There’s been a fair amount of speculation as to who else would join the supplier framework for Identity Assurance. We are happy to confirm that the eighth successful supplier is PayPal.

As a founder member of the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) which provides a structured conversation between the Cabinet Office on behalf of the UK Government and a market of providers committed to interoperability, PayPal adds their high profile and expertise in the online transacting space. They join the recently announced suppliers that includes The Post Office, Cassidian, Digidentity, Experian, Ingeus, Mydex, and Verizon.

Of course, this is just the beginning of the process. The real work of realising our ambitions for identity assurance services can now begin. We’re working closely with departments to develop an identity assurance process that can be adapted and reused right across government, benefiting users and and service providers alike with a simpler, faster, better and safer way to access and transact with government services.

Francis Maude, Minister for Cabinet Office: “Governments talk a lot about delivering value for taxpayers. Yet most of the time they aren’t very clear about what they mean. Now taxpayers can judge value for themselves.” Today the Cabinet Office has published an update to the Transactions Explorer tool. This now includes data on the cost per transaction for 44 of the biggest services the Government offers its citizens.

Taken together, there are over a billion transactions through these 44 services every single year. That’s over 88% of the transactions handled by central government. We now know that these services cost over £2 billion a year to run.

Making this data public is a big step forward for transparency. The UK Government has never done anything like this before. And as far as we know, no other country systematically tells its citizens how much they pay for the services they use – services like paying car tax, applying for a passport, or filing a business’s annual returns. This data sets a baseline for service performance. And the public can, and should, judge our progress on improving against this baseline.

It is no coincidence that those who have made the biggest strides online have some of the lowest costs. Doing things digitally is simpler, better, faster, and cheaper. Popular online services, such as driving test bookings, have already reaped some of the benefits gained by moving away from expensive paper and phone based processes.

We’re now at the beginning of a radical transformation of some of government’s biggest services. The digital strategies published last month were a statement of ambition shared by the whole of government to grasp the web’s potential for delivering services in a more effective and more efficient way.

This is no small task, and there is a long way to go. The huge range in service costs shown in the Transactions Explorer, and the missing data points in some services, illustrates the scale and diversity of this challenge. Some will have further to travel than others. But by shining the sunlight of openness and transparency on service performance as we have today, the users of government services will be in a stronger position than ever to hold their public servants to account as this transformation unfolds.

Last July, GDS published a full list of all the transactional services that the Government offers to citizens and business, along with their annual volume of activity. It was the first time the Government had ever done this.

Today, we released an updated version of the Transactions Explorer, and with it, another first. Data on cost per transaction – how much it costs the Government to deliver each individual use of a service – has been collected and published for 44 of the biggest public services.

One of the most fascinating things revealed by the information in our first Transactions Explorer release last year was the sheer range of things the Government does. From paying tax to arranging burials at sea, the tool showed that citizens interact with public servants in a multitude of ways.

That diversity is reflected again in the data we’ve published today. Across the biggest services in Government, the cost of a single transaction ranges from over £700 to as little as five pence. Such big variations seem strange, until you consider the difference between applying for a passport, with all the security checks and sophisticated printing that entails, and submitting a standard tax form.

Transactional services provided by the DfT, its agencies and sponsored public bodies

But complexity doesn’t tell the whole story. Digital is a big part of it too. Services where transactions are completed using digital channels generally cost much less – for example, booking a driving test costs £6.62 by post, £4.11 by telephone, but just £0.22 online.

Making the collection of this data easier is a big priority for us. We are continuing to develop the Performance Platform, turning it from a tool to display data on GOV.UK into a platform that gives Departments the ability to monitor the performance of their digital services in real time. We’ll be testing this with some of the transformation projects that were trailed in the digital strategies published last month.

Measuring service performance is important, but actively using that information to drive decisions is essential. The digital by default service standard that we are launching later this year will put a service’s ability to measure and track performance at its heart. It’s all part of data driven design, and iteratively improving services based on user feedback.

And as ever, we’re interested in your thoughts on how to improve the presentation of this data, and what else you think it would be helpful to see. Please email us, or comment below.

Another busy week at GDS, including the release of the Transactions Explorer and the announcement of Paypal as the eighth supplier for the Identity Assurance programme.

We’ve also seen visits from the RPA and from the Minister for Civil Society Nick Hurd among others.

Just got back from taking photos at today’s Sprint 13 conference, so what was it like? Think of the famous Hokusai wave and you’ll get a sense of the energy that was unleashed at Queen Elizabeth Conference Hall today…

It was a complex event with high profile speakers like Martha Lane Fox and Francis Maude in a large conference hall, 6 break out workshops in smaller rooms (to run concurrently), registration, refreshments area, not to mention the beautiful snowscape of Big Ben in the distance.

So, four hours to cover a dozen speeches, six workshops and capture the feel of the event. These should give you a sense of how it went. We captured loads of video of every workshop and talk, and we’ll be sharing these with you as soon as they are through the editing process hopefully early next week.

Big Ben snow view

GDS team reception

Martha Lane Fox arrives at reception

Rachel Neaman in conversation

Francis Maude and Martha Lane Fox before speaking

Martha’s opening speech

Francis Maude’s speech

Antonio Romeo of MoJ

Martha does Q&A with Ian Trenholm

Sprint 13 logo and people

Emer Coleman social media workshop

Mark O’Neill workshop on digital delivery

Amanda Derrick workshop on identity assurance

Alice Newton workshop on MoJ’s ‘You be the judge’

Audience

Stephen Kelly’s closing speech

Before Christmas, Ben Terrett asked the design team to think of one thing we’d like to change on GOV.UK. My choice was easy; add high resolution graphics to the site so it looks better on high pixel density devices.

Rather than write a report about what I’d like to change, I took the opportunity to get going and actually implement hi-res icons and logos on GOV.UK.

I came across Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent’s hidpi Sass mixin in a talk given by John Clevely from BBC News here at GDS. I decided to approach the solution using media queries. I started with making use of CSS Trick’s future resilient Retina display media query:

@mixin device-pixel-ratio($ratio: 2) {
  @media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: $ratio),
  only screen and (min--moz-device-pixel-ratio: $ratio),
  only screen and ( -o-min-device-pixel-ratio: #{($ratio*10)}/10),
  only screen and ( min-device-pixel-ratio: $ratio),
  only screen and ( min-resolution: #{($ratio*96)}dpi),
  only screen and ( min-resolution: #{$ratio}dppx) {
    @content;
  }
}

At the moment the minimum pixel ratio is set to 2. This means that it only targets Apple’s Retina devices and a few high density Android handsets including the Google Galaxy Nexus, Google Nexus 4, Google Nexus 10 and Samsung Galaxy S III. There are a handful of Android devices with 1.3–1.5 ratio screens, but unfortunately I can’t get hold of any of these devices at the moment to test the site on.

We’re currently using two separate image files, one normal sized and one double sized. Spriting images isn’t really practical with our current design and mark-up because the elements with background image icons are flexible in size. Duplicate images are not being downloaded on hi-dpi iPhones or Androids. Further testing will reveal if images are being downloaded unnecessarily on other hi-dpi devices.

Google Analytics doesn’t record pixel density ratio by default so we set up a custom variable and we gathered a few days worth of data. This has given us some interesting results.

Looking at all the devices that report pixel-density-ratio, over 25% have a ratio greater than one, which is 13% of all traffic. This is a surprisingly high percentage.

Strangely there are a few devices reporting a ratio of less than one, including the Samsung Galaxy Y. I can’t figure out if this is a bug or not, because it means that each physical pixel on the device has to show information about more than one pixel, which is in fact the equivalent of showing a zoomed out image.

We’ll keep an eye on the statistics and see how this develops over time.

It’s been cold and snowy. The weather has impacted on people’s lives across the UK, but has it affected people’s interaction with GOV.UK? Tara Stockford and I did some quick analysis of traffic and trends over the last couple of weeks.

Visitors

Just under 2 million unique visitors came to GOV.UK during 18 – 20 January, a slight drop of 2.4% on the weekend previously. But over the three day period, Friday and Saturday had fewer visitors than the week before, while Sunday had 4.6% more.

Searching for…

Two-thirds of visits to GOV.UK over the last weekend came from searches on Google, Bing etc. Here are the top 10 most searched for keywords or phrases:

The previous week, the top weather related keyword was ‘cold weather payment’ at 34th with 3,915 visits.

Doing some deeper analysis on last weekend, there were 2,931 different keywords that included ‘weather’, accounting for 2.5% of all visits to GOV.UK. Here are the top 20 keywords:

Interestingly GOV.UK received relatively little search traffic for school closures or travel.

Most visited pages

However, looking at the page views for content with a ‘winter’ theme over the two weekends the picture is more subtle:

In addition to sharp increases in page views for the Cold Weather Payment guide, the Winter Fuel Payment, Practical driving test cancellations, Check school closures and other weather related travel content all saw large growth in page views.

Of course, GOV.UK is now the home for a number of government departments and the snowy weather has had an impact on Inside Government too. There has been an increase in visits to /government/publications/guidance-on-community-action-during-severe-weather and /government/news/travel-disruption-across-uk

Site searches

In GOV.UK site search, by far the highest rising search term was ‘cold weather payments’ or ‘cold weather payment’, with a combined total of 4,404 searches last weekend, compared to just 505 the previous weekend.

There were a further 417 searches for just ‘cold weather’; almost all of these users clicked on ‘Cold Weather Payment’ at the top of the search results, so we’re satisfied that they’re finding what they wanted.

Site searches for ‘school closures’, and longer-tail phrases containing that term (such as ‘school closures in wolverhampton’), shot up to 1,113 compared to just 8 the weekend before. But in the search results for just ‘schools’ or ‘school’ (up to 159 from 38), our school closures page was further down the list where users might miss it, so we’ve temporarily promoted it to appear at the top.

When people searched for terms containing ‘snow’ (724 compared to 53 the previous weekend), there were only nine pages where the word ‘snow’ actually appears in the content. We’ve made some changes to help users also find related results about bad weather, disrupted services and winter payments, even if they don’t explicitly mention snow.

Similarly, we’ve tweaked the results for terms such as ‘bad weather’, ‘winter weather’ and ‘heating’ to make sure that users can find information on heating bills and energy-saving improvements as well as practical information about local services. For broad terms like these, we’re less sure what people are looking for, so we’ve aimed for a selection of the most relevant and popular results.

We’ve also spotted some new misspellings in the GOV.UK search logs such as ‘school closers’, ‘wether’ and ‘wheather’, so we’ve added them to our custom spelling list to ensure that users still get relevant results.

We are pleased to welcome the Department of Energy & Climate Change onto the Inside Government section of GOV.UK.

Alongside DECC, we welcome two other bodies, the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group and the Nuclear Liabilities Financing Assurance Board.

The latest to the party

These three are the latest government organisations to transition to GOV.UK as part of a process which will see around 300 departments and agencies joining the site by April 2014.

With DECC, Fuel Poverty Advisory Group and the Nuclear Liabilities Financing Assurance Board included, there are now 7 ministerial departments and 13 other organisations on the Inside Government.

Getting busy in here

Although we’ve been releasing features in every sprint, when organisations transition they often create a larger than usual wave of new functionality and UI tweaks. Included this time are bulk uploading of attachments, the ability to replace attachments without changing the previous URL and new attachment types (ArcGIS and KML). These features particularly benefit DECC but will also be of use to current and future organisations on Inside Government. For more regular updates on our releases, you can follow activity on our Tumblr blog, Inside Inside Government.

The arrival of DECC also means a hike in content and users for Inside Government. For example, DECC leads on 8 policies and contributes to a further 11. As the content grows, we will be working hard to improve the performance of site search and filtered document lists: lots of discussion and activity behind the scenes on that and you can expect improvements soon.

Next up
The next department to transition in January will be the Scotland Office. We’ll be posting more details on that and subsequent launches in due course.

Mike Bracken sums up this week’s Sprint 13 showcase of digital work across Government, with keynote speeches from Francis Maude, Martha Lane Fox and Stephen Kelly setting the agenda for 400 days of digital service delivery. The Department of Energy and Climate Change became the 7th department on GOV.UK. Internet pioneer Tim Bray visited GDS .

Stephen Kelly, Chief Operating Officer for Government, writes about SPRINT 13.

Last week I was delighted to participate in SPRINT 13 the cross government digital event organized by GDS. It was great to see so many colleagues from all over the civil service enthused about our ambitious digital agenda. We have 400 days to deliver a radical transformation of government, to implement the government digital strategy and to deliver on the ambitions of the Civil Service Reform Plan.

At SPRINT 13 it was rewarding to see where departments are on their journey and to hear our digital leaders talk about the need to deliver with ‘audacious speed’. This is not a phrase one might have expected to hear from an official in the past but it’s indicative of the changes that are taking place right across the civil service.

This message is not going unnoticed, and SPRINT 13 received plenty of positive media coverage including this interview by Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, with Minister Francis Maude. You can read all media coverage here.

SPRINT 13 was full of inspirational presentations and talks and this short video preview will give you a bit of insight into the event. We will be tweeting out links from @GDSteam as we release further content in the coming week.

GOV.UK provides government with several ways to promote and support its marketing campaigns. I wanted to give you a bit of background on what the guidelines are, and how they’re being used.

Keep Calm And Carry On

Seventy years ago, the UK’s Ministry of Information produced this poster to be deployed in the event of an invasion. It resurfaced relatively recently when a bookseller found it in a pile of books, beginning its ascent into ubiquity (including GDS’s own tribute, below).

After the war, government departments continued to find new and varied ways in which to campaign, and sometimes to create changes in social behaviour. For example, the DfT’s THINK! campaign helped change attitudes to seatbelt safety and drink driving.

And although the government continues to use traditional media for its campaigning (it’s hard to move at the moment without seeing a twenty-foot high poster-people reminding you to fill in your tax return), it is also taking advantage of the possibilities of digital media.

Taking campaigns to where people already are

Just a glimpse at the digital engagement case studies featured on Helpful Technology will demonstrate the variety of digital campaigning and engagement approaches taken by government at national and local levels.

HMRC used Flickr to post mugshots of tax evaders. The Intellectual Property Office linked up with Dragon’s Den to talk about copyright issues. And the Driving Standards Agency (DSA) is running a cross-platform campaign on the Highway Code, generating more than 13,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook and 15,000 Twitter followers.

What do many of the most successful examples have in common?

Well, they’re using digital technology to take the campaigns out to where people already are – to Facebook, to Channel 4, to the NME website.

Often, this gives people more time and space to engage properly with an issue, on their own terms and in their own language, rather than expecting them to visit a government website.

So what’s the role of GOV.UK?

GOV.UK is – as you may have spotted – a fairly straightforward website. It aims to make it as easy as possible for people to access government services, and understand their rights and obligations.

So although this may not make GOV.UK the best place from which to try and change how people behave, it can however be useful if the campaign goal is to keep people clearly informed – for example, about government services or changes to the law.

We’re working with departments to make the most of this.

A good case in point is DWP’s Workplace Pensions campaign. You may have seen the TV adverts about it – the biggest change to pensions in a generation.

This is where we come in. We provide a campaign landing page, which can be promoted in the TV ads, and which uses the same images and messages. In time, we’ll also be promoting pages like this through the site’s navigation, while taking care not to interrupt any core user journeys.

When we do this, we’ll also want to ensure our approach is working – so for every campaign page we host, we’ll measure and report on traffic. We’ll also provide space to host background material about the campaign in GOV.UK’s Inside Government section, and space for departments to communicate with stakeholders.

Cabinet Office and campaign approvals

Finally, we’ve been working closely with the Cabinet Office’s Marketing and Advertising team to ensure that when government does deliver a digital campaign, it does so as efficiently as possible.

As part of this, we’ve just drawn up some more detailed guidance for government departments on the GOV.UK campaigns offer – civil servants can find this over on the Government Communications Network website (you’ll need to register to get access to the document).

This morning the Scotland Office became the eighth ministerial department to move its corporate publishing over to the Inside Government section of GOV.UK.

Today’s release also introduces a new topic to bring all government content about Scotland into a single place, and three policy pages setting out the government’s goals for Scotland in clearer terms than ever before:

• Facilitating a legal, fair and decisive referendum in Scotland
• Informing the debate on Scotland’s constitutional future
• Maintaining and strengthening the Scottish devolution settlement

You can expect more policies to appear in the Scotland topic as a further 300+ organisations move their content across to GOV.UK between now and April 2014.

Next up

In February we turn our attention to DCMS, our own department the Cabinet Office, and the corporate profile of HMRC.

If that wasn’t enough, we’re also building the new Worldwide section of Inside Government, where international content from FCO, DFID, MOD, UKTI and others will come together to show what the UK government is saying and doing all around the world. It will also include content for foreign nationals in numerous languages.

At GDS we realise how important it is to build government services by understanding the needs of the people who use them. One of the most useful ways of doing this is by testing products with end users, and remote user testing is one method we use to do this at scale.

As detailed in other blog posts remote user testing is conducted by asking users to complete a number of tasks online, with their actions being recorded by a bespoke piece of software. This gives us task success rates, time to complete task, and common paths that people take through the site.

This method has proved really useful for testing Inside Government, particularly when used in conjunction with traditional face-to-face lab testing.

The latest round of remote testing involved 400 online participants completing five tasks on the latest release of Inside Government. The tasks that they were asked to complete were similar to those asked in the previous round, and included finding policy information, consultation information, department information, ministerial information, and contact information.

What did we find?

From this latest round of testing we found several improvements;

• task completion is a minute faster than the previous testing in April 2012
• average task completion is similar to previous round in April 2012 (64% vs. 60%), but…

Some tasks were achieved with greater success, namely

• policy information was found more easily (77% vs 64%)
• ministerial information was found more easily (54% vs 33%)
• agency or department contact details were found more easily (83% vs 69%)
• information on the homepage was easy to digest, and links to other content widely used

Users did, however, struggle to find consultations on the site. Users didn’t understand where to start looking, or under what navigation heading it would be listed. This issue was also picked up in the face-to-face lab testing, so it was quickly addressed by the product team and a solution is now undergoing further testing.

Remote usability testing has proved to be really useful at GDS. We can test products quickly, easily, and cheaply with a large number of potential users, and findings can be given to the product teams quickly.

Using this method of testing on Inside Government alongside agile working methods has really helped us understand how the product has improved – while also indicating where further work is needed to make it better for users.

The work GDS is doing is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building better digital services. Roger Oldham, Deputy Director, Digital Services at the Ministry of Justice writes about what they’re up to, and how you can help them do it.

Digital service design is all about people. Every year 9 million people come into contact with the justice system, using some of the most complex services in government. It’s our job to make them easier to access, simpler to use and better value for the taxpayer.

And how we achieve that is about people too.

We’re looking for talented developers, tech archs, interaction designers, product managers, content designers and agile delivery managers to help us deliver world class digital services.

Our new Digital Services Division is leading a digital transformation that touches every part of the department: 65,000 staff, 133 prisons, 500 courts and tribunals, 45 public bodies, and millions of interactions with users. With an active digital leader on our departmental board, we’re committed to digital by default right at the top.

It’s hard to overstate how radical this idea really is in changing our whole approach to services: designing them around the user and delivering them online – and only online – wherever possible. Our digital strategy sets out how we’re planning to do it, and we’ll be reporting regularly about our progress on our new blog.

We’re working closely with GDS and a wide range of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to make this happen. But a commitment on this scale demands hands-on capability within our department.

This is an exciting time, and big challenges lie ahead, but we’re starting to put a team in place to meet those challenges. Please get in touch if you’re interested in joining us. You can contact us at digital@justice.gsi.gov.uk

University of Salford student Andrew Langhorn recently got in touch with us to chat about his dissertation on the UK government’s approach to digital. We asked him to write a few words about what it’s like to study a live service like GOV.UK.

Along with ‘we’re out of beer’, ‘9am lectures’ and a handful of other equally worrying phrases, the word ‘dissertation’ strikes fear into the hearts of many university students each year. In the past the concept of ‘online service delivery’ probably sparked a similar fear in the heart of many governments. I set out to try to tackle both simultaneously, by writing my dissertation on digital government in the UK.

Whilst my friends had their noses deep inside books about the Second World War, or Marx and his Communist manifesto, I was subscribing to RSS feeds, reading blogs, and actively researching government online services.

White papers, speeches and other publications form the basis of e-government theories and initiatives. After a few days of research, I found Martha Lane Fox’s somewhat legendary report on Directgov. I was excited to learn that her ideas hadn’t just been left on the back-burner, but in fact they’d been implemented by the Government Digital Service (GDS).

So far, so good, you’re thinking? Largely, yes. One of the greatest things about GDS is its commitment to work openly, and to collaborate with colleagues across Whitehall and in the private sector. But for someone writing their dissertation, openness and honesty come at a price; constant revision and rewriting.

When I started my research, the 2010 Government ICT Strategy was the most up to date piece of strategic information I could find. So, when the Government digital strategy was published, followed by the publication of the departmental digital strategies, I had to rewrite my 7,500 word draft dissertation.

When I first started writing, transactional data was also rather limited. I had to use a BBC News article and the results of a SOCITM study for the Cabinet Office published in 2012. Since then the release of the Magna Charta, the Transactions Explorer, and the Digital Efficiency Report have all shed new light on this area, although unfortunately not quite in time for my dissertation deadline.

It’s odd to think that the dissertation I finished writing only a few weeks ago is probably on it’s deathbed already – I suspect that within a year it will be largely out of date. Still it was a incredibly interesting project.

However every cloud has a silver lining. So, whilst I’ve been constantly rewriting entire paragraphs and pages, I’ve learnt a lot about the direction of digital government.

On reflection, you could say that in true GDS style, my work is iterative. In the last few weeks alone more progress has been made inside and outside GDS. Had I been starting my dissertation today I would have written about these changes but I’ll leave that for others to do.

I’m happy I covered the landscape as it was. And I’m pleased it’s continuing to evolve.

All of the talks and all of the workshops from SPRINT 13 are now available online. Filmed live at the event on 21 January, they’re a celebration of the best digital work in government today.

SPRINT13 set the ambitious goal of transforming services over the next 400 days.

Francis Maude’s opening speech set the stage, while Stephen Kelly’s closing remarks outlined the approach government will be taking to transform digital services.

In between we had talks from Antonia Romeo about digital innovation at the Ministry of Justice and Brian Etheridge about the Department for Transport’s approach to digital partnerships and leadership.

Martha Lane Fox was a brilliant host for the day’s events, and her illuminating discussion with Ian Trenholm revealed more about Digital leadership and digital innovation at DEFRA.

Meanwhile, you can read more about the workshops held throughout the day on the SPRINT13 event page.

They can’t tell the whole story but digital analytics are a useful and readily available source of information about how people are interacting with the GOV.UK platform and content.

Like other GOV.UK teams, Inside Government uses the insights from digital analytics to monitor performance. Using this insight we can see where we need to focus our efforts to ensure that everything is running smoothly.

The GOV.UK performance dashboard is a useful way to track traffic patterns. Following on from an earlier post in the weeks following Inside Government’s launch on 15 November 2012, we wanted to share some more figures and pick out a few trends.

Cross site traffic
As of 30 January 2013, the Inside Government section of GOV.UK has grown from 5 government organisations at launch, to 21 in a three month period. Eight of these  are ministerial departments.

The site has had 3.2 million visits from 1.6 million unique visitors, which is about 4% of the overall traffic to GOV.UK. Inside Government users have viewed 7,738,445 pages, looked at approximately 2 pages per visit and spent an average of 2 minutes and 13 seconds on the site each visit.

Forty-five per cent of traffic to Inside Government comes via search, with 38% coming from referrals and the remaining 17% is direct. In terms of referrals from social networks, Facebook accounts for approximately 45% of traffic, as does Twitter.

Views on the departments
It has been interesting to see how the page views break down across the departments. Note: some of these organisations have joined Inside Government more recently than others:

• AGO –  73,545 page views 
• BIS - 1,150,573
• DCLG - 2,102,537
• DECC - 425,814
• DFT - 1,819,176
• FCO - 784,136
• MOD - 1,685,224
• Scotland Office - 5,281

To get this organisational breakdown, we use ‘custom variables’ which we’ll be blogging about soon.

Much in demand
In terms of page popularity, the top 10 are all ‘top level’ pages:

1. /government/publications - 582,518 page views
2. /government/organisations/ministry-of-defence - 486,168
3. /government/organisations/department-for-communities-and-local-government - 333,406
4. /government/organisations/driving-standards-agency - 322,948
5. /government/announcements - 258,688
6. /government/organisations - 224,648
7. /government/organisations/department-for-transport - 221,048
8. /government - 177,290
9. /government/policies - 163,787
10. /government/organisations/department-for-business-innovation-skills - 158,730

With the Publications index page featuring so highly, we thought it would be interesting to identify the top 10 most visited publications, which are:

1. /government/publications/hs2-revised-line-of-route-maps - 91,197 page views
2. /government/publications/high-speed-rail-investing-in-britains-future-phase-two-the-route-to-leeds-manchester-and-beyond - 25,702
3. /government/publications/national-planning-policy-framework–2 - 23,770
4. /government/publications/50-ways-to-save-examples-of-sensible-savings-in-local-government - 19,790
5. /government/publications/improving-the-energy-efficiency-of-our-buildings - 18,183
6. /government/publications/defence-commercial-graduate-programme-brochure - 16,984
7. /government/publications/traffic-signs-manual - 14,695
8. /government/publications/foreign-embassies-in-the-uk - 14,643
9. /government/publications/english-indices-of-deprivation-2010 - 13,288
10. /government/publications/service-inquiry-report-into-the-accident-involving-red-arrows-hawk-t-mk1-xx179-on-20-august-2011 - 12,565

The list of publications shows how varied the content on Inside Government is, and it’s also an excellent illustration of how wide our audience is.

While there are frequently visited and popular content types on Inside Government, the site also plays an important role when government makes, or is involved in, any topical or major announcements.

For example, on 28 January 2013 Inside Government had its busiest day yet. Over the course of one day the ‘HS2 phase two initial preferred route plan and profile maps‘ received 483,511 page views. This was the second most viewed page on GOV.UK that day (Find a job with Universal Jobmatch was the most viewed page).

These are still early days; Inside Government isn’t even 100 days old. We’re encouraged by what we’re seeing but we’re not celebrating. We are watching the data and carefully considering what it means as we continue to focus on the exciting transition of the remaining 16 departments.

I’ve just completed a lightning tour of four UK cities. I’ve been speaking, and more importantly listening, to some of the leading small and medium-sized (SME) business technology companies in the UK.

Doing business with central government has often proved to be a very frustrating experience for SMEs. The admin, hassle and general form filling required – even before you get to the stage of spending precious fee-earning resources on writing a competitive bid – has long meant that doing business with government has been too expensive for our most innovative SMEs.

Stephen Allott – the Crown Representative for SMEs – and I took ourselves out of London to listen to business. We ran roadshows to explain how it’s now easier to do business with government and how the government has changed its approach. And we made it clear how to win government business.

Stephen also made sure everyone knew about the tools we use to publicise upcoming contracts (Contracts Finder) and to whistle-blow if you feel you have been unfairly shut out of a procurement (Mystery Shopper).

In two days we met with over 250 businesses in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and finally Edinburgh. We exploded some myths, explained the government’s digital strategy and learnt how we can help businesses to bring new capabilities to government, especially digital ones.

It was heartening to hear how companies had used the G-Cloud to win business, but also frustrating to hear of stories of bureaucracy getting in the way. Yet the overwhelming theme was positive – there is so much talent out there.

A huge thanks to the local chambers of commerce, and to Albert Ellis at Harvey Nash for helping us reach so many technology-related businesses so quickly.

Engaging before procuring

We also introduced the new premarket engagement workshops we’re running in the Cabinet Office. Rather than just talk about early engagement, we are trialling how we can generate better solutions by using workshops. We’re running workshops on the NHS e-referrals programme and the NHS Integrated Customer Services Platform, both of which will be live procurements in the near future.

At these workshops we will explain the user need and the departmental ambition in response to that need. Then we’ll work with leading technology companies to see how best to design the programmes, the services and ultimately the procurement route. It’s the first time government has done this, but we hope it will be a model for future commissioning of services in government.

If you’d like to know more about the premarket engagement workshops please email our team via mark.willis@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

Future workshops

We want to do more of these workshops, so if you’re interested in taking part, do come back to me at @liammax.

Another busy week at GDS, including reaching the milestone of 100 million visits to GOV.UK.  We also attended a lot of behind-the-scenes meetings to start planning and looking at the transformation of 23 exemplar services across seven departments.

What has GDS been up to this week?

Well, a lot of hard work, but a celebration as well. We passed 100 million visits since we launched GOV.UK, which is a tremendous achievement. Probably more notably, we had 6 million individual visitors in the last week of January/first week of February, and that’s a tremendous achievement; that’s substantially higher than we were getting for Directgov and Businesslink. So it’s a testament to how well it’s working. I should give a shout-out to Tara Stockford and Lana Gibson and the team for the SEO work they’ve done and all the content work they’ve done. So yes, we’ve got a lot of work to do, but it’s nice to cross that milestone.

Who have we been working with this week?

It seems like everyone at the moment, Ali. We published the Government’s digital strategy late last year, and as you know, the departmental strategies we published just before Christmas. What’s happening now in government isn’t particularly newsworthy, but it’s a lot of behind-the-scenes meetings to start planning and looking at the transformation of 23 exemplars across seven departments, right across the Government’s estate. So there’s a whole host of work going on there, and I won’t give you the details of many of these workshops.

But we met with key departments: HMRC – met with Lin Homer at the start of the week, the Development Secretary; she’s right behind the transformation agenda there, so that’s tremendous; we’re getting a team spinning up there. We met with Treasury, and of course colleagues in Treasury, and making sure the Cabinet Office and Treasury are going through this hand-in-hand, and making sure that our financial processes are in place is absolutely crucial if we’re going to pull this off over the next 400 days. Also I met, earlier today, with DVLA and Department of Transport. So we’re meeting with the key departments and we’re really getting down to business.

Also this week, we welcomed representatives in the Technical Open Standards space from 12 other countries, and they’ve come to see what we’re doing in the UK. We should give a big shout-out to Linda Humphries and Liam Maxwell, who’ve done terrific work in this area, and it’s good to see that other countries are referencing what we’re doing, and also how far ahead we are in putting the open standards debate into play; into delivery of public services. So that was a big win this week.

So what is coming up next week?

We’re all very busy, continuing working with a lot of departments, helping them develop their digital strategies. Highlights for me: working with HMRC on the key exemplars; it’s going to be crucial to get that right. We have an event on Wednesday with NESTA and the Cabinet Office and the Omidyar Network, sponsoring an event called Tech for Good; I’m really looking forward to that. Stephen King, the guy who runs Omidyar in Europe, is a terrific force for good in our space, and he’s someone I respect a great deal. So it will be good to see them on Wednesday.

We’re working with colleagues in Treasury. We’re continuing to push the identity agenda as well, and Friday next week, we’re all going out for an afternoon, because we do a lot of show-and-tells, and I constantly talk about looking sideways in GDS and in digital in government, because we’ve got to work across a lot of different agendas. So on Friday we’re going out for a few hours, and we’re doing Ignite-style show-and-tells to everyone here, so everyone has a sense of where all the agendas are up to. So I’m really looking forward to that event as well.

Are there any new starters, or people who you’ve said goodbye to at GDS?

There are plenty of new people coming as we spin up some of our projects. There are probably a couple of people worth a mention this week. Matt Navarra’s coming back to join us, he’s currently at the IPO. It will be great to have him, not least because of his active social media presence. I’d like to personally say goodbye to Lindsey Bromwell, who’s been Private Secretary here and previously worked in Cabinet Office; she’s been absolutely central to the growth of GDS, but also helped me hugely, and grown the team here, and we’ll miss her. She’s going to Welsh Assembly, so no doubt she’ll be writing us letters in Welsh and we’ll have to reply to those. But thanks for all her work; she’s been a fantastic part of the team.

Has anything outside GDS caught your eye?

This is the bit where I normally mention something not to do with government. But actually this week, I’ve got to give praise to Liam again, and to Stephen Allott in government. Because we had a roadshow event, well outside of GDS, actually, in four cities in the UK. We saw 250 SMEs. It’s absolutely crucial that we get SMEs in this country into the Government’s digital and technological supply-chain, and these events are hugely important in getting the goodwill and the support of SMEs. In this country we are blessed with SMEs who are great at technology. Sitting where we are right now, we’re surrounded by digital creative agencies, London is awash with them, but many other cities have got a really active presence.

It’s a sign of some regret from me that we’ve not really encouraged many of these companies to work with us in the past. We’ve not made it easy enough, and these events, telling them how to get onto the G-Cloud; how to work with government, are crucial in growing that number of small companies who work with us. It was tremendously well-received, and we’re looking to do some more in the future. So that was the thing that struck me the most from outside GDS this week.