Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

Tag: Government Data Value Cycle

Visualising Government as a Platform

In Richard Pope’s essential book Platformland he pitches a new ‘anatomy of public services’ and uses helpful images to dismantle, reconstruct and develop for 2024 ideas that he was first part of putting forward in 2015. Given how well the book does this we should all hope that he’s moving the conversation forward in terms of the UK’s inertia in this area.

Over the weekend he popped up on BlueSky and LinkedIn to ask what people who had seen those original drawings in 2015 thought about them at the time.

This will be the nudge I needed to finally finish a series of posts (I don’t think you want it as a single post 🙃) I started writing about my reflections on Government as a Platform so if you want them straight to your inbox then do subscribe.

I remember being treated to a sneak peek of what Richard and others were cooking up and being persuaded pretty quickly that they were absolutely spot on. When it was subsequently presented to GDS more widely at an All Staff (I don’t think any public version exists but Tom Loosemore’s October 2015 Code for America talk captures a lot of it) it was one of those moments at GDS, of which there were more than a few, that made me feel so lucky to be working alongside such inspiring minds.

So perhaps I was too close to the thinking and experiences that produced the visualisation to be an impartial observer – I was already fertile soil for these seeds to land in. I expect people who were further away from the conversation (and the shape it subsequently took) might give more insightful responses to Richard’s immediate question for his purposes in 2024. Nonetheless, here are some thoughts of my own.


Mark Foden’s “Gubbins of Government” was another reference point at the time and I thought these images and the ideas they put forward were a great complement to that and spoke of a similar ambition in ways that could land with a not-inside-GDS audience.


I liked how the visuals were helpful beyond the ‘whole of government’ perspective. The obvious takeaway is that the data, consent and components layers are about the role of the centre to enable vertical services at the top. I think it’s also a helpful cross section for specific services to think about as well. Any end to end service trying to meet a whole need is going to do that through a composite of elements (micro-services if you will), that sit on top of a service-wide approach to data and identity.


At the OECD I wrote the Government as a Platform pillar of the Digital Government Policy Framework. That exercise was really helpful for me in marshalling my thinking as a partial retrospective on my work as the Lead Product Manager for Government as a Platform in the UK (more on this in those upcoming blog posts).

One of the biggest things I felt when it came to writing it up was the need to take a wider-angle lens on how you enable and equip teams to move quickly, at scale, and with quality. This 2015 visualisation sits alongside a whole host of contextual assumptions about things we at GDS didn’t exactly take for granted but which we saw as self-evidently important: fixing procurement, controlling spend, assuring quality, building capability, etc.

So as powerful as I think the visuals are and were, I think they only tell a partial, more technical story, about what it means to create a Government as a Platform ecosystem.

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Building a data-driven public sector Part 3: Unlocking the value of data without losing public trust

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Building a data driven public sector (DDPS)

On 16th May 2024 I led a 90 minute session as part of the Digital Academy Masterclass, hosted by the Government of Azerbaijan’s Innovation and Digital Development Agency, and delivered by Digital Nation.

I’ve broken the presentation into 4 parts. After the introduction, Part 1 considered the potential of data to deliver public value; Part 2 looked at the elements needed to actually build a data-driven public sector; and this, Part 3, explored how to unlock the value of data without losing public trust.

Unless otherwise indicated or an obvious screenshot, the images were generated by ChatGPT.

Now we’re onto the third and final part of this morning’s session. We’ve thought about where value can come from in terms of what you do with data. We’ve thought about the role you all play in helping to create the conditions for data to be used. But now we will finish with thinking about how our use of data builds and preserves trust.

Trust is such a valuable commodity. But it can be lost so quickly and take so long to repair.

Trust between citizens and their government is the basis on which the legitimacy of public institutions is built. Without trust, some policies lose their meaning and some services cease to be used. Unfortunately, trust is deteriorating in many countries.

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Building a data-driven public sector Part 2: How to do it

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Building a data driven public sector (DDPS)

On 16th May 2024 I led a 90 minute session as part of the Digital Academy Masterclass, hosted by the Government of Azerbaijan’s Innovation and Digital Development Agency, and delivered by Digital Nation.

I’ve broken the presentation into 4 parts. After the introduction, Part 1 considered the potential of data to deliver public value; this is Part 2 and looked at the elements needed to actually build a data-driven public sector; and Part 3 explored how to unlock the value of data without losing public trust.

Unless otherwise indicated or an obvious screenshot, the images were generated by ChatGPT.

David McCandless, of Information is Beautiful, suggested that instead of thinking about data like oil, we should rather think of it like soil. Data is a fertile environment from which good things might happen. 

But just like soil, it is something you have to nurture and care for if you want it to give you a good return.

And this is where we start our second section – if we’re in roles with responsibility for building a data-driven public sector then we need to think about our job in terms of farming. We need to be mindful that when it comes to data our job is to make good soil and nurture data-driven ways of working.

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