Four years on, whilst the Service Standard has been adopted by some digital teams within local government, my far from extensive research failed to find one council where it has been full adopted across their entire organisation, although some elements have been in some larger councils.
So why is that?
Perhaps it's because the Service Standard describes how services can be built by the very few public sector organisations where large fully multidisciplinary teams of user researchers, services designers, content designers, UX spcalists, developers, and so on exist?
In reality, for local authorities such as smaller districts which make up the majority of councils in terms of numbers, that kind of team will always be unobtainable.
The second factor is that no matter what size the council, there isn't the right governance structure within that local authority in place, and my guess is it's just too much of a leap to go from the practice of buying something, switching it on, and hoping for the best, to designing services according to the standard.
So what's to be done?
I think we need a new, more inclusive digital service standard for local government. Something that can be used by every council, and because councils will always buy in products, something that can be applied as part of a procurement process too.
It's something I'm going to be looking at in 2024 and if you or your council are interested too, or you have a view on using the existing Service Standard in local government, then please do let me know.
Comments
Post a Comment