A future vision for digital gov
I recently saw the Bluesky post from Jeni Tennison asking for suggestions for the new digital centre and the vision for digital public services. That was swiftly followed by the excellent blog from Martha Lane Fox about working in the open, and now I can’t resist throwing my hat in the ring for this as I’ve been around long enough to have seen some changes (good and bad) and see the challenges and opportunities that currently exist. In the words of Martha, “Let’s go!”…
Invest in user centred design. This one is obviously extremely biased given my role, but if you want “innovation” you need a way to realise that. You need designers to bring ideas to life and connect them to reality, and base it on something that gives certainty to those designs - evidence, ie: user research. If we want to make efficient use of public money, we need that certainty we are getting it right as quickly as possible, without having to backtrack and redevelop something that wasn’t based in evidence (wasting money, time, and precious goodwill of staff). And while we’re on the topic of innovation…
Find the healthy tension between maintenance and innovation. Sometimes innovation doesn’t automatically mean technology, sometimes it’s fixing the basics like putting food on the table for children, and heating the homes of the vulnerable. I could wax lyrical but Richard Pope has already done a much better and comprehensive job in Platformland (buy it, you won’t regret it). That said, I do believe in unlocking the potential benefits of digital (obvs!) but it’s not the only tool we have in the box.
Unlock more freedoms for working in the open. It’s all very well - and bordering on flippant - saying “work in the open”, but the reality is that there are structural and cultural problems that exist to stop this happening. If we can unblock those you’ll find there is a huge treasure trove of ideas from people bursting with things they want to talk about. Talking about our work, our approach and our culture is a hugely influential play that has been proven to work - for our standing in the world as digital leaders in the public sector and Civic Tech, but also for “softer” aspects like attracting people to apply for jobs when they understand what the organisation does, what the work is, and it’s culture. I agree with everything Jukesie said about more blogging, roadmapping, show and tells, get togethers etc.
Shift the focus from technology to people. We’re actually really good at this, but it requires a lot of effort to keep the focus on outcomes and not the output (ie: usually meaning the technology). If you start with people, the rest will follow. A lot of this is about becoming comfortable with uncertainty, something that is hard to square in the public sector given that eventually it all boils down to “how much money are we spending?” - a topic which needs crystal clear certainty. Saying that we want to do a thing but we don’t know the output or technology yet is highly uncertain for purse-string holders, but we need to be ok with that discomfort and find pragmatic ways to deal with that uncertainty. And yes, this is Point 1 in disguise…kind of.
Encourage cross government collaboration. This is a bit of a sweeping statement, but to be more specific we need more shared objectives that promote opportunities to engage. My experience is that each department effectively acts as their own separate organisation with their own roadmaps, budgets and strategy - the points to collaboration reduce considerably where two organisations are pursuing different agendas (which will obviously happen as each org has their own clear remit). Related to…
Whole services, not siloed programmes. People don’t experience life in perfect neat parcels, yet we have a very binary way of delivering something to our users because problems are siloed away into distinct programmes. If you’ve had a child we can provide individual services that you need (if you know about them!), but if during that process you become disabled, face financial trouble and have to close your business as a result then the burden on finding/interacting with the cluster of services to deal with those events separately becomes exponentially more complex, sequential and therefore stressful. The opportunity for error increases. Those services cross multiple departments, teams and programmes of work, making it harder to join up for an end user. Life is messy and doesn’t happen in neat checklists, so public services shouldn’t either. Government needs to offer services for the “whole” not parts, and as such needs to arrange itself accordingly. I could also yap on about proactive services, but this is already something with significant momentum behind it.
Invest in belonging. Meaning people and communities of practice. We need a reason for people to be attracted to work in the civil service, beyond the high level mission of making things better for our users and reducing burden. That’s great, but it’s not enough! People need more than just a high-level “feeling” when joining an organisation. What community or tribe are you joining? What is the comprehensive and compelling offer for keeping people? Belonging and the “employee offer” is the glue that will hold people true to the civil service, their discipline and in turn help them feel connection to the work they all share. Teams that have strong a strong sense of belonging emit this characteristic like a beacon, and attract more people to join - so it’s a virtuous cycle that is worth investing in. Invest in training and development, apprenticeships, academies and other knowledge sharing activities. Belonging also comes from feeling you have a say in your work and the way you work - so we must find ways for our people to be more autonomous, bottom-up and recognised for the experts that they are.
Delete unnecessary bureaucracy. Reward people for doing so. Make the basics of working in a modern org simple. Some of this is necessary friction, and to some extent some can’t be avoided due to the sheer size of things. But there are simple fixes to some of the unnecessary friction that will unlock greater productivity and wellbeing, and they are easy to find if we give it some time and attention. Some silly stuff just gets in our way (tools, rules, process…) and it wastes time. Let’s do an audit of these things?
I think some of these have lots of small things that can nudge them in the right direction, but others are much more systemic/wicked problems in nature that require cultural mindset changes at scale, and a significant financial investment as well. Those are the challenging ones.
It’s likely I’ve missed a whole bunch of other things, but these were top of my mind.