Genevieve's Journeys

UK government is on an ambitious course to change the way British people contact and use government services.

The government digital strategy http://www.publications.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digital/ has a strap line of

Digital services so good that people prefer to use them

The publishing strategy alone is really breathtaking.

It's the moving to digital service provision, and then to gov.uk so everything is in one place, that is really challenging; challenging to the way that people think about who provides the services that they use, and challenging to the people who work in these departments, to think of themselves not as just department civil servants but part of a greater whole.

You no longer have your little corner of the web; it's part of a single service, that is accessed the same way that you access all your services from government.

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/category/single-government-domain/

The blog is tracking what is happening in this process

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/category/digital-strategy/

And the design principles are the kind that make communication pros cry with joy. (Don't know if this is visible to all, but check)

https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples

The biggest change I see in the communications side, aside from moving to digital, is to deliberately and thoughtfully create a new style - one that is in plain English.

Plain English is the absolute opposite of 'government-ese' that Sir Humphrey lived and thrived on in Yes, Minister. It is the antithesis of political language as it is used by ministers. So this is a huge, huge step.

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/11/13/explaining-gov-policy-gov-uk/

As someone with a passion for writing and communicating, I think it's amazing.

But as someone who has worked with authors, I wonder if this will really happen. I don't have the same confidence in people's willingness to change as I do in the ideas of clear communication in English.

Several other changes on the project management side

- using existing tools: no longer spending squillions on consultants to redesign tools that already exist. The blogs are wordpress; the stats are googlestats; the coding is on something unfortunately called github (another in-joke gone public). https://github.com/

I think this is a consequence of past huge gov't digital projects that have crashed and burned, costing huge amounts of money - trying to digitise the NHS is an example that is still in progress.

- using 'agile' development; which IIUC means develop as you go, release what works for the moment, build on it and update. It avoids the more traditional hangups of 'sitting in a room for months in meetings' gathering requirements; it introduces other problems that require everyone to be up to date, all the time, and never assume that what was decided last week is still valid this week.

- releasing in stages - different depts are getting onto gov.uk at different times, and GDS are developing components as-needed, rather than trying to set the whole framework up perfectly from the outset (and possibly living with legacy errors indefinitely). It requires a modular approach, which is scaleable.

In a way, it's an approach that you could only make work, once people have worked in other environments, seen other systems that didn't work, and thought a lot about what they'd like to see in future. 

It relies on digital-friendly workers who know how to use e-mail and online tools, who know its weaknesses, and who are prepared to learn new tools throughout their working careers.

It couldn't have happened from the start of the Internet; I think we had to go through other approaches, and build the tools and the network and the computing speed we have now, to get this to work.

I am excited; I'd thought my job was ending, and in fact there's scope for me to really get into this approach of working, and I've loved plain English from the first time I met it at Nortel. The prospect of making it work for people rather than be a stick to beat them with is really marvellous.