Skip to main content

The same but different; My thoughts on the State of Digital Government Review

 

State of digital government review
A new government allows for reflection and change unlike any other time.

It provides the opportunity for constructive criticism of the past, and to embrace the opportunities of the future, unburdened by the legacy of years in power.

It happened in 2011, and it’s happening in 2025.

This week saw the release of the State of Digital Government and the Blueprint for Modern Digital Government, a kind of call and response around the landscape of digital public services and how the Government might improve them.

I had worried that given both reports were completed in what was a reasonably short space of time that they might not be as rigorous or as inclusive as they could be. I needn't have. 

The State of Digital Government is one of the most honest reports into the UK public sector digital I've read in a while. It is critical whilst not being judgemental, and realistic about the opportunities and challenges for true transformation of public services..

In some respects it feels like 2011, in others it doesn’t, and here’s why.

In 2011 a small group of pioneers came together within the Civil Service, led and supported by the likes of now Lord Maude of Horsham and Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho to help create the first incarnation of the Government Digital Service (GDS).

Their ideas and energy helped transform government services, from the creation of the single government website GOV.UK, to the creation of the Service Standard which facilitated in my view one of the most underrated achievements of GDS, far better spend control on digital and IT.

For the next few years the mission continued, with the creation of GOV.Notify, GOV.Pay, in fact there’s a whole blog on the history of GDS here.

In 2011 onwards, efforts were focused almost entirely on central government. 

Whist it's true that services like Register to Vote included local government, in this case it actually created more work for councils through a lack of engagement and understanding.

In fact the creation of LocalGov Digital was in some respects a response to a perceived threat from GDS by being largely excluded, whilst the majority of public services people use on a day-to-day basis are actually delivered by local government or the NHS.

Sure, a digital service to renew a passport is useful, but what people really need to do on a day-to-day basis are things like reporting a missed bin or booking a GP appointment.

In this respect, these two reports are different from 2011. 

The acronym NHS appears in the state of digital government report 63 times, whilst the phrase “local government” is used 29 times. 

I get the sense that the authors understand that fixing the public sector should start with the services people use the most, and perhaps even that the NHS and local government are possibly the most broken, in relation to finance at least.

As a result I am enthusiastic about the next year and beyond in public sector digital.

Sure, there’s potential to miss that not every NHS trust and council are equal, and digital maturity across an organisation and the resources within digital teams will be very different in London boroughs to that in rural counties and districts.

The early signs are good though. 

Minute is a solution for note taking, transcribing and summarising meetings up to Official Sensitive classification, being developed by i.AI (which as of this week is part of GDS) and is already being trialled in local government.

It already seems as good as solutions offered commercially, and the team developing it has the technical expertise, energy, and collaborative approach I would love to see taken on for all the work involved in delivering the Blueprint.

So whilst it’s reminiscent of 2011, this moment feels different.

Not just because of both the scale of the challenge ahead and the technical capabilities now available to the public sector are so much greater, but because of a recognition that true transformation must be right across the public sector and perhaps this should start where services are most important to everyday life, with those those delivered by local government and the NHS.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital best practice checklist

This week I finished the draft of a digital best practice check-list. It's not digital strategy, in fact I'm increasingly thinking organisations don't need a digital strategy, they need a delivery strategy. My draft has check-list of seven questions and recommendations, with one overall recommendation regarding best practice for delivering digital. Ideally it would be incorporated into a wider service and information delivery strategy. Below I've omitted the bulk of the content, the reasoning behind arriving at the recommendation from the question because it's still in draft, but here are the seven questions and eight recommendations: 1. Is the council properly promoting its digital services and content, to reduce avoidable contact? Recommendation: Establish a “digital first” ethos to the promotion of services and better targeting what, when and where they're promoted. 2. Are the digital services the council offers, especially where the design and...
5 comments
Read more

Carl's Conundrum of Internal Influence

I'm writing this partly as a reply to an excellent piece that Carl Haggerty published about the disconnect between internal and external influence and partly due to various conversations over the past month about how to make using tools like collaboration platform  Pipeline common practice. This isn't really about Carl though, or Devon County Council, or any other council specifically, it's more a comment on the influence of digital teams in local governments, or lack of, and how to resolve this. So here's the question that prompted this piece. How can someone who's been recognised nationally for their work, first by winning the Guardian's Leadership Excellent Award and who has more recently been placed in the top 100 of the Local Government Chronicle's most influential people in local government , "sometimes feel rather isolated and disconnected to the power and influence internally". First, let's consider whether is this a problem to...
6 comments
Read more

Pipeline Alpha

In September 2014, officers from 25 councils met in Guildford to discuss a platform to enable collaboration across Local Government. A "Kickstarter for local government" is the missing part to Makers Project Teams , a concept to enable collaborative working across different organisations put forward by LGMakers the design and development strand of LocalGov Digital . Based on the user needs captured at the event, LGMakers created collaboration platform Pipeline and by October people from over 50 councils had signed up . Pipeline is an Alpha, a prototype set up to evaluate how a Kickstarter for councils might work. It is a working site though, and is being used as the platform it is eventually intended to be, at present without some of finer features a live offer might have. So what have I've learnt in the eight months since we launched Pipeline? There's a strong desire to collaborate  LocalGov Digital isn't a funded programme. I wrote about how much it ...
1 comment
Read more

Superfast highways

You may have seen this slide I put together to help explain digital transformation This week we launched a new beta service to report speeding traffic. It looks fairly simple but to give you an idea of what's happening in the background I thought it might be useful to show you the before and after. So here's the before and as you can see it's completely a manual process. Stuff might be recorded electronically but it takes someone to do something seven time to make the process work and send it to the parish or the district. Here's the after What this doesn't tell you is that it's basing whether the request is for the parish or district on three questions. It's also doing a spatial look up to find the parish and returning the parish clerk details using the Modern.Gov API. Because these are already part of our platform this is data that we currently maintain, so there's no additional work to keep this up to date and we've reduced the h...
1 comment
Read more

Defining transformation to a wider audience

For the past month I've been putting together a paper on the next steps of digital transformation, for the organisation I work for. I'm proposing we look at two capabilities and two business areas, and if approved I'll be writing more about it. It's been a great exercise in gathering my thoughts and helping me to define digital transformation to a wider audience and how it fits into the bigger picture of service improvement. Here's some of the stuff I've learnt or had affirmed: Transformation, digital or not, starts with understanding the needs of the user through research. This should be obvious, but in local government too often I've seen "build it and they will come" approach applied. It's unlikely a commercial operation would launch a new product without first researching the market, so why would a digital service be any difference? A couple of years ago I wrote how the phrase "digital transformation" was hindering digit...
1 comment
Read more