Users need services that are genuinely agile and responsive to changing needs – where change reduces costs and risks rather than raising them and so making government more productive and our public services better.

Our guiding principles for this change are simple:

• focusing on user needs, ensuring that technology becomes so good that our colleagues, citizens and businesses want to use it
• putting outcomes first; such as reductions in cost per transaction
• using ‘openness’ to our advantage – open data, open standards, open source, open markets

Making a start

The Cabinet Office has already begun to make some changes. The delivery of commodity infrastructure services – connectivity, application hosting, hosting, collaboration and productivity services, devices and support – is moving towards the use of standard services procured via common frameworks such as the Public Services Network and G-Cloud. The Integrated Shared Services programme is driving towards the delivery of browser-based shared services through a small number of common service centres. And then there’s us, GDS,  in place to co-deliver Digital Strategies with Digital Leaders in departments and agencies.

In making these changes, we are enabling departments to focus on their Mission IT systems – the technologies needed to address the specific user needs of that department. GDS is working on a review of the governance and support provided to IT professionals. This is an important part of ensuring that we are providing structures in which they can flourish, and work in tandem with their digital colleagues to deliver great services for users.

The shape of government technology

We have mapped government technology into four distinct functional areas:

1. Digital public services: the transactional services that drive citizen engagement with the state.

2. Mission IT: the line of business applications that run the individual internal processes of departments and agencies. These are often specific to their business functions and many can be defined as ‘special’, although they draw upon underlying commodity components.

3. Infrastructure: the common connectivity, hosting and device management services that enable organisations to have the tools they need in the hands of officials and colleagues.

4. Back office: the day to day services like HR and Finance that run the operations of all our departments and agencies

Some of these areas are things that meet common user needs across government. To address those, we will implement government as a platform, providing departments with common business functionality that can be re-used by multiple users in multiple service areas. For specific needs, such as those in Mission IT and digital public services, GDS and the Cabinet Office will work alongside departments to ensure they have the capability and support they need to meet them. The service manual is a big part of building that digital capability across government, and GDS plans to provide a similar level of support to technology services.

Other organisations like eBay and Paypal have already successfully implemented the platform model, developing a core technology infrastructure that others have then built upon – driving the success of the platform and meeting users’ needs more effectively than the original provider could have achieved alone.

These changes will be introduced over the next 5 years as deals for existing services come to their natural end. As these expire, departments and users will be transitioned to common services. The Cabinet Office will support departments in ensuring that it can be successfully delivered. The outcomes will be worth it: early adoption of this approach has already made significant savings.

By focusing on our users’ needs, driving towards commodity services wherever possible, sharing services and breaking down departmental silos we will be able to make large savings for the taxpayer. But we will also be able to deliver technology that is fit for purpose and supports civil service reform.

Highlights: The 1000th code release on GOV.UK – that’s about seven every working day. We also created a team within HMRC to extend the way we’ve been working out into departments. At our big monthly team meeting on Wednesday we heard from the Student Loans Company about the great work they’ve been doing to transform their transactions. We also saw the launch of the Digital Skills Alliance, led by Martha Lane Fox at the Go ON UK Trust. Next week we’ve got our regular digital leaders’ meeting on Wednesday and a major release of new guidance for CTOs which will form part of our digital by default service standard. We’ve also got more new starters in the team, and continue with our progress on the 25 exemplar service projects. As part of this I’m going up to the north-east to meet DWP and HMRC, and while up there I’m speaking at the Thinking Digital conference.

(Full transcript below)

Matt:
Okay. Hello Mike, what have you been up to at GDS this week?

Mike:
Hi Matt. We’ve released our thousandth code release to GOV.UK this week. That’s an amazing statistic. That means really about seven releases every working day. I want to talk about that for a moment, because when we came to government the MO for getting stuff done was like “IT programmed a code release every three months”. Now we’re doing one every hour and a quarter, and it shows you just how reactive we are to user need. I’m delighted, it’s a real testament to the strength of the team’s architecture, and the way it’s been built and also our receptiveness to user need and user feedback. James Thornett and the team have done a great job.

The other thing we did this week, the major achievement is actually we moved a team from here. This is a year when we’re trying to get out and spin up our examples in lots of parts of government. We moved a team to HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs], Etienne and Chris, and the gang, and having a digital centre in the heart of our tax system is a really big step.

Matt:
That’s excellent, we’ve also had a couple of big events this week.

Mike:
We have. On Wednesday we had a team meeting, me and everyone went in a room and did the show and tell and it’s great. One of the best bits of it, we had our colleagues from Student Loans company come down, Martin Campbell, Lindsay Brown, Hilary Brownlie. They came down and gave us a presentation of the work they’ve done. So much of this year is about successes that don’t happen here in GDS with GOV.UK, it’s successes happen where transactions are. That was terrific.
On Monday Martha Lane Fox, Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho as it is now, she launched the Digital Skills Alliance with the Go ON Trust that she chairs. Lots of companies involved, Danny Alexander the Chief Secretary of the Treasury made a great speech about digital skills. So it’s great to see government and Go On working to generate more skills out there for everyone to increase their digital uptake.

Matt:
Brilliant. We’ve also got another big meeting next week as well.

Mike:
We have digital leaders next week, next Wednesday, and a crucial thing on the agenda there is applying the digital by default standard and working out how some of our new services meet that standard and what we do with some of our existing services.

Matt:
We’ve also got some releases coming up next week.

Mike:
We have, our biggest single release is the CTO guidance, which is going into the manual. Liam Maxwell who runs the Office of the CTO here in GDS, his team have actually been creating a load of advice and guidance and direction for the many, many CTOs and CIOs in government. Actually the fact that that isn’t a meeting or a paper, the fact that it’s on a browser, it’s a manual, is part of our new governance for technology. I’m really excited by that.

Matt:
We have also got some stuff taking place outside of the office next week as well.

Mike:
Yes, plenty of things going on outside this office. There’s 25 exemplars in 15 locations. I’m going to Newcastle next week, seeing the team up in Longbenton which is just north of Newcastle, it’s where the DWP and HMRC offices are, seeing what we could do digitally there. I’m also speaking whilst there at the Thinking Digital conference, and I’m really going to be talking about how we get many of those companies and individuals with great digital skills up in the North East into our supply chain.

Herb Kim, who runs that conference has been a pioneer in this space for many years. There’s loads of companies up there and we’ve got to get them into the government supply chain.

Matt:
Finally we’ve got some new starters as well at GDS.

Mike:
We have plenty of new starters, and one worth mentioning is Julie Hendry. She’s an Agile coach, and it’s great that we now have people who are going out and coaching other parts of government around Agile principles, and how we do stuff here. She’ll be working first and foremost with DVLA.

Matt:
Excellent. Until next week.

Mike:
Onwards.

The complete list shows the breadth of transactional services provided by the government, from tax-based transactions with volumes in the millions per year, to applications to burn heather and grass, for which only one licence was issued last year.

We’re collecting data every quarter for a rolling 12-month period, and the latest release covers January to December 2012. As this is the second major release of data, we’ve started to present a clear view of changes in services over time.

For the first time, we’re also publishing data on digital take-up: the number of transactions completed through digital channels. As departments start to implement their digital strategies, and as services are being transformed, the Explorer tool will track the rise in digital take-up and the effect this has in reducing costs per transaction.

The main purpose of the Transactions Explorer is to ensure that service owners and the public have transparent access to key measures of service performance. Since its launch, we’ve been encouraged to see departments starting to improve their processes for collecting, using and sharing performance data about their services.

In the Explorer, each of the 70 highest volume services now has a more detailed page showing some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) we’re using to assess transactional services. Cost per transaction and digital take-up are there already, and in the coming months we’ll start to publish data on user satisfaction and transaction completion rates.

More updates are planned in which we will automate more of the data collection where we can, and integrate the Explorer more closely with the Performance Platform.

I am enormously grateful to all of the members for volunteering their time and their expertise for the public good. Over time, their efforts will have a massive impact on people’s lives, making our services better and potentially saving millions of pounds in public money.

It was great to finally get down to work on putting the structures in place to help us make the right choice of which open standards to use.

The Open Standards Board agreed the process for how we should select open standards and appointed Nicholas Oughtibridge from the Health and Social Care Information Centre to chair a Data Standards Panel to advise the Board.

They also agreed to use the assessment criteria proposed in the European Common Assessment Methodology for Standards and Specifications as a starting point for the criteria to be used by advisory panels and challenge owners when assessing challenge proposals.

The terms of reference for the Board are published on the Standards Hub along with more information about what was discussed at the meeting.

The first challenges have been open for responses since March and we’ll be starting to close these soon. Challenge owners can then begin to put forward proposals, drawing from these responses. You’ll be invited to discuss these proposals with us as they develop.

If you’ve not already signed up to the Standards Hub and had your say, now would be a perfect time to get started.

I’m very proud to announce the latest release of the Performance Platform. Building on the performance statistics we have for GOV.UK, this release powers the dashboards for all the different Licences, Notices, Registrations applications you can make. David Williams blogged about these in March.

The Licensing dashboards are the first of many; the Performance Platform is built to allow any government service to input data from any source, to see how that data changes over time, and in the future to compare their service’s performance with that of similar ones. The aim of the platform is to allow the owners to make data-driven decisions to improve their services.

Although the primary audience for this information is the person who owns the service, all this information is also publicly available – you can see it yourself at https://www.gov.uk/performance/licensing; and in the future you will be able to download the data too.

In this instance, we are combining data from both web analytics and from back end systems so we have a very good picture of how many licences are being applied for online and how many are being processed.

Users can drill right down into specific local authorities such as Cornwall, or look at individual licence data such as collecting money in the street for charity.

As an example of the sort of data being collected, here is the drop-off rate for all online submissions in the week starting 6 May 2013:

So, we can see that many more people are downloading a form than are going to submit it; and of those who get to the submit application page, only 68% (21% of the total visitors) actually successfully submit the form and where necessary pay the fee.

Now, with all data, it seems to me that the most important question is: is this number big or small? And the truth is that at this early stage, we don’t quite know the answer: given that in many instances people actually have to pay money for one of these licences, a 32% drop-off rate may be perfectly reasonable.

However, it’s fantastic that we now have this benchmark, and as we start to get more and more data in on this and on other transactions, we will be able to see more clearly if this is typical behaviour.

There’s plenty more to come from the Performance Platform, and we hope it will give real power to service owners and allow them to make a positive impact on the transactions people make with government. In the meantime, those who are technically minded might be interested that the Performance Platform code is publicly available on github.

I’ll write more when we have more services available and more statistics to compare – but I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the Performance Platform team who have worked so hard on the project.

Yesterday Lord Young released Growing Your Business, the second instalment of his report on small firms. The report looks at ways to help small firms grow. Record numbers of people are starting a business each year, joining a community of over 4.8 million firms in the UK today. Of these, 3.6 million are sole traders.

Lord Young’s report identifies just how much complexity, cost and inconsistency hinders Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs. GDS is making its contribution through GOV.UK with its focus on user needs and delivering simpler, clearer and faster information and services.

Support for SMEs

GDS is working with colleagues at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) to bring more coherence to the wealth of schemes and programmes available through a clear, simple framework based around user needs, not the needs of government departments.

Through an ongoing process of iteration, and acting on user feedback, we will tailor our communications with businesses over time to deliver greater and greater impact. This includes the content and services on GOV.UK and also the way we communicate with businesses more generally.

Getting closer to users

Lord Young’s report recommends the use of the 130+ business schools around the UK as ‘anchors’. These anchors will provide an information resource to meet the specific needs of SMEs. SMEs will be able to access practical advice, additional face-to-face support, and mentoring.

GDS is working with BIS colleagues to determine what kind of support government can, and should, provide to support these local communities of practice.

Open data

Our commitment to open data will help us to provide better information to businesses. We are developing APIs through which businesses can access government data. Since the launch of GOV.UK we’ve been trialling a content API and we’re continuing to improve and refine it.

Open standards

We’re being more transparent throughout the procurement process for government technology. By doing this we’re giving suppliers of all sizes the information they need. Setting out our Open Standards Principles is a part of this. We’re providing a level playing field for all suppliers and making our contracts more accessible.

The G-Cloud Framework is improving the way in which suppliers can sell technology services to government. It has simplified purchasing and it provides a marketplace through the Cloudstore. It has already cut the long tendering and procurement process for commodity IT to days or hours rather than weeks or months.

We recognise the time demands on SMEs and so we’re keen to communicate with them in a clear and straightforward way. Our dedication to user feedback means we’ll continually be looking for ways to reduce the burdens on SMEs, and promoting the support that government can give to them.

Highlights: Progress this week on a new supplier framework, approaching launch around the end of this month, which will provide the whole of government with access to a broader range of digital and agile suppliers. GDS have also been working closely with the Student Loans Company in their selection of a technical transformation partner. The Digital Advisory Board also met this week. Next week, the monthly all-staff meeting will see updates from all the different projects and workstreams across GDS.

(Full transcript below)

Interviewer:
Hello Mike. What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Mike:
So a few things; firstly our supplier framework, which is a means to get a much broader range of digital and Agile-type suppliers working across the whole of government. That is making its final way into a thing called the OJEU [Official Journal of the European Union] process, which means we go out to the market, and we get suppliers signed up to that. We are hoping some time around the end of this month, to actually issue that. It is a lot of legal work, but that has been going on for six months now. We are getting to the final throes of that, which will be a real big step for us. Because it will open up to all departments, a whole new supply chain. So that is good progress. I spent the last two days in Glasgow with Mat Wall, helping SLC [Student Loans Company] select a technical transformation partner. So viewing supplier presentations, catching up with the good folks like Gordon Simpson and Tom Mead, and Martin Campbell up there, on the work they are doing there. We had a good meeting in the Digital Advisory Board this week, on Wednesday, where they all came in to meet with us.

Interviewer:
Excellent. We have got a big meeting here as well next week.

Mike:
Yes. Next week is our monthly all staff meeting. So that happens on Wednesday afternoon. So we are all looking forward to that, to see what the updates are across all the different projects and workstreams in GDS.

Interviewer:
Cool. There will be a few new faces.

Mike:
There are a few new faces around, who started this week as well. A person called Ian Chick, has just started in the transformation team, central programme office there, to help us get a bit more mature and established in how we run some of these big programmes in GDS.

Interviewer:
That is excellent. We have had some good weather since the Bank Holiday as well?

Mike:
We have, yes. Thankfully, the ice age is over and the GDS Griffins, our softball team, went out there and won their first game. Good old Albert Massa was named our MVP, or “man of the match,” as we used to say.

Interviewer:
Excellent, until next time.

Mike:
Thank you.

The content explorer provides a very useful snapshot of how the policy content is performing. But I wanted to dig further down into the data.

At the time of the analysis, Inside Government featured approximately 200 policies. I started by examining usage of the format to provide some background context using our analytics package.

The black line in the graph below shows the weekly visits to Inside Government since it was launched. The red line, plotted on the right axis, shows visits in which at least one policy was viewed. Note the different scales on the two Y axes. Visits involving looking at a policy page make up around 10% of visits to Inside Government, and this has remained fairly consistent as more departments have moved to GOV.UK.

I next looked at the pageviews of policy pages in the first two weeks of April to get a sense of the popularity distribution. (Use this chart to get a feel for the distribution, rather than the individual data points!)

This shows that there are a few policies which are relatively very popular such as Increasing the use of low-carbon technologies and Reducing obesity and improving diet. The majority of policies got fewer than 2000 pageviews but this is not surprising as many of them are topical, such as Marking relevant national events and ceremonies, or specialist, like Managing freshwater fisheries.

The majority of policies feature 3 tabs: ‘Policy’, ‘Detail’ and ‘Latest’ and I broke down each 3-tabbed policy by the share of pageviews each of the tabs received.

From this I was able to calculate that on average the Policy tab received 57% of the pageviews. Next, I created a histogram with percentage ‘buckets’ showing how many policies were categorised in each.

This shows, for example, that there were 14 policies in which the Policy tab share was between 50–55%. The broken yellow line shows the average, and outlying areas have been highlighted in red. On the left side are policies in which the main Policy tab was infrequently viewed, such as Making it easier to trade. On the right side are policies in which users hardly looked at the Detail or Latest tabs, such as Adapting to climate change.

The underlying data for all the policies have been shared with Inside Government content designers to analyse further how users are coming to these policy pages and to identify where improvements can be made.

This analysis is part of our work to understand how users are engaging with content since we completed the transition of the ministerial departments to GOV.UK. Next we will introduce additional factors such as the distribution of time spent on pages, the depth of scrolling and where links have been clicked on a page; all of which will provide a deeper understanding of user behaviour, and pinpoint where performance is good or where improvements are required.

Highlights: A very big week, as we marked the 24th and last of the ministerial departments moving to Inside Gov. The numbers that describe the volume of activity over the last six months are incredible – and thanks go to so many of the team who’ve worked hard to make this happen. Other notable things this week have been GDS participation in a cross-government major project review – working with Defra to answer for performance in and around our work with the Rural Payments Agency, one of our first exemplar services. We also had the opportunity at the Public Sector Show this week to talk to counterparts looking at digital services in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

(Full transcript below)

Interviewer:
Hello, Mike. A big week for GDS this week.

Mike:
Huge week. We made it; we made the 24th department onto Inside Gov. As well as Export Finance UK, we moved the Number 10 site and the Deputy Prime Minister site to the platform. It’s the end of a hugely ambitious five months to move the entirety of Whitehall onto one domain. It’s a tremendous, tremendous achievement.

In the last six months we’ve published 50,000 documents; 222 sub-domains have been closed; 2,250 user stories have been delivered; 223 policies have been written to a new clear style; and 5.8 million people have visited Inside Government pages, making more than 29 million page views.

I want to give a lot of thanks. The team here have been amazing; people have worked really, really hard. Neil Williams and all the guys here have done a great job. I’d like to thank some people who’ve helped us with moving these last two domains on. I’d like to thank Susan D’Arcy and Louisa Harper, who worked on Number 10; Anthony Simon and Amy Khan, and the teams at the PM’s office and over at Downing Street, because they’ve been constantly supporting us. It’s great to now have them on the platform.

Interviewer:
We were joined for some celebratory words later, weren’t we?

Mike:
We did. We did, firstly we should thank our Minister, Francis Maude, who took time from a very busy day for him. He came over and gave a fantastic speech, really raised all the team. We also had some visitors on the day. Chris Martin, who’s the Prime Minister’s PPS, who’s a very busy man and obviously can’t spend much time away from Number 10, he came over to see what we’d been doing and left, I hope, impressed. It’s great to have him on side. I should also thank Stephen Kelly, who obviously runs the Efficiency and Reform Group. Stephen came over and also bought us all a drink, which was nice.

Interviewer:
That was very kind of him. Have we been up to anything else this week?

Mike:
One of the interesting things to happen this week was we had an MPA review, called MPRG; it’s a Major Project Review Group. It’s when treasury-led groups of civil servants and external advisors hold us up to account. Sometimes we sit on those when we look across government and what it’s doing.

This week we were on the other side of the table with our colleagues from Defra; it’s one of our first exemplars. We were held to account by Sir Peter Gershon and others, who asked us really searching and challenging questions about RPA, the Rural Payments Agency, and our work there and agile across government.

It’s fascinating to hear the challenge and also to take the challenge. It’s also a little bit intimidating sometimes to be on the other side of the table. That was the major thing this week. It’s good; it’s good that everything we do is in the open and it’s audited. It’s great that we can on those panels say to people, “Look at our website. Look at our blog,” because we’re trying to do all these things as openly and transparently as possible.

Interviewer:
Excellent. You’ve got away to talk at the Public Sector Show as well.

Mike:
It’s really important that we engage as much as possible with colleagues right across the public sector, and it is a great show. This one was in London, but we had time afterwards with colleagues from Scotland, and also particularly spent an hour with the Northern Ireland colleagues who are looking at their digital agenda.

They actually have their own domains over there, but they also do a lot of work looking at how we’ve worked on platforms, to see if we can help them. We’re going over soon to Belfast to meet them, but it was great to really connect with them as well.

These shows are really important, because at the end of the show more than a dozen people waited and asked us loads of questions about how they can work with the central government agenda. Again, it’s another way of reconnecting with the wider public sector.

Interviewer:
Excellent. We’ve also had some new starters and a couple of people saying goodbye.

Mike:
Yes, Will Callaghan left this week. He did a great job for us and it’s important to know – we wish Will the best, great guy – but also where he’s gone. He’s gone to ‘Go On’ trust and he’s going to be a huge force in driving those on. We’ll miss him but we’ll still see him.

I think it’s great from my point of view that we as a hub here, when people do leave they go on to really notable digital things. In some ways I’m sad to see Will go, but I’m glad that he’s gone to another high profile digital role.

We say “Hello” to some new colleagues here. Fola’s [Ekundayo] joined us as a content designer on the GOV.UK team; and Gavin, who’s joined the transformation team, Gavin Watson. It’ll be good to welcome those into GDS this week.

Interviewer:
Excellent. Enjoy the Bank Holiday.

Mike:
Thank you very much, and you; onwards.

Customer insight plays a vital part in ensuring any DVLA product, service or initiative is fit for purpose and easy to use for all our customers. Recently we tested new versions of driving licence renewal reminder forms and new online transactions with profoundly deaf customers. We wanted to share some of our findings.

Insight and diversity

Our Customer Insight and Diversity Team is an in-house group of researchers and usability testers who use a range of techniques to engage with our customers.

We test a variety of things from paper forms, mock web pages or online transactions, to telephone Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) systems. We also make sure we get a diverse selection of people in for these tests. This ensures we get feedback from disabled or traditionally difficult to reach customers.

There are more than 3.7 million people of working age (16 to 65) in the UK with some form of hearing loss, which demonstrates the potential impact of not catering for this customer segment.

For the testing with deaf users, we worked closely with various associations and charities to help us find participants. In this case we had excellent support from Robin Ash, Midlands region Empowerment and Campaigns officer for the British Deaf Association.

What did we find out?

User testing is always an important opportunity to challenge (or validate) assumptions we make while designing services. Initial discussions around the reminder letters quickly made us realise how difficult certain groups of customers find it to access DVLA services (and many others across the public sector).

For example, it didn’t occur to me that the average reading age in the deaf community is generally lower than the UK adult population. This was first identified by Reuben Conrad in 1980 when he tested deaf children’s reading skills and found that the average reading age was 8 years old. It was so shocking that many people started to change from oral education to signing. The average has now crept up to about 9 but it is still less than what’s required to be able to read the Daily Mail.

Statistics cited by the Department for Education show deaf children’s attainment at Key Stage 2 English and Maths was 42% lower than their hearing counterparts. There are too many reasons for such low figures to include them all in this short post. However, it is useful for us to know what we are dealing with; and important that we’re aware that deaf people have varied levels of written and sign language competency.

This meant that some of the wording and terminology we used in our literature was completely unknown to the participants. For example, words like ‘surrender’ and ‘defaced’ were known only in a very specific context, and caused quite a bit of confusion. Customers also mentioned they found using our online services generally hard for those same reasons.

On the whole, the new transaction pages we tested were very well received. They were described as simple and easy to follow, allowing the individual to retain their independence and complete the transaction rather than potentially struggle with communication through an intermediary (for example, face-to-face at a DVLA office or with the help of a social worker).

The younger participants were particularly receptive, and although there were a couple of issues raised there wasn’t anything that would result in a failed transaction or cause them to seek someone to help. These results are being fed back to the relevant teams and recommendations have been made to improve the language and accessibility of our digital services.

I’m pleased to say that the test was a great success, and we now have some valuable insight about the changes we’re proposing. It’s a great example of how the Customer Insight & Diversity team has been able to identify significant issues that we need to address, and how our recommendations have been fed back into the delivery of products and services.

Research and testing in this way is critical and should be a part of any business change or service development. Putting the customer at the heart of what we do is more important than ever, particularly in supporting digital by default services.