Corporate report

Government Digital Strategy: quarterly progress report December 2014

Published 16 January 2015

This was published under the 2010 to 2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government

We published the Government Digital Strategy in November 2012 and updated it in December 2013. It sets out 16 actions saying what government will do to:

• create digital services so good that people will choose to use them
• support those who aren’t online
• build digital capability and skills across government
• use digital to improve policymaking

Each department has its own digital strategy, setting out what it will do to respond to these actions. Every 3 months we publish a report on GOV.UK, showing what government has achieved against the strategy’s aims. In December 2013 and December 2014, we published annual reports on what we achieved during these years and our plans for the future.

Foreword by Mike Bracken, Executive Director, Government Digital Service

It’s been 2 years since we published the Government Digital Strategy. Since then we’ve transformed some of government’s most-used services, improving the lives of people all over the country. More than 3.7 million transactions have taken place on exemplar services.

I want to say a huge thank you to everyone involved in making that happen.

Four more exemplars went live this quarter. One of these newly live services, Carer’s Allowance, illustrates brilliantly the importance of our work. In redesigning the application process we cut 170 questions, halving its length. We made it simpler, clearer, and faster for those caring for the most vulnerable in our society to access the benefits they’re entitled to. What could be more important?

Seven more exemplar services have gone into public beta since October, so users can now do things like transfer car ownership or claim redundancy payments online. We’ve also helped people doing business in the UK save valuable time with the Home Office’s Registered Traveller service.

That work goes hand-in-hand with deep business transformation. With the abolition of the paper tax disc, the DVLA have gone from being a department that processes millions of pieces of paper each year to becoming one of our digital flagships.

Obviously no digital service is ever truly ‘done’, but I’m pleased that in all of these cases we’re improving digital services with the help of real users.

Meanwhile I’m delighted we’re only days away from completing the transition of content from more than 300 agencies and arm’s length bodies onto GOV.UK, the single domain for government. Just 2 years ago users were expected to understand the internal organisation of government to interact with it; now you can find all central government content and services in one place. We’ve built more than just a website; we’ve built a publishing platform for government, and thousands of civil servants are working with us to constantly iterate and improve our content.

Similarly, the public release of the GOV.UK Verify platform is a tremendous achievement. The Verify team have done something genuinely revolutionary: they’ve created a federated identity platform that protects citizens’ privacy, and at the same time stimulates a new market of identity services. It will be iterated and improved throughout the beta, as the team cooperates with the first services making use of the platform.

I want to congratulate the thousands of civil servants who have worked to build these new foundations. We’re building a network across government committed to meeting the needs of the people who use our services every day. It’s a culture of public service that deserves to be celebrated.

Onwards!

What we’ve done so far across government

Between October and December, we’ve moved:

• 4 more transformed services into live and a further 2 into public beta (which means there is now a total of 16 services available for public use)
• 53 more agency and arm’s length body (ALB) websites to GOV.UK, completing the planned transition programme of over 300 sites

We’ve made GOV.UK Verify (our identity assurance service) available for public use in 3 services.

We’ve published public performance data about the traffic to GOV.UK

We announced a third set of open standards for government.

We ran a further 3 service manager induction programmes and 4 open programmes, and made a digital foundation day programme available to all departments through Civil Service Learning.

What’s coming next

Between January and March 2015 we plan to make a further 4 services available for public use: redundancy payments, rural support (Common Agricultural Policy), personalised registrations and vehicle management. By March 2015 we will:

• identify and provide guidance on how services should be developed and improved after they’ve gone live
• award a contract for Crown Hosting
• run a Sprint 15 event to share our learning and progress to date on transforming significant government services
• publish our digital and technology skills and learning matrix
• complete the Cabinet Office technology transformation programme

GOV.UK

Moving agencies and arm’s length bodies (ALBs) to GOV.UK

To support the transition of agencies and ALB websites to GOV.UK, the Government Digital Service (GDS) provided user needs and content training to these organisations. During October, November and December GDS trained over 200 people to support GOV.UK.

Between October and December, 53 more websites moved to GOV.UK. This means we’ve now completed work to move all core publishing of agency and ALB sites across to GOV.UK by our target date of December 2014. For the first time almost all government information is available in one place.

Use of GOV.UK

As more websites moved to GOV.UK, usage figures have risen. The highest number of unique visitors and visits was in the first week of the quarter (September 28th to October 4th). There were 10.3 million unique visitors and 15.3 million visits. This was largely as a result of the new Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) tax disc rules coming into effect on 1 October, alongside a number of high traffic HMRC tax sites moving over to GOV.UK.

On 16 October we had our 1 billionth visit since GOV.UK was launched - the day before GOV.UK’s second birthday.

In late November GOV.UK was ranked the 31st most used website in the UK (up from 42nd in January 2014, and 76th in October 2013).

Other government websites

The most recent quarterly report on government websites was published on 1 November 2014. At present 1,882 government websites have been closed and a further 17 unused domain addresses have been retired.

GDS blogged in October on an audit it was undertaking of the 1,900 public service domains (covering local government etc) to assess whether these sites continue to operate within the criteria for having a gov.uk domain.

Action against misleading websites

Phishing and scamming

GDS leads cross-government action on the growing problem of misleading websites. These are third-party sites that charge for services that people can get for free, or at a lower cost, through GOV.UK.

We’ve been working with departments to identify these sites. Where they place sponsored advertisements on search engine websites such as Google or Bing we’ve alerted the search engine provider. As these sites have often broken search engine providers’ terms and conditions, they have taken down a number of these adverts from their search result pages.

We’ve seen a significant reduction in the number of registered complaints. This indicates that the ‘#startatGOV.UK’ message is beginning to influence user behaviour.

Redesigning services

GDS is supporting departments as they redesign and improve 25 of the most important and highly used services to make them digital by default. These services range from registering to vote or applying for EU farming subsidies to applying for benefits or arranging a prison visit. Some services have mainly individual users; others have business users.

We call these ‘exemplar services’ because we want departments to learn from them about what they need to do to redesign services effectively. We’ll use what we’ve learned to extend and improve digital skills and activity across the whole civil service.

We regularly report on what we’ve achieved on our transformation dashboard.

Service transformation

Four more exemplar services went live this quarter. They are:

• View driving licence
• Carer’s Allowance
• Apply to an employment tribunal
• Registered Traveller Service

Claim Carer’s Allowance online

View driving licence, which allows drivers to access their record online, has received well over a million page views from users in more than 200 countries.

PAYE, the first exemplar supported by the new GOV.UK Verify service, became available for public use in beta in October.

Find an apprenticeship was released for public use in December, making it easier for 16 to 21 year olds to search, view and apply for apprenticeships using their mobiles and tablets. PAYE for employees was also made available for public use by going into public beta.

This means that we now have 16 services available for use by the public.

In October GDS’s Director of Transformation Mike Beaven spoke at the Agile Business Conference, saying there had been more than 3.7 million user transactions across the publicly accessible services since their launch.

Exemplar projects: what we’re learning

We want to make sure we learn from this transformation work. We’re looking at how organisational structures and culture need to adapt, and staff skills improve.

From the start of the transformation programme we’ve been working to develop skills and expertise in the government departments and agencies responsible for the exemplar services. Most services are now effectively using agile methodologies. User researchers are fast becoming the heart of each delivery team, meaning that an understanding of how users actually behave is becoming integral to the development and provision of new government services.

We’ve also continued our work on agile governance. This covers things like principles, processes, case studies and resources. We’ve been testing the principles and writing guidance with input from people across government departments. The second instalment of our guidelines on agile governance for service delivery was added to the Service Manual.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) set up a digital buddy initiative where all its digital transformation projects have direct support from a senior digital leader from elsewhere in the department with personal experience in delivering complex digital services.

Other service transformations

Other government departments continue to make their services digital by default alongside the exemplar projects.

The Department for Education’s (DfE) ‘Get into Teaching’ site went into public beta following departmental self-certification against the Digital by Default Service Standard.

The Department of Health (DH) is redesigning major transactions it manages. For example, blood donation appointments booking passed the Service Standard to go live in October, and organ donation registration will shortly be assessed.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) made its new online consular appointments booking service available in public beta using the approach developed by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for the prison visit booking service. This sort of approach, known as ‘government as a platform’, develops common platforms that all of government can use, saving money and creating more consistent user experiences.

Meeting the Digital by Default Service Standard

The Government Service Design Manual, first published in April 2013, gives departments information and guidance to help them achieve the Digital by Default Service Standard. This sets out the criteria we use to judge whether a digital service is good enough to for public use through GOV.UK.

This has now been fully in force for 9 months. GDS teams undertook 31 assessments between October and December. Each service is assessed when an application is made to move it to the next development stage.

Departments are now self-certifying services handling under 100,000 transactions each year. GDS trained a further 50 departmental assessors to do this from October to December. Ten departments now have an assessment panel in place. They are:

• Home Office
• MOJ
• Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)
• Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)
• DVLA
• HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC)
• FCO
• DH
• DWP
• Cabinet Office (CO)

DWP are developing this approach but have not yet run a panel.

We publish all the assessment reports on GOV.UK, including the departmental ones. This makes the process open and transparent, and helps other services to better understand the assessment process and its requirements.

Helping more people use digital services

We want everyone who is able to use our digital services to do so. To persuade people who are already online to use government digital services, we need to make those services preferable to alternatives, and publicise them.

We work with a range of other organisations to help people currently offline gain the basic digital skills to go online safely. If people can’t use digital services on their own, we find other ways that we can support them so they still get the services they need.

Increasing digital take-up

DVLA saw more digital take-up as a result of changing various aspects of its services, such as getting rid of the paper road tax disc on 1 October. It also consulted on creating new incentives for using digital channels, such as charging less for online driving licence renewal. It removed legislative barriers to making personal registration and vehicle management services digital by default (eg getting rid of the requirement to physically surrender a log-book).

However, a report published by the Confederation of British Industry in October said that government still should do more to keep pace with digital technology. It found that while 77% of people bought or ordered goods or services online, only 41% interacted with public authorities online in the previous 12 months.

To help narrow that gap, we’re making it clear to service managers how we expect them to plan to maximise digital take-up before they’re assessed against the Service Standard. We’re training them and developing take-up plans with a number of exemplar services to share learning and best practice.

GDS supported the Carers Allowance digital service on work to boost digital take-up. So far, over half of applications have been made digitally. It’s been testing what type of interventions are most successful as well as looking at ways to measure digital take-up more accurately. The aim is to publish the results of this work in early 2015.

The DfE put a new contact us form live on GOV.UK. All users can now contact the department through a single form. As well as making it easier for people to contact the department, it’s expected to make the process cheaper and more efficient to run.

HMRC has revised regulations so it can send information digitally to support the Digital Self-Assessment exemplar service. And it’s running a project to replace paper forms with electronic versions.

Helping people use digital services: assisted digital provision

Not everyone who uses government services is online, and not everyone will be able to use digital services independently. The government has to make sure everyone who’s entitled to a service can get access to it.

No digital service will go live without appropriate support for people who aren’t online, so they can use the digital services through non-digital ways, such as face to face, by phone and through intermediaries. In some cases, people may be offered help to use the digital channel independently.

Piloting assisted digital support

Several services started to deliver assisted digital support as they went through public beta and into live. MOJ blogged about assisted digital support for its prison visit booking service and how it is using insight from this to improve the overall service.

The GDS team has also been piloting the way in which this support is described. It is using the findings to test and improve the way this support is described on GOV.UK. It’s also done work on understanding the user journey for assisted digital.

Helping people get online: digital inclusion

Government Digital Inclusion Strategy

We published the government Digital Inclusion Strategy in April 2014. The strategy explains what departments, partners and GDS will do to help people go online.

Results from the annual survey by our partner, the BBC, were published in November. We use this to measure progress on this work, and its results indicated that 20% of UK adults still lack basic online skills.

Working together

So far, 62 organisations from the public, private and voluntary sector have signed up to the UK Digital Inclusion Charter and agreed to help people learn new skills and put them into practice.

The Tinder Foundation led a partnership campaign, Get Online Week (#GOLW14) in October. The week included roughly 2,500 local events, helping more than 50,000 people take their first steps to use the internet.

Digital inclusion and libraries

GDS’ Digital Inclusion team worked with William Sieghart’s Independent Library Report for England to explore how libraries can further support digital inclusion activity. The report concluded that access to free WiFi should be a vital and core component of any future public library offer.

GDS identified the need and opportunities that could be fulfilled by free wifi. This involved visits and consultations in libraries, and a survey of around 3000 library users.

Identifying where and how to target our digital inclusion efforts

GDS ran a cross-government research project to determine the number and characteristics of digitally excluded government service users in the UK. This will identify the support they need to get online or use government services and their preferences for doing so. We will have the results by the early new year.

Increasing the number of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and voluntary organisations, charities and social enterprises going online

BIS is working with industry on inclusion initiatives linked to broader SMEs and individuals’ skills work. It aims to help 1.6m more small and medium-sized businesses to trade online by 2018, by:

• making it easy for businesses to find tools and resources
• raising awareness of the importance of trading online
• helping local partners to engage and support businesses

In November BIS launched a national campaign (part of the ‘Business is GREAT’ campaign) to motivate businesses to go digital. This included resources on GOV.UK to help businesses do more online and a refreshed business section on Go ON UK’s website.

It also provided £2 million of funding for 22 Local Enterprise Partnerships to deliver local digital activity for small businesses and to test new approaches. One example is a new digital TV channel in Manchester which provides easily-accessible and cost-effective advice to businesses, supported by events, advice and networking sessions.

Digital inclusion links to wider policy outcomes

Digital leaders have been identifying areas where building digital skills can be part of wider policy issues.

An example of this is the work currently taking place with offenders. BIS and the National Offender Management Service have created a virtual campus to help prisoners develop the skills they need to become more employable in an increasingly digital world.

MOJ has included digital inclusion training as part of the assisted digital process. This supports users of services such as booking a prison visit or lodging a civil claim, so that less confident users can improve their digital skills over the long term.

Building civil servants’ digital skills

The Digital Inclusion Strategy commits departments to:

• making sure all their staff have the digital skills necessary to do their jobs effectively
• use and improve online government services, eg that they meet level 7 on the digital inclusion scale

GDS’s digital inclusion team and Civil Service Learning updated the definitions for ‘digital’ in the Annual Skills Review to reflect the digital inclusion scale. This helps departments understand their staff’s digital capabilities and identify what learning and development opportunities they need. Departments completed this information gathering by November. GDS will use the results to work with Civil Service Learning to provide new training that will help all civil servants reach level 7 on the digital inclusion scale by 2016.

Helping civil servants understand digital

The Civil Service Capabilities Plan, published in April 2013 and updated in June 2014, identified building digital skills as a priority so civil servants can use the internet and technology to make government policy and digital services better.

Strategy and digital leadership

Three departments appointed new digital leaders during this quarter. They are Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), HM Treasury and Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

Three departments published updated departmental digital strategies: HMRC, DH and Department for International Development (DFID).

Cabinet Office support across government

Recruitment

GDS’s Recruitment Hub continues to respond to departmental requests for help in hiring interims. It is also helping make both permanent and fixed term appointments into senior civil servant (SCS) and other digital roles. This includes:

• shaping job roles and advertising approaches, learning from experience across government
• advice on salary levels and on using specialist recruitment companies
• running campaigns
• joining recruitment panels

Between October and December, the hub successfully helped recruit a number of leadership positions including:

• Home Office Chief Technology Officer and Chief Digital Officer
• Information Technology Director General for DWP
• Portfolio Director for Home Office
• Deputy Director of Digital and Publishing for DH

It also helped with SCS recruitment for:

• Department for Transport (DfT)
• DECC
• Office for National Statistics (ONS)
• BIS
• Ministry of Defence (MOD)

GDS also helped HMRC, DVLA, MOJ, CO and DWP hire heads of design. They will work within the digital teams, helping with the design of exemplars and other digital services to make sure these are user centred, easy to use and elegant.

DVLA became a sponsor of Swansea’s TechHub initiative, which works with local education establishments (including both of Swansea’s universities), local businesses and the community to develop a future supply of skilled local talent.

Guidance and advice

Between October and December we’ve:

• published a community development handbook which is a guide for people developing communities of practice in government
• run 3 service manager induction programmes and 5 open programme events, which between them involved 82 people from 27 different departments or agencies; we reviewed these to ensure they met user needs
• run 2 digital foundation days (a workshop for people involved in digital services) and made these available through Civil Service Learning to make it easier and more straightforward to meet departmental demand for them
• hosted our first Stack Tech Conference to build a community of practice around technical architects, developers and testers in government (over 90 people attended)

Improved digital training and development

The second cohort of the Digital and Technology (DaT) fast stream started in October. This scheme provides career paths and training linked to current and future digital and technology roles in government.

A digital and technology skills and learning matrix was piloted in over 15 departments and agencies. It was used in digital transformation activities such as:

• running or designing assessments of digital and technology skills in DfE, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), MOJ and Crown Prosecution Service
• creating development plans in Skills Funding Agency and DVLA
• improving the digital foundation programme and designing digital expert programmes (eg for user researchers) run through DWP’s Digital Academy
• creating consistent skills specifications for digital roles across government
• defining the digital leadership skills needed across government to achieve service transformation

GDS and BIS are looking at whether this work could be applied more widely to the skills that employers require, to help understand which are ‘hard to fill’ skills gaps and which are in particular demand.

DWP: Building our digital capability

How departments are becoming more digital

BIS

BIS has established a digital and technology team with specialist skills to work on service transformation across the department.

It held its second annual Digital Fortnight in October, including sessions led by 2 of its exemplars, and looking at subjects such as agile methodologies, digital inclusion and assisted digital.

It’s also working with staff across the department to build digital skills relevant to their work. To maintain momentum after the October event, it started a digital buddies scheme to provide peer-to-peer support in using digital.

DCMS

The department held an all-staff conference in October built around the theme of creating a more digitally able and agile workforce. This included workshops on new software and hardware available in the department and sessions on digital support for policymaking, from social media research to effective use of real-time monitoring and evaluation dashboards.

Defra

Defra began to analyse results from a capability review conducted over the summer. This identified digital skills areas for further work, particularly agile delivery awareness, identity assurance, using online communities, service design principles, user stories, open standards and open source technologies.

DFID

The department started using a digital skills self-assessment tool during November and December, designed to help staff identify the right learning opportunities to meet their needs. It also ran a series of targeted digital skills development sessions for groups such as the leadership group, heads of profession, new graduates, policy staff and advisers.

DH

The department launched a digital passport in November, equivalent to level 7 of the digital inclusion scale. It also hosted a second Digital Champions summit in November, plus a digital ‘show and tell’ event for senior leaders, digital champions and other interested staff.

DfT

The department set up a new continuous improvement team which began to work alongside the digital team looking at the view driving licence exemplar.

DWP

DWP ran 3 targeted Sprint events: Sprint DWP, Digital Leaders; Sprint DWP, Operations; and Sprint DWP, Security. It began to implement a social media strategy, trialling how wider understanding and use of social media could support work coaches and advisers to help more jobseekers into employment. This ran initially in 3 job centres, at London Bridge, Newport and Rusholme.

DWP also developed a tag cloud of important digital terms. It started using this to help raise awareness in the department of the range of issues involved in making an organisation digital and to inform the syllabus for its academies.

DWP tag cloud

FCO

FCO began beta testing new digital training including courses, self learning and group learning materials.

HMRC

HMRC used Building the Future events to share plans for digital service transformation. It has built identification and prioritisation of digital skills into its workforce planning, and it has helped GDS shape future training approaches for SCS and policy specialists.

Home Office

The department ran roadshows during December, in collaboration with its Immigration Platform Technology team, to raise the profile of digital with staff nationwide.

Sessions were run in Liverpool, Sheffield, Croydon and London and included show and tell events, demonstrations of services and talks by digital specialists including the department’s chief digital officer.

Following DCLG’s move into Home Office offices at Marsham Street, Home Office is working with them to identify where they could work together to promote digital services.

MOD

MOD completed a survey of existing digital skills in the department and its future requirements. It started to look at establishing digital as a recognised professional pathway in defence. Defence Equipment and Support embarked on a digital buddies scheme to help improve digital literacy among its staff.

In October, it ran its first Digital Innovations Awards. Winners included a project to improve MOD’s online HR system (reducing call volumes to internal helplines) and a virtual learning environment created to help military personnel get professional training.

MOJ

The MOJ specialist digital team worked with colleagues across the department to test different ways to embed digital thinking and skills successfully in policy and operational areas. It helped train existing staff where skills gaps were identified and continued to recruit specialist skills where necessary.

The digital team continued to work with the MOJ Policy Excellence Group and Policy Hub to work on innovative solutions to policy issues. Work started on developing a common intranet platform that can be used to support digital working across the whole department.

DECC

DECC ran a third ‘pulse survey’ in September to track and measure awareness and understanding of digital in the department. The findings demonstrated that awareness of the digital agenda stood at 86% (compared with the 12 month target of 75%), supported through team briefing programmes and intranet coverage.

Digital working across government

The government is establishing or sharing common approaches across departments in a number of areas supporting digital. GDS leads on much of this activity, and also supports department-led work where requested.

We are keen to share learning with other governments too. The government founded and hosted the D5, a group of the most digitally advanced governments in the world (South Korea, Estonia, Israel, New Zealand and the UK), at a 2-day event in December. These governments signed a charter of principles for digital development.

Assistant Minister KIM Sung-Lyul speaking at the D5 event in London

The government also led a delegation to South Korea to participate in a UK/South Korea IT policy forum, covering topics such as 5G, the Internet of Things and government support for digital start ups.

Technology leadership

The Technology Leaders Network was set up to ensure that government is equipped with the right technology to support great digital services, and that best practice and learning is applied and shared consistently across government.

Technology Leaders attended a UK government technology event run by MOJ on 20 November. They discussed how the concept of ‘government as a platform’ could be developed further. On 11 November, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined his future vision for technology to them and digital leaders.

Technology Leaders agreed guidance on how civil servants can use open internet tools securely, based on work initially undertaken by MOJ. They also reviewed the government’s first technology pipeline, which is designed to help government coordinate technical development.

Identity assurance

GOV.UK Verify

The identity assurance programme works with central government departments and agencies, as well as other public service providers, to plan their use of the new identity assurance service. It will provide a better, faster and safer way to prove you are who you say you are when using government services online.

GOV.UK Verify (the identity assurance programme’s service) entered public beta on 14 October. This means that users can use GOV.UK Verify without having to receive a special invitation.

We published information on the services that plan to start using GOV.UK Verify over the next 6 months.

Growing the Identity Assurance Hub

GDS held a second market engagement day on 30 October. It published a summary of the contract and other information to help to inform the market.

The Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) was published at the end of November, with the deadline for tenders at the end of January. In the second procurement, we’ll be looking to set up a framework with between 5 and 10 identity providers.

Buying digital services

Digital Marketplace

The Digital Marketplace provides a single place for the public sector to buy digital and technology services. It moved into public beta in early November, replacing the decommissioned CloudStore. It focuses initially on the G-Cloud 4 and 5 catalogues, with G-Cloud 6 and Digital Services 2 being available by early 2015.

A dashboard for the Digital Marketplace measures the service usage and performance.

The G-Cloud 6 invitation to tender was published on Tenders Electronic Daily (TED, the online version of the OJEU) on 6 November 2014. The framework is expected to go live in early February next year.

GDS developed an improved service submission portal on the Digital Marketplace for G-Cloud 6, completely reworking the questions that create the public service descriptions. This was to help suppliers better structure their data to highlight their services’ features and benefits. It also allows buyers to be able to find services that meet their requirements in a clearer, simpler and faster way. Although the service didn’t have to be part of the formal service standard assessment process, it opted to go through it to ensure it would fully meet user needs. It was one of the first services to map where its service sat on the digital inclusion scale.

We’ve published a Digital Marketplace blog covering information about how we’ve been preparing for the launch of G-Cloud 6 by:

• developing the new service
• enhancing features
• improving search
• making changes to the onboarding process for suppliers

We’ve created a market engagement strategy to support our buyer and supplier communities and developed a Digital by Default education programme for our next round of regional events.

Digital Services framework

In November 2013, GDS and Crown Commercial Service created the Digital Services framework. It gives government easy access to suppliers of all sizes who can design and build public services that are digital by default and focused on user needs.

Digital Services 2 (the second iteration of this framework) went to OJEU in December. Based on current timescales and plans to eventually decommission the Digital Services Store, we expect the new service to be available from May 2015.

The Digital Services Managed Service, which central government buyers are required to use, has been going through a discovery to make it a digital by default service available in the Digital Marketplace.

Digital platforms shared across government

Performance measurement

The Performance Platform, which provides structured data to help departments improve services, continues to grow. There is now a range of detailed service and overview dashboards. All departments publish information openly and transparently about how their digital services are performing.

During the quarter, GDS created an Admin App, a minimum viable product tool that allows services to build and deploy performance dashboards without having to use a developer. It also built a new tool to deal with application processing times so people can see how long it takes to apply for a service.

Analytics and data science

We believe in using data to inform design. GDS has:

• helped exemplar services review their analytics capabilities to identify what skills and tools each has available and to identify any problems
• increased dedicated product analysis support for teams
• started a community of practice for performance analysts working on government digital services, which so far has 55 members from across government (this held a ‘show and tell’ session attended by 30 people, with 6 talks from their peers)

Over the last 3 months, we’ve:

• helped exemplar services implement analytics and develop capability (eg helping the Common Agricultural Policy project build ‘conversion funnels’ that measure users’ progress through the service), and decide on reporting requirements after the service goes live
• published a detailed case study on Carer’s Allowance service analytics and how the data has led to service improvements
• explored how data visualisations can provide powerful insights into how different types of content on GOV.UK are visited

The data science team has published over 12 alpha projects since it was set up last year. These are rapidly developed projects designed to show the potential of data science in government. They have gone a long way to communicating and demonstrating how this relatively new discipline can be used effectively in government. For example it is examining how statistical modelling tools can be used to improve customer insight.

The team have supported knowledge transfer by providing one-to-one technical assistance to teams across government who are interested in doing data science themselves.

The government’s first data science accelerator programme ran in November to discover what help people from other analytical professions (like statisticians) need so they can acquire new skills to help them become data scientists. The second group started in December.

Researching user needs

GDS set up a user research lab for government departments to use. It shared experience on doing this with UK government departments and beyond, including the NHS, DVLA, DWP, the Scottish government and the US General Services Administration.

Over this quarter, GDS alone tested services with more than 1,400 users: an average of 22 each day. This is in addition to work carried out across all departments.

To share learning and increase consistency, GDS holds monthly cross-government meetings of user researchers. We have also shared learning through the GDS user research methods wiki, and user research blog reaching more than 4,000 people.

Researchers worked with designers to identify evidence-based design patterns to use consistently across GOV.UK forms and transaction pages. Designers and user researchers collaborated in person and on the design patterns wiki and outcomes were published on the Service Design Manual.

Government IT systems

GDS is developing a common, cross-government approach to the things that everyone uses like desktops and hosting. We’re calling this Common Technology Services (CTS). Our aim is to show a different way of designing and providing technology to the civil service. We want users to have modern, flexible technology services that are at least as good as those people use at home. These services will also be cheaper than the services currently in place.

The Public Services Network (PSN) is a programme which joins up network infrastructure across the UK public sector. PSN carried out all recommendations made by the government Major Projects Authority by the end of November. The Technology Leaders agreed a revision to PSN’s compliance regime including a transition plan involving a pilot of the process, which will be completed by early 2015.

Cabinet Office guidance on spending controls was refreshed in November. The savings approach for IT and digital spend controls was reviewed and discussed with the National Audit Office to agree on new and existing methodologies.

A number of departments are identifying common services and platforms that can be used across all the programmes they run. For example, DWP is looking at change of circumstances notifications and case and task management approaches. BIS ran a forum for agencies’ digital leaders to explore how identity assurance could be approached across its range of services for individuals and businesses. The international-facing departments are looking at aligning processes and systems through a common platform.

Crown hosting

We negotiated with potential suppliers to supply hosting services for government, and sought clarification of legal, technical and commercial issues. We will select a preferred bidder in early 2015, with a view to the service starting in March.

Learning from the Cabinet Office’s technology transformation programme

The Cabinet Office technology transformation programme (COTT) has developed common technology platforms for all CO staff (plus some from CCS and DCMS) who work with information classed at OFFICIAL level under government protective marking guidance. This covers the majority of information created or worked on by civil servants. The programme will allow staff to do their job faster and more effectively, and is expected to save significant sums.

By the end of December, we’d moved around 2,000 users from the old, outsourced IT system to the new technology services. Most applications are cloud-based and accessed through a browser which keeps the technology services loosely coupled. This allows services to be swapped out for better user experience and value as and when needed. The remaining 1,300 users will be migrated on to the new technology services in the early new year, with the programme due to complete and close by the end of March 2015.

CTS has been using the experience of COTT to help departments adopt cloud collaboration software. Pilot projects are running in a number of departments including HMRC and MOJ. It also ran a discovery for a technology transformation approach in the Home Office to replace current IT.

Open standards

Departments made plans to update their documents to Open Document Format (ODF), PDF/A and HTML5 on GOV.UK.

The Open Standards Board selected 2 more standards for use across government: vcard and icalendar. For public emergency alert messaging, government will adopt CAP 1.2 (Common Alerting Protocol), subject to some further scrutiny.

GDS hosted a Plugfest in December where developers from across the world came together to fix problems with interoperability when users share documents across different types of software using different devices.

New approaches to government technical architecture

A sub-group of the Digital Leaders network explored common needs around data formats and exchange. This will help us understand where to focus our efforts as we develop a modern service architecture for government services. It also reviewed the role of architecture, quality assurance and technical governance.

We’ll be using this information to inform priorities for development of APIs (application programming interfaces) for core government services. We’ll also be recommending principles, standards and priorities for data formats and exchange. The architecture team is working with Home Office, MOJ and DVLA on this.

We have started to consult on what would be useful APIs for us to build once we turn our attention to this in the next year. We’ve also started work to simplify the underlying technical architecture of the GOV.UK publishing platform to enable both read and write APIs to be developed across all information published on the site. This should increase our capacity to publish reliable data rapidly.

GDS led a cross-government and industry taskforce to define technical and business solutions for energy companies to release consumer energy data to third parties with consumer consent. The aim was to agree these without the need for legislation. DECC led a ministerial roundtable bringing together the largest energy companies and other third parties in October. DECC are now liaising with the energy industry to agree an implementation date for this.

Departments’ use of APIs includes:

• DVLA’s link to enable the insurance industry to check driver details at the point of quote and renewal
• validation of driving licences in support of identity verification through GOV.UK Verify
• reuse of open data from DFID, other government departments and private sector suppliers by the Development Tracker
• MOJ’s tribunals database team improving access to information about the outcome of trials and tribunals
• ONS’s Improving Dissemination Programme releasing data from 40 statistical titles via an API and Data Explorer tools

Digital policymaking

The Cabinet Office Government Innovation Group has continued to run targeted activities to use social media and GOV.UK channels to support policymaking. It also led a cross-departmental initiative to create and test an online policymaking toolkit to guide civil servants across government on using tools (both digital and offline) that help make policymaking more agile, open and evidence-based.

In October, Cabinet Office launched new social media guidance for civil servants.

Many departments already use digital tools to engage with the public and to improve policymaking. For example:

• DH’s digital team was shortlisted for a Civil Service Award for their communications work on transparency, publicity and community engagement supporting the G8 Dementia Summit
• Defra has extended use of digital engagement tools, which are being used by the Smarter Guidance and Waste Policy teams
• DFID’s Development Tracker has enabled the public to understand the location, scope and cost of their programmes of work
• Defra and DWP ran a joint Policy Week in November to highlight open policymaking approaches and blogged on digital and policy in DWP
• FCO began beta testing a small innovation fund to encourage the use of new digital tools and techniques in policy work
• all police forces now have the option to use TrackMy Crime, a portal developed by the Home Office and MOJ to allow victims of crime to follow the police investigation and response
• MOD’s Armed Forces Covenant team used Facebook to consult with users to help shape their future service
• digital tools were used extensively (alongside other channels) to gather views and generate ideas as part of the Northern Futures initiative, which aims to find ways that the northern cities in England can work together to compete with cities around the world; 195 ideas were submitted on the website and over 7,000 people visited the platform.

Defra Policy Week