What does the internet want from a new Digital Centre for the UK Government?
06 Oct 2024 (last updated 29 Oct)
Recently Jeni Tennison put a shout out on BlueSky asking for ideas on what a future vision for digital government should include (she’s part of an advisory panel that’s working with DSIT to develop this vision).
The response was amazing, prompting lots of suggestions and multiple blog posts from folk like Si Manby and Caz Hufton, James Plunkett, Tom Morgan, Neil Williams, Nikola Goger, Laura Yarrow, Sharon Dale, Anna Hepburn and Matt Jukes, as well as resurfacing older posts from the likes of Mark O’Neil, Emma Stace and Frankie Roberto.
I started to keep track of it all so I thought I’d share the categorised results here. It’s not a comprehensive list (and of course I have my own bias) so apologies if your idea wasn’t included.
UPDATE - Jeni has posted about the response herself - you should definitely go and check that out.
WARNING - As Vicky Teinaki reminded me, if you ask the internet anything you also have to consider who's voices are not being heard, so please bear that in mind too.
OK, here's what people said:
Overall service vision #
- We need a strong vision from the centre
- A public sector reorganised around the services it provides, the platforms that power them and the data it stewards
- Services that just happen invisibly, or that take less than a minute
- Services that always provide escalation routes and a named facilitator
- A clear, energising, unifying digital vision for the public sector
- A clear, strategic service offering
- A stronger mandate and ability to unblock things
- A civil service that's user centred, iterative, open, multi-disciplinary, service-oriented
- Work with departments to understand and fix the basics first: legacy tech, data, business processess, procurement, financial approvals and ways of working
- The service is the policy and operations, enabled by digital, data and tech
- Fix the basics - start with the problem
- Cross-disciplinary teams should also include Policy, Legal, Ops etc.
Cross-departmental collaboration #
- Remove policy silos
- Adopt a 'whole service' approach to systemic needs
- Create roles that are accountable for outcomes that span departments
- Build on cross-dept working and initiatives
- Implement shared cross departmental budgets and data exchange
- Encourage cross government collaboration
- Fund whole services, not siloed programmes
- Make funding of developing/running services that cross silos possible
- Invest in collaboration roles and really use our collective knowledge
- Shared cross departmental budgets and data exchange
- Create feedback loops in government, so value can flow from anywhere, not just the centre
- Digital to be properly integrated into departments, not bolted on
- Collaboration and reuse beyond central government
Digital infrastructure and platforms #
- Develop more common platforms and efficiencies in tech
- Invest in the Digital Platform teams (eg. Pay, Notify, Forms etc.)
- Roll out One Login to Local gov
- Create more components for things like analytics, address lookup, hosting, credentials, registers, payments, statistics, consultations
- Add payments out, and messages out
- Invest strategically in open source as an infrastructure
- Apply the same principles and quality control to internal services that we do to public ones
- Delete unnecessary bureaucracy
- Fix the basics (multiple mentions)
Funding and resource allocation #
- Create long term investment in infrastructure
- Fund teams not projects
- Create shared departmental budgets
- Fund products/teams, not programmes
- Break free from the CapEx/OpEx split
- Remove the need to promise specific deliverables in business cases
- Increase the % of funding that goes towards maintenance and improvements
- Decrease the % spent on shiny new services and features
- Find the healthy tension between maintenance and innovation
- Fund local government to develop its own solutions
- Less duplication across local government
- Extend platforms to local government and arms length bodies
Digital inclusion and accessibility #
- Recognise that digital doesn't work for everyone all the time
- Enforce accessibility and usability standards for software used by large workforces
- Invest in libraries as a way for people to access services digitally
- Include the digitally excluded and those subject to data poverty
- Future-proof services to cater to the information-seeking behaviours of young people
- Enshrine higher standard of accessibility and inclusivity in law
- More diverse teams, especially including disabled people and people with disabilities
- More teams that include people with current frontline experience
- Get a diverse group of NHS patients to feedback step by step experiences with digital public services
- Educate society around data and digital literacy
Data management and literacy #
- Share data effectively between different parts of govt
- Make the data we have usable and designed for various stakeholders
- Increase data literacy for both society and SLTs
- Free the Public Address File!
Skill development and training #
- Reintroduce the academy and provide training for digital delivery
- Invest in people's abilities
- Hire more leaders with digital capability and experience
- Get serious about training future generations of engineering talent
- Provide free access to DDaT skills training for teams and stakeholders
- Routes into digital jobs for people who are young, who have had career breaks, or who are currently in the lowest-paid government jobs
- Sort out civil service professions so that they are aligned rather than contradicting / competing with each other
- Create a safe environment where questions are welcomed and valued
- Get people excited about the opportunities
Procurement and supplier relations #
- Drive change in HM Treasury and our relationship with suppliers
- Better procurement, better contract management, better frameworks and intelligent client capability
- Break the capture of government by systems integrators
- Innovate procurement - encourage small suppliers, not big ones, and not huge multi-year contracts
- Fix produrenemt and financial approvals (again)
- Cakes for bears
Service design and UCD #
- Invest in User-Centred Design
- Shift the focus from technology to people
- Create a strong content strategy for government
- Create user-centred content that span departments
- Enable the 'Right to ID'
Performance management and assessments #
- Make service assessments less scary but do more of them
- Bring back the performance platform
- Support service assessments and make them consistent across all services
Communication and transparency #
- Do comms that's less about process and more about the work that gets done, as it gets done
- Unblock us so we can work more in the open
Things to avoid #
- Establish / imply / elevate a digital elite whilst allowing everything else to carry on as it is
- E-learning, memorising terminology from Agile Frameworks will not get us where we need to be
- Automagical digital exemptions from proper staffing/funding
- Discoveries that don't include technologists
- Performance measurement theatre (poorly chosen OKRs)
- Don't waste money recharging for platforms
- No AI for it's own sake
- Don't prioritise monetising public data over x-gov data exchange
I'll try and keep it updated and may refine the categories over time. I've left any duplicate recommendations in, to indicate that multiple folk felt they were important. To see who said what, refer to the original thread.