Tag: Government Digital Service (Page 1 of 2)

Visualising Government as a Platform

November 25, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

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.

Question for digital government people c 2015. Did you see these at the time? What worked / didn't work about them (conceptually, not graphically)
— Richard Pope (@richardpope.org) 2024-11-23T10:14:39.259Z

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.

Five things I think about GDS, CDDO and i.AI moving into DSIT

July 10, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 5 Comments

If those acronyms mean nothing to you then this blog post is not for you. It’s written in response to the news that the Government Digital Service (GDS) and the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) are moving from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) under the responsibility of Peter Kyle as the responsible minister.

At the OECD one of the things we would emphasise was the importance of a mandate and authority for providing leadership of digital government across the entire public sector. GDS was the poster child for this idea. Many countries have established their own Digital Government Units similarly located at the centre of government and operating in proximity to the country’s political leadership. In more than one country the digital function has been given even more prominence and made an extension of the President or the Prime Minister. This has been critical in ensuring that the agenda receives support at the highest levels and made a priority.

In the UK, GDS benefitted from Francis Maude as the Minister for Cabinet Office (MCO) with his leadership backing the wave of transformation through to 2015. Under his watch many of the things that established the culture for digital transformation bedded in. And then in 2015 there started a sequence of 12 MCOs in 9 years. Not many of them showed the same aptitude for leading digital transformation as Maude.

Along the way the clarity of responsibility for digital started to fray. Digital inclusion, some aspects of data, some parts of Artificial Intelligence, and some parts of digital identity moving over to what is now DSIT.

Re: The oddness of the political moment

July 9, 2024 / Benjamin Welby / 3 Comments

At the start of June, James Plunkett wrote a piece called The oddness of the political moment. It is amazing just quite how quickly the atmosphere has changed since the election (I’d attribute a lot of how I feel myself to having prayed through Croydon and then for all 650 MPs in the last week) but the post remains very timely and insightful.

I left a couple of comments around accountability. One on the accountability of those elected to serve, and the other about GOV.UK and the policymaking process. David Durant said one needed to be a blog post, but I’ve done both.

1. Accountability of politicians

“…it seems increasingly clear we need people whose day job it is to care about the infrastructure that underpins accountability and the associated discourse…”
The oddness of the political moment, James Plunkett (07/06/2024)

When I decided to leave the OECD, a major factor was the stark disconnect between its stated mission of ‘better policies for better lives’ and the practical reality that means the organisation has to prioritise diplomatic niceties over accountability. I accept that my expectations are perhaps unreasonable. After all, the OECD isn’t an organisation designed, set up or mandated to provide accountability when a member mis-steps. However, you can’t have a ‘rules based international order’ if there’s no accountability against those rules.

Fragile states and digital foundations

October 1, 2015 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

When crisis hits it puts unexpected pressures on infrastructure. In some cases the state or its civil society is resilient and can cope but where the physical, societal or administrative fabric is already fragile then issues are compounded and recovery becomes harder. And then there’s the impact of war.

The world has developed coping mechanisms for dealing with this. Government aid and development budgets kick in, international organisations mobilise and individual donors dig deep to help meet needs. And lots of time, money and thought continually goes into making sure that the quality of those coping mechanisms gets better. But the scale of the need can be overwhelming.

Digital can be a huge enabler and a powerful tool in helping to support those responses. Today is the Techfugees conference. That’s a great response to a crisis that has reached the tipping point in the public consciousness. It’s brilliant that the conversations don’t end today but will be followed by efforts to deal with problems: the Techfugees hack day tomorrow, Ich Bin Hihr in Berlin on Saturday and maybe also Code for the Kingdom in London over the weekend. People are getting together to unify around solving identified needs rather than fragmenting into delivering well meaning, but not yet validated, ideas.

Pride (In the name of GOV.UK)

December 23, 2014 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

On Friday 19th December 2014 when the final agency switched on its pages we celebrated GOV.UK being ‘organisation complete’.

Three years ago one of the four things Baroness Lane Fox told government to do was ‘fix publishing‘. She recognised that hundreds of different publishing platforms could do a good job in isolation but required the public to understand the complexity of government and that approaching similar needs in bespoke ways was expensive and inefficient. It wasn’t the first time government had recognised the complexity of its web estate and we’ve stood on those broad shoulders to successfully replace over 600 websites with just the one.

That achievement is only really the end of the beginning but I’ve been reflecting on my highlights so far, in anticipation of what’s to come. I’ve got seven. Continue reading

Local government digital service and the GDS design principles

June 19, 2014 / Benjamin Welby / 4 Comments

This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series Local government digital service

This is the final entry in a series of blogposts unpacking my opinions about the local government digital service debate. In the first post I set out my opinion that a single entity with the mandate and resource to address the common needs of the public is overdue; in the second I wondered about what that might mean from a democratic point of view; my third wondered about the distinction between building and buying services and my fourth explored how this might work in practice. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t claim to have all the answers and want to know where my assumptions are completely barmy!

In this series of posts I’m expressing an opinion. I find the idea persuasive and the need obvious for a local government digital service. I’m certainly not claiming to have all the answers! I think your position on this matter will have a large amount to do with whether you think Baroness Lane-Fox’s cry of “revolution not evolution” is as appropriate in the local context as it was centrally. I believe it is. Happily, local government doesn’t need to revolt from scratch – GDS doesn’t have all the answers but we’ve got some very useful experience about trying to bring all the things together. I think the GDS design principles are brilliant and so to conclude I’m going to think about what they might mean in a local context.

Start with needs*

*user needs not government needs

Local governments have different priorities, different political makeups, different challenges and different histories. They are all unique. And our experiences as citizens can’t be separated from the characteristics of where we live.

But are our needs unique?

The Local Government Services List says not always. It’s imperfect but it is a helpful starting point for the user needs of a resident in any given postcode: if services or information can be described in a consistent fashion then why can’t they be surfaced and accessed in a consistent fashion?

Do less

Local government digital service: how might it work?

June 19, 2014 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Local government digital service

In this series of blogposts I’m unpacking my opinions about the local government digital service debate. In the first post I set out my opinion that a single entity with the mandate and resource to address the common needs of the public is overdue; in the second I wondered about what that might mean from a democratic point of view and in the third I gave some thought to where services come from already, and could come from in future. In this post I ask how it might work in practice and finish off the series by considering the relevance of the GDS design principles in the context of local government. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t claim to have all the answers so please comment and tell me where my assumptions are completely barmy!

I don’t think I know the answer to this piece of the puzzle but but from my standing start I think there are a few possibilities for how you might create a local government digital service.

Fundamentally this must start with someone having enough mandate to formally recognise the activity that already exists and do a proper Discovery about what 21st century local government digital services could, or should, look like if they were being created from scratch. The Discovery phase of a project is the place to get all the hopes and concerns expressed and understood. It neither prescribes, nor proscribes, a particular approach but gives the space to test some ideas and come up with an idea of what your prototype might look like.

It was interesting that DCLG hosted the event that they did and that the department’s digital leader commented on the resistance to the idea of GOV.UK. So perhaps central government is beginning to think about funding something centrally from the top down to create something akin to GDS. Such an approach would need to work alongside the experience and expertise within councils and make sure it isn’t felt to be an imposition on local authorities whilst still maintain its ability to achieve the disruption it needs to. A centralised approach may be effective in delivering services free from the legacy overheads but it may prove difficult to build the relationships between local authorities that will actually result in consistently world class service design.

Local government digital service: build or buy?

June 19, 2014 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series Local government digital service

In this series of blogposts I’m unpacking my opinions about the local government digital service debate. In the first post I set out my opinion that a single entity with the mandate and resource to address the common needs of the public is overdue and in the second I wondered about what that might mean for democracy. In this post I think about where services come from and in the others I wonder about how it might work in practice and finish off the series by considering the relevance of the GDS design principles in the context of local government. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t claim to have all the answers and want to know where my assumptions are completely barmy!

In the debate about meeting localised user needs in a coherent fashion it can be forgotten that it’s something that actually happens every day. There is a precedent for local residents to administer very postcode specific activities through a single product that is managed and delivered centrally.

They are not perfect examples of services that would be given the Digital by Default Service Standard seal of approval but that’s even better – they give the local government digital service lessons to learn and opportunities to iterate.

A first example would be the Blue Badge service. It is a piece of policy owned by the Department for Transport but which is administered by local councils. The digital service gives a consistent experience to the person who wants to apply for, change or renew their blue badge. That is a veneer on top of a complicated process but the complexity is hidden from the public allowing the service to be administered according to the local characteristics of the relevant council. The service is showing its age and has certain usability issues but here is a common user need served by a common digital service to administer a central government policy in a very localised way.

Local government digital service: democracy

June 19, 2014 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Local government digital service

In this series of blogposts I’m unpacking my opinions about the local government digital service debate. In the first post I set out my opinion that a single entity with the mandate and resource to address the common needs of the public is overdue and here I wonder about what that means for democracy. In the other posts I thought about the distinction between building and buying services, asked how it might work in practice and finish off the series by considering the relevance of the GDS design principles in the context of local government. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t claim to have all the answers and want to know where my assumptions are completely barmy!

In the fanfare and celebration of what has been done in the last two years it can be forgotten that central government had brilliant pockets of service design being delivered by exceptional civil servants. UKGovCamp had been instrumental in joining the dots between those people and created the conditions where GDS could thrive. It is absolutely not the case that everything was rubbish and suddenly GDS made all things new.

And one of the brilliant things about an event the Department for Communities and Local Government recently hosted to stimulate the debate about collaboration between councils was getting to spend the day with a room full of people committed to public service delivery. Whatever might happen in transforming the approach of local government it must acknowledge that the commitment and self-organisation of those brought together by UKGovCamp for central government is exemplified by LocalGovDigital who are dragging their sector forward in the margins of their day jobs.

On a local government digital service

June 19, 2014 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Local government digital service

I think local government would benefit hugely from a disruptive approach to providing digital services and meeting user needs. I’ve thought this for some time. This is the first of a series of blogposts where I unpack why I think what I think; the second talks about the threat such ideas have to local democracy ; the third about the provenance of services themselves; the fourth about how such an organisation might work and the final post considers the GDS design principles in the context of local government. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t claim to have all the answers and want to know where my assumptions are completely barmy!

There is a conversation about digital government that does not go away. It is all the fault of alphagov.co.uk and the birth of the Government Digital Service. Does local government need a digital service for itself?

It’s an opinion polarising conversation.

While I was working for Hull City Council I wrote a couple of things that led to my joining GDS. GDS has a very specific focus on central government, and central government only. And there is plenty to keep us busy. I’ve worked on different projects and learnt huge amounts but there is an obvious gulf between the mandate we have to support digital service design across our sector and the inconsistent patchwork of innovative practice in local government.

Start with needs*

Do less

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