In Martha Lane Fox’s 2010 report, that, in effect, led to the creation of GDS and that set out its mission, there were a series of recommendations.  These seem like a reasonable place to start in assessing GDS’ delivery track record.  The recommendations were:

1. Directgov should be the default platform for information and transactional services, enabling all government transactions to be carried out via digital channels by 2015 … must focus on creating high-quality user-friendly transactions … scaling back on non-core activities.

2. Realign all Government Delivery under a single web domain name … accelerate the move to shared web services.

3. Learn from what has been proven to work well elsewhere on the web … focus on user-driven and transparent … implement a kill or cure policy to reduce poorly performing content.

4. Mandate the creation of APIs to allow 3rd parties to present content and transactions.  Shift from “public services all in one place” to government services “wherever you are”

5. Establish digital SWAT teams … work on flagship channel shift transactions

Not surprisingly, I agreed entirely with this list at the time – nearly a decade beforehand I’d produced the picture below to represent the e-Delivery team’s (eDt) e-government vision – eDt was a part of the Office of the e-Envoy when the late Andrew Pinder was in charge.  I think it captures Martha’s recommendations in a page:

 

Now, nearly 7 years after Martha’s report, we have a new flagship website (whilst Martha’s report was strong on making use of the direct.gov brand name, given the investment in it over the previous 6 or so years, a decision was made to use a different brand – you’ll see that we had suggested that as a possible name in the 2001 picture above; it’s in the very top left).

Here are 3 pictures showing the journey we have made over the last 13 years:

1) Direct.gov’s home page in May 2004

2) The same site, in January 2007

Thirteen years of user needs, iteration, at least three different content management tools and, branding and size of search bar aside, do you notice any major difference?  Nope, me either. 

My guess is that the lessons that we learned from 2002-2010 have been learned again from 2010-2017.  Sure, some new lessons will have been learned, but they will be largely the same – many of the new lessons will have been technology and methodology related I suspect. Despite everything, it all looks the same and that, when poking
behind the front page, all that’s revealed is more design changes –
bigger fonts, simpler questions and cleaner lines.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again

The creation of gov.uk has been a massive job – huge amounts of content have been moved, sorted, consolidated, re-written and, doubtless, re-written again.  It all feels like marginal change though – more of the same.  Heavy lifting, yes, but more of the same, incremental changes, with some big parts still to move, such as much of HMRC and still no real home or consistency for business-related content

The real mystery, though, is where are the transactions?  The new ones I mean, not the ones that were online a decade ago.

Looking back at Martha’s recommendations:

(1) Single platform and transactions – is at least partly done, but transactions have advanced little in a decade.

(2) Single domain – looks initially to be a success (and one that I do not underestimate the huge effort it’s taken and that it continues to take), but there isn’t much else in the way of shared web services (I’ll be coming on to Verify and other common platform technologies soon).

(3) User driven and transparent / Kill or cure – I’m going to score as strong effort, but not nearly enough of an advance on what was done before.  We have a huge amount of content piled on a single technology platform.  Disentangling it and ensuring that there’s only one place to find the most relevant content on any given topic is not well advanced.  If you’re a business, things are even more confusing. And if you’re a sole trader, for instance, who hops between individual and business content, you’re likely more confused than ever.

(4) APIs – beyond what was done years ago, I don’t see much new.  I would love to be pointed at examples where I’m wrong here as I think this is a crucial part of the future mission and it would be good to see successes that I’ve missed.

(5) Flagship transactions – I’m not seeing them. The tax disc is a great example of a transaction that was started years ago and that has been successively iterated, and I don’t want to undersell the monumental shift that getting rid of the disc itself, but it’s an outlier.  Where are the others, the ones that weren’t there before 2010?

Martha’s goal of “enabling all government transactions to be carried out via digital channels by 2015” seems as far away as it was when, in 2001, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, exhorted us to put joined up, citizen-focused services online by the end of 2005.

The real mystery is why we are tinkering with content instead of confronting the really hard stuff, the transactions.  As I said in 2012:

GDS’ most public delivery is “just another website” – those who know (and care) about these things think that it might be one of the sexiest and best websites ever developed, certainly in the government world.  But it isn’t Facebook, it isn’t iTunes, it isn’t Pirate Bay.  It’s a government website; perhaps “the” government website. Once you’ve packaged a lot of content, made wonderful navigation, transformed search, you end up with the place where government spends the real money – transactions (and I don’t just mean in IT terms).
 

And now we have a Transformation Strategy that promises it will all be done by 2020.  I’m not seeing it.  Not if we follow the current approach.  That sounds snarky and perhaps it is, but it’s really the fundamental point of centre’s digital efforts – joining up what hasn’t been joined up before.  Content, as has been well proven for the last 15 years, is the easy bit.

Transactions are definitely the difficult bit, and they’re difficult in two ways – (1) the creation of an end to end service that goes all the way from citizen possibly through intermediary (everything from PAYE provider to accountant to Citizen’s Advice Bureau to me doing my mother’s tax return) and (2) the rethinking of traditional policy in a way that supports government’s desired outcome, meets user needs and is also deliverable.  From 2001, we started putting transactions online and, for the most part, we put online what was offline.  At the time, a good start, but not one that fits with current thinking and capabilities.

In October 2012, I questioned whether the Emperor had any clothes on; somewhere in that piece I said:

The question is really how to turn what GDS do into the way everyone
else does it.  In parallel with GDS’ agile implementations, departments
are out procuring their next “generation” of IT services – and when
you consider that most are still running desktop operating systems
released in 2000 and that many are working with big suppliers wrapped
up in old contracts supporting applications that often saw the light of
day in the 80s or, at best, the 90s, “generation” takes on a new
meaning.  To those people, agile, iterative, user experience focused
services are things they see when they go home and check Facebook, use
Twitter or Dropbox or have their files automagically backed up into the
cloud.  Splitting procurements
into towers, bringing in new kinds of integrators, promising not to
reward “bad” suppliers and landing new frameworks by the dozen is also
different of course, but not enough to bridge the gap between legacy
and no legacy.

and then

The question is whether the GDS model is the one that achieves scale
transformation right across government, or whether it is another
iteration in a series of waves of change that, in the end, only create
local change, rather than truly structural change.

My sense, now, is that it’s the latter – another iteration, but one that hasn’t created as much change as the inputs would suggest and that, today, is creating far less change than it did early on in its life when charismatic leadership, a brilliant team, an almost messianic zeal and bulletproof political support were in place.

GDS has done some brilliant and world-leading stuff but has also failed to deliver on its mission.   Simply, GDS isn’t working.  We need to think again about what it’s going to take to deliver the vision; something that has been largely consistent for much of the last two decades but still seems far away.  This is tricky: we don’t want to lose the good stuff and we clearly want to get the huge pile of missing stuff done.  The current approach is a dead end so we need to do something different; with the appointment of a new minister, now could be the time for the change.

Every few years for at least the last two decades, HM Government has revised its approach to the co-ordination of all things IT. Throughout that time there’s always been a central function to e.g. set standards (govtalk for example), engage with industry to get the most done at the best price, co-ordinate services, do some direct delivery (ukonline.gov.uk, direct.gov.uk, gov.uk etc) and also teach government what to do and how to do it – the art of the possible.

It started with the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), followed by Central Information Technology Unit (CITU), then the Office of the e-Envoy (OeE), the e-Government Unit (eGU), the Office of the Government CIO (OCIO) and, most recently, the Government Digital Service (GDS). Some of these – CCTA and CITU for instance – overlapped but had slightly different roles.

After each revision, there was a change of leader, a change of approach and a change of focus – some were for the better, some not so much. Nearly 7 years after the Martha Lane Fox report that brought GDS into being, it’s time for another one of those revisions.

We should, of course, celebrate the successes of GDS, because there have been some big results, learn the lessons (of GDS and all of its predecessors) and shutter the failures. So let’s first laud the successes. GDS have, in my view, been responsible for four big changes at the heart of government.

1) User focus and an agile approach. GDS has shown government that there is another way to deliver projects (not just web projects, but all projects), through focusing on user needs, building initial capability and then iterating to bring on successive functionality. Whilst this wasn’t new and still isn’t yet fully adopted, there isn’t anyone in government who doesn’t know about, and have a view on, the topic; and every department and agency across the board is at least experimenting with the approach and many have taken it completely to heart. The two dozen exemplars showed departments that the new approach was possible and how they might go about it, infecting a new generation of civil servants, and some of the old guard, with an incredible enthusiasm. Assess user needs, build some and ship, assess results, build a bit more and ship again (repeat until false) is understood as a viable approach by far more of government than it was even 5 years ago, let alone 15.

2) Website consolidation. What was just an idea on some slides nearly 15 years ago, as seen in the picture below, is now close to reality. The vast bulk of government information sits on gov.uk, a site that didn’t exist in 2010. Gov.uk receives some12-14 million visitors in a typical week. We’ve gone from a couple of thousand websites to a handful (not quite to one, but near enough to make little difference).  Bringing together the content and giving the citizen the impression that government is all joined up is a necessary precursor to achieving lift off with transactions.

3) Spend Controls. Before the Coalition Government came in, departments spent money however they wanted to, despite the best efforts of various bodies to impose at least some controls. There’s now a governance process in place that reviews projects at various stages and, whilst the saves are likely not as big as has been claimed, the additional review focuses departmental minds and encourages them to look at all options.  Controlling and, more specifically, directing spend is the mainstay of changing how government does IT and will support further re-use of platforms and technologies.

4) Openness, transparency and championing issues. Government blogs were few and far between before 2010; official ones didn’t really exist. GDS staff (and, as a result, departmental people too) blog incessantly, to talk about what they are doing, to share best practice, to lay down gauntlets (e.g. championing the issue of necessary diversity on panels through the “GDS Parity Pledge”) and to help recruit new people from inside and outside of government to the cause.  Working in the open is a great way to show the outside, as well as the inside, world that things really have changed.

Each of those is a significant achievement – and each has been sustained, to at least some degree, throughout the time GDS has been active which deserves additional celebration. Having an idea is the easy bit, it’s getting it done that’s the hard bit – the latter is where most people turn around and give up. Each of these achievements does, however, come with a succession of buts which I will explore in later posts.

In the world of agile, failure is inevitable.  The point, though, is to fail fast and at a lower cost, correct the errors and get it right the next time.  Getting the next phase of the online agenda right requires some significant rethinking, an analysis of the failures and the setting of a new direction.

This is not to say that what GDS has done to date isn’t good – the successes outlined above should rightly be lauded.  It is, though, to say that it was not and is not enough to create the necessary change.  Transformation is an overused word and one that is rarely delivered on, least of all in an agile, iterative world; but a step change in the way citizens interact with government is still possible.

So, to create that necessary level of change, we need to put in place a different approach, one that ratchets up the pace of delivery with departments, one that integrates tightly with the outside world and one that doesn’t repeat the past but that embraces the future.
 
I plan to publish a succession of posts looking at this with the aims of constructively challenging what’s been done so far and providing a framework for setting things up successfully for that next phase.