I've been talking about service patterns and design with people from around the public sector recently, partly because this could be key to a wholesale reshaping of the public sector.
Service design goes beyond the use of digital, but given almost every public service now makes some use of technology now, service design and digital transformation are intrinsically linked.
I became aware of the need for common service patterns at an event organised by the Department for Communities and Local Government a few years ago. The workshop was part of the now defunct GOV.Verify programme, and brought together licencing and digital teams from councils across the country.
The idea was to see if Verify could be used as part of a common service to apply for a taxi licence, but as the day went on it became apparent that despite similar roles all delivering services to same legislation, they all worked slightly differently across every council.
There was no common service pattern, so there could be no common service.
A lack of common service patterns can prove costly within a single organisation too. We've all read reports of spiralling costs and lengthy delays in pubic sector IT projects, and in part this can be attributed to the desire for bespoke functionality resulting in tweaks or even wholesale redesign of how a platform functions to meet the unique service designs of that organisation.
One of the successes of the roll-out of PlanX as part of Open Digital Planning is that there's a library of re-usable service flows or patterns, and to varying extents the low-code solutions that are widely used across local government also have a re-usable library of common services too.
Without a common pattern for that service they will always need to be tweaked and bespoked for local use though, meaning there's little chance of a large uptake of solutions like Local Gov IMS, originally funded by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities which might provide a common income management platform for councils.
You may have seen me write about work I've been doing through LocalGov Digital with Dr Rebekah Wilson and Sarah Slate at the Local Government Association (LGA) and colleagues in my organisation including Kafilat Akintoye, around the Service Standard and service design in general. The draft report will be published in the next few weeks, and contains proposals around the use of a common standard and a service design community.
The Blueprint for a Modern Digital Government talks about a "one only" rule and a Digital Backbone.
I think service design and common patterns are key to the delivery of this at the very least across local government, and perhaps functions that involve the NHS, the Police, or central government too, so I very much hope they feature in the Government Digital and AI Roadmap, to be published in summer 2025.
None of this is new, nor are they my ideas, I am merely an advocate for service patterns and design, and after reading this I hope you are too?
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