milestones on 4 GaaP products:

• GOV.​UK Notify is now sending messages for 4,000 public service teams - from nearly 1,000 different organisations - right across the UK public sector;  in the last 12 months alone, we've sent more 1.6 billion messages to users of these services
• GOV.‌UK Pay has taken 7.1 million payments in 2020 (2.8 times more than in 2019), which helps more than 160 organisations across the public sector who use Pay
• GOV.UK PaaS recently connected its 100th organisation, and services are running and scaling on GOV.UK PaaS from more than 40 public bodies
• GOV.UK Design System just released a cookie page pattern and a cookie banner component, which helps services build their own banner to display information about cookies to secure user consent.

As Director of Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) Functional Strategy and Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for the GaaP Programme, it’s really exciting to be able to help shape the roadmaps and see how we’re meeting user needs, and hearing about the impacts and outcomes our products enable across the country and beyond.

Our GaaP product teams are lean, agile and inspiring. They work across the public sector from central to local governments constantly striving to improve their products. They are the unsung heroes: they aren’t the flashy websites or products you may know, but they underpin every department.

The “Build Once, Use Many” nature of GaaP products enables organisations to reduce wasted effort, increase pace and agility, increase value for money, reduce technical friction for increased interoperability and resilience, and most importantly create consistent and trustworthy user experiences.

As always with digital services, that means more 24/7 self-service and less load for public sector colleagues from shuffling back end paperwork, meaning they’re better able to serve the needs of our communities. We recognise that the emotive benefits are as valuable as practical and financial: making services simple to use is good for everyone’s wellbeing, civil service and public alike.

I am truly excited about the future for GaaP, providing solutions to common problems which we can deliver with pace to address even more user needs and create better outcomes. We value our partnerships and relationships across government, helping inform and deliver everything we do, and I know we can go further together.

The Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service - or “VPS” - was set up as part of the government’s response to coronavirus to provide support for clinically extremely vulnerable people who were advised to stay at home in England, otherwise known as “shielding”.

Between 23 March to 30 July 2020, the VPS facilitated more than 4.2 million deliveries of essential supplies (including food and medicine), enabled citizens to access support for basic health and care needs while shielding, and provided priority supermarket deliveries.

In this month’s episode of the GDS Podcast, we talk to some of the teams behind the impressive cross-government collaboration between the Government Digital Service (GDS), NHS Digital, Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

Listen to hear insider perspectives from:

• Sally Benson, Service Delivery at DWP
• Martin Woolhead, Acting Deputy Director for Food for the Vulnerable at Defra
• Kate Nicholls, Patient Contact & Data Team / Shielding Directorate at MHCLG
• Nick Tait, Service Owner / Shielded Vulnerable People Service at GDS

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.

The No.10 Innovation Fellowship Programme is a new flagship scheme run in partnership by Number 10 and the Government Digital Service (GDS) to attract top talent from the digital and tech sector into senior positions in government. Around 10 fellows will join teams across the Civil Service in solving some of the toughest challenges the government faces today through their technical expertise.

Fellows will be offered a 12-month contract at Deputy Director (SCS1) level, with the possibility of extension for a further 12 months. Fellows will help transform the delivery of public services and build solutions to some of the government's biggest challenges, by accelerating the adoption of cutting-edge technologies and approaches from across the private sector.

The programme has been developed by working closely with our advisory board of digital and tech leaders from across the public sector, who have provided feedback and guidance on the programme.

The final 5 fellowship projects came from an internal competitive bid process. We received 46 bids from a total of 26 different government departments and agencies.

The 2021 fellowship cohort will be working on important digital innovation projects with 5 central government departments across England. The projects are:

• Ministry of Defence - Serious games: using deep reinforcement learning to support planning for military operations
• Department for Education - Harnessing the potential of digital solutions in education
• Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office - Unlocking the power of data to address humanitarian crises
• Department of Health and Social Care - Designing high-impact data solutions in the fight against coronavirus (COVID-19) and beyond
• Ministry of Justice - Using digital solutions to better manage offenders in the community 

What similar programmes have achieved

The programme is modeled on the hugely successful US Presidential Innovation Fellowship scheme, which has attracted leading talent beyond the reach of most federal agencies. Hires have included the lead developer of Google Maps and the Co-Founder of the Earth Genome Project.

As part of this programme the US fellows have had significant impact. One project concerned the delivery of the healthcare.gov site, which has saved lives by improving access to healthcare records via the Blue Button Project. Another project enabled the Smithsonian Institute to digitalise over 137 million artifacts. This resulted in an end-to-end solution for creating digital records for historic files, enabling them to be more informative for researchers and members of the public.

Successful applicants of the scheme will have a potential career path for senior leadership roles in the Civil Service. Similar programmes in Canada and the US have seen over 50% of Fellows apply for senior leadership roles in government at the end of their fellowships and be successful.

The ideal applicants

We want to attract a range of diverse and talented individuals who are used to delivering at pace, have strong leadership skills and are innovative. We are interested in those who have excelled in their field and who have the power to influence those around them to do their best work.

In the selection process, we will pay close attention to the domain and technical expertise needed by departments, and also consider how teams of fellows will operate together.

Successful applicants will have excellent understanding and experience of applying cutting-edge approaches in one or more of the following areas:

• data science
• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• data engineering
• product management
• systems design
• user-centred design
• experimental or quasi-experimental methods
• software development

To see the full list of desirable skills please read the DDaT Capability Framework.

What it’s like to be an Innovation Fellow

Fellows will work in small teams on projects that are technologically challenging, highly impactful and deliverable within a year. During the application process, candidates will be matched with departments who are looking for their skill set in addressing high priority challenges.

The programme will also reserve a fifth of fellows’ time to participate in induction, coaching and networking events, and to pursue personal projects with other fellows where they can make an impact.

Next Steps

If you are interested in applying please visit the No. 10 Fellowship website for more information.

It’s now been a year since the Government Digital Service (GDS) transitioned to remote working in March 2020. We have been reflecting on the challenges GDS’s Internal Communications team has faced, what we have learnt and, most importantly, we’ve taken time to celebrate success during what has been a unique and challenging year!

We both joined GDS during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, meaning two-thirds of our current Internal Communications team has never worked from a GDS office. We had to learn about GDS’s culture, priorities and audience from our homes, while trying to keep colleagues engaged and navigate being new starters ourselves.

Once everyone at GDS began working remotely, it became a team priority to ensure staff engagement levels were retained. There was a concern that colleagues would become disconnected from departmental goals and culture as everyone was working independently from home.

Doing things differently during COVID-19

To address this, the Internal Communications team increased the frequency of all-staff meetings, now hosted virtually, to ensure senior leaders remained visible and engaged with GDS people, and everyone was kept informed about organisational updates. More frequent meetings also meant colleagues - particularly remote new starters - felt included and part of GDS.

The frequency of our ‘actions for line managers’ email was also increased from fortnightly to weekly. It was important to reinforce that a support structure existed for those who found themselves managing others in such unique circumstances.

Finally, the team focused more attention and dedicated channel space to highlighting the range of wellbeing and mental health support available at GDS, and the importance of managing a balance between work and personal life whilst remote working. During challenging times, there needed to be more openness and communication about these topics and resources.

The ‘new normal’

Once the new normal established itself, we switched our focus to thinking about a long-term strategy. Throughout December 2020, we conducted a review of GDS’s internal communication channels.

We used user research methods such as virtual workshops and surveys and looked at all available analytics, including email opens, all staff meeting attendance and internal video views. This helped us to understand how our colleagues felt, and how they wanted to be communicated with and ensured we were not relying solely on ad hoc feedback when planning new strategies.

We hosted interactive sessions in which colleagues had a safe space to provide honest feedback on what they liked or did not like about how we were communicating with them, how they thought we could improve, and what they required from the team more generally. Simultaneously, we ran an all staff survey that asked similar questions to the interactive sessions so those who could not attend could also offer their views.

The virtual workshop sessions gave us the opportunity to be creative with user research methods. Usually, we would have held sessions in an office space with sticky notes and small group discussions. Instead we used virtual collaboration boards to gather feedback that could be collated anonymously. We also used elements from hackathons to get creative ideas on how to solve key communications issues from our users.

The workshop sessions gave us richer qualitative feedback, whereas the data collected from the all staff survey was a mix of qualitative and quantitative. Feedback from both the workshops and the survey was collated and themed by channel, sentiment, and topic. From this we created a set of core, overarching insights into what employees wanted from Internal Communications, a proposed strategy for each channel to meet user needs going forward, and a set of changes to implement and test.

The review demonstrated how our work was already making an impact, and where our efforts need to be refocused. In 2020 we increased the open rates of weekly all staff emails from 53% in the summer to 76% by the end of the year. The industry standard is 43% (source: Mailchimp). Data from the review also showed us that colleagues value these weekly emails and the information they contain. Combined, this insight has given us confidence in our approach.

An example of how we refocused our efforts is with the removal of monthly senior leader videos. Viewing figures already showed low engagement levels: on average less than 10% of our audience watched them. Qualitative channel review insight supported this data, and we concluded that introducing more frequent interactive Q&A sessions with our senior leaders would be a better use of the team’s time and energy and be more engaging for staff.

Where we’re going next

In 2021 we are continuing to use the insight from the review to improve our channels using an iterative test-and-learn approach, listening and learning from our colleagues as we make changes to channels and content. GDS’s offices in Bristol and Manchester mean we will need to ensure connectivity between colleagues is maintained between offices, even after COVID-19 restrictions ease.

The pandemic has been a challenging and interesting time to start working in internal communications. The whole team is really proud of our work to make user-centred changes to GDS’s internal communications approach, and keep a focus on employee engagement during this unprecedented time.

If you have any questions please leave a comment so we can get in touch!

On 10 February 2021, the Government Digital Service (GDS) International team collaborated with the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to host a virtual conference for European public sector leaders. “Public Sector Leadership in a Time of Digital Transformation” was attended by more than 70 senior public officials across 14 countries.

The conference focused on digital maturity and was opened by FCDO Director of Europe, Sarah Taylor. The opening keynote was given by Chris Ferguson, Director of GDS’s National, International, Research, Service Design and Assurance and DDaT COVID-19 Hub.

Chris shared his experience of what it takes to create and sustain a resilient digital estate. Maturity markers such as digital by design, leadership buy-in and governance, institutional funding and capacity were then explored further in a series of case study presentations and panel discussions.

Doing digital differently

A highlight of the event was a case study presented by a former GDS colleague, Janet Hughes, now Programme Director at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Janet gave a fascinating insight into how Defra co-designs services in partnership with farmers, to ensure they are user-centered and fit for the digital age.

Janet was candid about the need to be ambitious, going beyond user-centred design principles to co-design services in partnership with the users themselves, using digital ways of working to achieve this.

Digital ways of working, thinking and operating should be applied to everything you do. “It’s not just about doing the same things more simply, more clearly and more quickly - it should be doing completely different things: re-imagining the way government operates and does things for the public… that are fit for the digital age.”

Janet was followed by guest speaker Janne Viskari, Director General of Finland’s Digital and Population Data Services Agency. Janne shared how Finland approaches digital transformation as a process, rather than a project and maps services to life stages: “It’s about making life better using digital tools.”

Increasing skills; reducing legacy IT

The middle session of the conference focused on 2 key digital transformation challenges: building digital capability and tackling legacy IT.

Chad Bond, Deputy Director of Standards and Assurance at GDS, spoke about the scale and risk of the UK’s legacy infrastructure and the long-term strategic funding models needed in order to make strategic decisions.

“Legacy presents a critical security challenge to government and critical national infrastructure, as well as acting as a barrier to transformation and modernisation.”

Director of Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Functional Strategy Rox Heaton then made the case for building DDaT capability within the public sector. She argued that without this, organisations pay a premium for consultants and external experts, lose organisational knowledge and ultimately become outdated and ineffective. Introducing a pay framework in the UK has already provided financial savings but perhaps more importantly led to greater retention and capability.

Government as a platform (GaaP)

The final session of the day was a GaaP panel discussion chaired by Rox Heaton and supported by Ben Welby, Digital Policy Analyst from the OECD; Pete Herlihy, Lead Product Manager for GOV.UK Notify; and Anna Eriksson, Director-General for the National Agency for Digital Government in Sweden.

Rox started by defining what GaaP meant to her (“it’s the ultimate in build once, use many”) before asking the same of panelists. Anna felt an important element of GaaP was moving from vertical to horizontal ways of thinking. Ben saw it as bringing everything together “to enable service teams to focus on the needs of their users”.

Pete highlighted the use of GaaP services in the UK during the pandemic and how this meant being able to build services “in hours and days” rather than months. He argued that having GaaP products “isn’t a luxury any more, it’s a necessity.”

Networking in a virtual world

In between sessions, delegates were invited to network and swap in-country experiences on small virtual tables. Discussions were facilitated by GDS experts in digital by design, capability-building, GaaP, global procurement reform and legacy IT.

An extract from the feedback survey.

Poll results and takeaways

The conference ended with a survey of senior leaders, who acknowledged that “senior leadership buy-in and appropriate governance” is one of the biggest blockers to digital transformation. Capability-building, institutional funding and being data-driven were other key areas delegates voted as hard to achieve.

The conference was closed by Trisha Doyle, Head of Product and Proposition for GDS International. Trisha explained that GDS International’s core mission is to help governments to do digital government better for all citizens. At GDS International we believe that good digital government means the provision of information and services that are inclusive, transparent, sustainable and delivers on users’ needs.