What we reckon

In response to Jeni T's ask: we (Simon and Kaz - personal opinions obvs) have been working in ‘digital’ government for over 12 years now, and it’s really positive that the government is taking some action in this space; to us it feels like the work from 2012-16 has faltered, and never really delivered on its promise. But good work has been - and continues to be - delivered, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that. It’s critical that any new initiative reuses and builds upon existing work, as well as learning why things haven't gotten to the place many of us hoped and expected they would when GDS were first formed. The panel’s work should be a reflection on the last 13 years, and not just yet more people coming in with a load of new ideas or technologies to try and reset everything; this cycle has happened many times. We’re really glad that Jeni and others have been appointed, and particularly thankful for the ask for wider reckons! We reckon the panel should be working out how they, as a team, can utilise good people already trying to deliver stuff, and the lessons that have been learnt across the public sector, without making any prior assumptions.

Whilst we agree on everything on Matt and Sharon's lists, we think there are 3 core problems that make everything else so much harder than it needs to be, and which block other good things happening;

Fix the basics, start with the problem (and shut up about AI)

1. • AI is literally mentioned in every quote at the moment - it is not innovation to say something ‘must’ use AI, innovation should come from proper Discovery and Alpha stages, but people are often forced into projects or specific technology adoptions, and AI is just the latest in a long line of these. We seem to be prioritising AI as a solution over solving the problem.

   • Building a digital service over a bad service just gives you a bad digital service, there is a lot of talk about ‘user centred’ and ‘iteration’ at higher levels without understanding what end to end service transformation actually entails.

   • We need to get into a good place of sustainable technology and teams. Sustainability means supporting and iterating products and services for their life cycles. ‘Legacy’ technology is just something which is unsupported, and which you can’t easily or cheaply change. Replacing a monolith with unsupported microservices doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

   • DDaT/GDD has categorised and promoted ‘digital’ profession jobs, but the functions are still bolted onto the side of departments and organisations, they are not truly embedded, and this is challenging. The functional leadership changes in 2016 just further reinforced this division of labour between digital and policy/operational functions.

   • Service Design is a thing everyone in a cross-functional team should be doing.

   • DSIT has the opportunity to provide leadership and vision from the centre. Since GDS and CDDO were split, there hasn’t been any real central ownership of a vision and direction for what digital and technology in government should look like and what it is supposed to achieve. We really need someone to provide some leadership, hope and energy again.

   • It’s not just about Central Government, we need to collaborate and reuse much more with the NHS, local government, BBC etc.
     
     

Don’t leave anyone behind 

1. • Digital isn’t always the answer, we need to design and enable access to public services and technology for everyone. Government is a monopoly, and if one person can’t access a service, we have failed. We can’t design for the 80%.

   • Enable the ‘Right to ID’ alongside GDS One Login, one of the biggest blockers to easily accessing online public services is the difficulty people find in proving who they are.

   • Stop trying to monetise public data over enabling cross-departmental attribute and data exchange. Government departments being able to easily and securely share data between themselves shouldn’t be an afterthought.

   • Take responsibility for educating society around data and digital literacy, and provide places they can access this as a service.
     
     

Fix the funding structure

1. • Enable shared departmental budgets, Without this, you cannot expect proper cross-departmental collaboration.

   • Fund teams not projects; small, focused teams with all the capabilities and empowerment to solve whole problems. More people doesn’t mean faster, better services. In fact it usually means the opposite. 

   • Stop robbing Peter to pay Paul - GDS platform work is vital, but the way it is funded requires departments to pay for those platforms. It’s all the same money, and taxpayers are now paying more to allow departments to process those billings, it’s just moving money around.

   • We never fix the basics, we just continue to replace them with other things that will need replacing, the end goal should be to *not* do transformation!

   • The CapEx/OpEx split means nothing when applied to properly maintained products and services, which are iterated and do not depreciate. Building something internally is still seen as buying an asset.

   • Cross-disciplinary teams should be comprised of everyone you need to solve a problem, this almost always includes Policy, Legal and Operations, as well as other more traditional ‘digital’ roles, but Directorate funding structures and silos make this hard to achieve.

   • Fix Service Assessments and give them the proper support they deserve. They should be consistent across all services, not just digital products, and there should be accountability that people are doing the right thing in the right way.