A digital centre for the rest of us?

Looks like I chose the wrong week to quit weeknoting. 

14 years ago Martha Lane Fox wrote a paper about which I wrote a blog post off the back of which Tom bought me a pizza. Which led to 8 blissful years at GDS doing the best work of my life with the best people, in the best (not perfect but definitely best) company culture I’ve ever worked in.

This week, familiar things are afoot. The baroness is back, the Pope is preaching, the GDS-watchers are abuzz and the stars are aligned for another exciting shake-up of the digital centre of government. 

So I thought I’d better write another post. 

My wishlist for the new digital centre

There are others who think more strategically than me about this stuff. But I’ll offer my perspective as someone who was at the heart of GDS for its (imperfect) best days, who quit during a low point when it barely had a heart to still be part of (no disrespect to the delivery teams who have kept doing great work); and who has since been trying to recreate the best of its culture and methods wherever I go.

Given where I went, I’ve also now keenly felt the need for the digital centre to go deeper and broader, both from a local authority perspective during my time in Croydon, and now in an ALB where the crumbs from the digital top table feel meagre indeed. 

Here’s what’s been put into the world this week:

• The official announcement of the new Digital Centre Design Panel
• Martha Lane Fox’s main takeaways from the panel’s first meeting 
• Replies to Panel member Jeni Tennison’s open call for input on BlueSky
• Matt Jukes’s ideas for the new digital centre design panel
• Laura Yarrow’s thoughts on a vision for the future of digital gov
• Earlier posts resurfaced as input to the panel: Frankie Roberto’s list of possible digital public works and Mark O’Neill’s 4 tier model for good service design

What follows are the notes I made for myself before a chat with Emily the other week, polished up (and augmented a tad with stuff I’ve thought of since).

A clear, energising, unifying digital vision for the public sector 

2024 isn’t 2010 and “revolution not evolution” isn’t the right clarion call this time. But I’d love this evolutionary wave to be tinged with a more visionary, disruptive zeal nonetheless. 

To my mind, the bold, unapologetically subversive vision we still need is one of service design and platform thinking taken to their full conclusion: a public sector reorganised around the services it provides, the platforms that power them and the data it stewards. One that uses test and learn approaches to develop policy and services in parallel. 

That vision is already out there, for example in Tom’s Code for America talk, and SFC’s blog posts on what we’re here for and government 2030. It’s time for a new articulation along those lines, updated for where we are now and to speak to the new political imperatives and missions it supports. 

In other words, let’s stop tinkering and Kate Tarling the heck out of everything, with gusto.

(Good service designers are verbs).

Or in other, other words: sure, let’s design a new digital centre of government for now, and house it in DSIT for now, but its 15-year mission should be to design itself away into the vertical and horizontal gubbins of a redesigned everything. 

A clear, strategic service offering

The “where to play” of the new centre’s strategy must surely lie in creating the conditions and providing shared tools and services to catalyse service redesign across the public sector. 

That’s also the glue that binds together the merged functions of CDDO, GDS and iAI. Users need help clearing the path and easy access to tools and services that accelerate their work across all aspects of profession and capability, standards and assurance, platforms and patterns, and emerging tech in order to go forth and transform abundantly. 

In other words, let’s Kate Tarling the new centre of government itself. It should be an exemplar of the very thing it espouses (‘dogfooding’ service design, to use that horrible metaphor).

Mandate and unblocking

There’s no getting away from it, a key ingredient that made GDS 1.0 the place where I got to do the best work of my career was the formidable Maude-Bracken backstop. (For balance: there are plenty of learnings about how to burn fewer bridges, but the point stands).

So, thing number one when it comes to creating the conditions for reform remains the ability to have people’s backs when they inevitably hit against the toughest part of this work: those pesky internal politics and vested interests.

Persuading and explaining, finding coalitions of the willing to be exemplars, and Brownian motion approaches to disseminating digital maturity get us so far but no further. Like it or not, sometimes you just need your dad/mum to be bigger than their dad/mum. 

How this can work inside of DSIT is a key question I’d like to see addressed, but I’m hopeful.

Go higher, deeper and broader this time around

Higher: We need schemes to get more people from digital careers to progress into SCS and CEO positions across central, local and arms-length government. We need a concerted effort to grow the digital understanding of those who are already in senior posts, or come into them from other career paths. Nothing changes without fixing this. Create this condition, deliver toolkits and services for this!

Deeper: From what I hear, many of the GDS-alike DDaT directorates in Whitehall depts are largely kept at bay doing surface-level UX work, glancing off the solid rock faces of their analogue institutions’ status quo. As others have said, too many digital services in 2024 remain little more than online versions of their paper roots, fundamentally operating how they always did. How might the new centre help all such teams get more traction or mandate for collaborative, whole service transformation? Create this condition, deliver toolkits and services for this!

Broader: I had no idea how blinkered my central gov perspective was (nor how well funded I was!) until I left for local gov and ALB land. It’s hard going out here, and the centre feels like a cold, distant star. Things that helped me most in the past 5 years were the Local Digital Declaration, DDaT Capability Framework and the Functional Standards, as levers to say “look, this stuff I’m saying is real, these job titles you’ve never heard of aren’t made up, and our paymasters are compelling us to fund products not projects and work in these user-centred, iterative ways”. So yeah. Create this condition, deliver toolkits and services for this!

Tangible things I have longed for in recent years include: 

• Access (ideally free) to DDaT skills training for my teams, and the people they interface with who we need to convert, which I can trust to be teaching the right, public sector flavour of UCD and agile. Reinstate the GDS Academy, basically. 
• Help with leadership development. Literally offer this as a service: come and do L&D sessions and digital maturity workshops in the boardrooms of LAs and ALBs. Give talks at the cross-LA and cross-ALB meetings they gather at. Make departments be more demanding of their ALBs about progres on digital transformation.
• Toolkits for governance, demand management, spend controls and assurance. This has been a wicked problem in Croydon and the BFI, and I suspect that’s common.
• Platforms for the rest of us. I won’t reprise the “local GDS” pros and cons, but I urge the new centre to end that tedious debate by doing something. Start small and iterate. Learn from what works (LocalGovDrupal!) Find ways to disrupt the shitty vendor landscape, ideally incubating new civic infrastructure alphas by fully leveraging the capability in amazing SMEs like dxw, TPXImpact and the like.
• Which also means fixing procurement, again. This one backslid badly. 

Get back to measuring what matters

With GOV.UK Forms coming along magnificently, the suite of highest-demand utilities for building digital services is close to being complete (although crucially never finished). 

But a pivotal missing platform is one that facilitates and forces a focus on whole services and how they are performing – overall, and at key points of the service journey.

GDS’s first attempt at this with the Performance Platform ultimately failed, but far from completely, and the idea remains an excellent and essential one to resurrect

I think there’s something game-changing to do in this space, with enormous potential to empower and enable the focus on whole service design I’ve been talking about throughout this post. But I defer to better minds than mine – in particular Ben Welby’s – on what that might look like.

Refresh the rulebooks to focus on flow 

They don’t need ripping up but they do need loosening. I’ll be brief on this point because it’s well known. Something needs to happen to shake up the overly rigid interpretation of agile phases and gate-like assessments; and to embrace a bit more wild iteration and discovery by doing. From the outside, looking back in, the centre feels slow and indulgent. Teams are bloated. We go faster with less money out here in the sticks.

Tell more stories, more often

Another thing I’ve longed for is case studies of service design success in pre-internet organisations, to help me explain and persuade. Where even are the Tarling-esque Service Organisations we can look to, that weren’t greenfield/tech in the first place?

The centre needs to both find and curate those stories, and get back to exemplifying proper working in the open. 

Remember that inside-inside-gov Tumblr from me, Ross and Pete back in the day? We drifted a long way from that unfettered immediacy. There’s been a sharp decline in the frequency of blogging from the centre coupled with a noticeable increase in PR polish and editorial control – even forcing some to break rank and publish their excellent thoughts off to the side.

I see that the godfather of agile comms Giles has also made this point, so make sure you read that. And I agree with Jukesie and Ross, this is about open roadmaps too.

For the people and the planet 

I’m sure the panel doesn’t need telling this but I also don’t want to omit it. Through all of this, it’s vital to design for good outcomes for people and the planet. Bake in inclusion, anti-racism and anti-ableism. Build guardrails. Build for sustainability, security, and trust. Do this above everything else.

Is that too much to ask?

Of course, it’s dead easy to write a wishlist like this. Doing it, in a highly challenged public spending period, with (I imagine) lots of competing VIP stakeholder views… much less so. And even as I write this, I realise there are things here I should be heeding myself in my job at the BFI! 

But I hope this is helpful to someone, a bit.