Corporate report

Government Digital Strategy: quarterly progress report October 2014

Published 15 October 2014

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, we published an annual report on what we achieved in 2013 and our plans for the future.

Foreword by Mike Bracken, Executive Director, Government Digital Service

We’re now 21 months into our work on the Government Digital Strategy actions. Increasingly, government is seeing digital as ‘the way we do things round here’. Digital is being used to help people to do important things in their life - registering to vote, claiming vital benefits and managing their tax affairs. And it’s also being used to improve the way government plans those services, providing better data and evidence for policymaking, and better channels to consult and involve people.

Recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) research showed over three-quarters of adults in Great Britain used the internet every day, with almost 7 out of every 10 adults accessing the internet ‘on the go’. They want simpler, clearer and faster access to government information and services so we’ve been moving 300 plus government websites to GOV.UK. Well over 80% have been moved already and we’re on track to finish this by the end of December. We’ve 50 more sites to do; once that’s complete most government information will be available in one place, presented to consistently high standards.

We’re also pressing on with transforming some of the most significant services in government. At the end of September, 6 services were live. By the end of March 2015 we expect to have 20 exemplar services being used by the public, in live or public beta. Departments are already using what they’ve learned from this work to start transforming a wider range of services.

To support this revolution in the way government deals with the public, we’re changing the way government works. HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) opened a digital delivery centre in Newcastle, a first for government. We’ve been persuading great technical and digital experts to join us, many who haven’t worked for government before. Over the past 12 months nearly 100 have joined us. We’re using their leadership, experience and insights to take us to a new level. We’re continuing to develop the digital skills of civil servants already working hard on making digital services work for the public. And finally we’re making sure that we equip them with world-class tools to do a great job.

We’re shaping government services around real user needs, based on data rather than assumptions. We’ve now got a policy lab working on digital issues, we’re pulling together a data science team, and we’ve established a state-of-the-art user research lab. And we’re getting more digital talent into the government supply chain by making it easier for a wider range of businesses to work with us.

We’ve got a lot of work still to do. Everything can’t change overnight. But our organisational attitude and mindset is starting to change fundamentally, which makes a huge difference to what is possible.

Onwards!

What we’ve done so far across government

Between July and September, we moved:

• 3 more transformed services to live
• 61 more agency and arm’s length body (ALB) websites to GOV.UK

We ran:

• Sprint Beta which gave teams working on digital projects across government opportunities to share what they’ve learned
• training for over 300 lead and content editors on user needs, web writing, GOV.UK style and publisher tools (meaning we’ve now trained nearly 1,000 people)

We also saw the opening of HMRC’s new digital delivery centre in Newcastle, the first of its kind in government. HMRC updated its digital strategy.

We launched our new Digital Marketplace to provide a single place for the public sector to buy from the G-Cloud and digital services frameworks.

What’s coming next

Between October and December we expect a further 6 exemplar services to go live. This means 20 exemplars will then be accessible to the public as live or public beta services.

We’ll finish moving the HMRC website and the remaining agency and ALB websites to GOV.UK. And we’ll move the GOV.UK Verify service from private to public beta.

We’ll publish:

• performance data about how well GOV.UK is meeting its users’ needs
• open document formats guidance

We’ll announce a third set of open standards for government.

We’ll run a further 3 Service Manager induction programmes and 4 open programmes, and make a digital foundation day programme available to all departments through Civil Service Learning.

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, Government Digital Service (GDS) is providing user needs and content training to these organisations. During July, August and September, GDS trained more than 300 content editors.

Maintaining high and consistent standards is important. GDS completed a round of spot-check reports on the quality of departments’ content, set up a content design community to share learning and maintain consistency, and held 3 content clinics to help departmental publishers.

Between July and September, 61 more websites moved to GOV.UK. They include:

• Land Registry, which has around 800,000 page views a month
• Legal Aid Agency, with around 500,000 page views a month
• Rural Payments Agency, handling around 120,000 page views a month

The release calendar of official statistics also moved to GOV.UK making it easier to find this important government information easier.

We’re on track to move the remaining agency and ALB sites across to GOV.UK by December 2014. By the end of September we’d moved 261 websites to GOV.UK, with 50 still to do.

We’ve also moved all content and redirected from:

• HMRC.gov.uk for tax credits
• Self Assessment
• Child Benefit
• PAYE
• VAT
• Income Tax
• National Insurance

We’ve launched a range of service guidance and tools, covering things like shared parental leave and disclosure and barring arrangements.

We continue to look for ways to improve the user experience on GOV.UK. For example, Department for International Development (DFID) has published a new funding finder for people seeking funding for international aid projects.

As more websites moved to GOV.UK, usage figures have risen. In June 2014 we had 53 million visits to the site, up from 41 million in June 2013. In July there was an average of 1.7 million visits each day. On 30 September we recorded 2,941,623 visits to GOV.UK, the highest daily traffic to date.

Other government websites

GDS published an annual report in July which covered data on the cost, usage and compliance of government websites open between 1 April 2013 and 31 March 2014. In June we published a quarterly report on open government websites. Both provide information on government funded websites and our intention to reduce their numbers.

BIS published a new Business is GREAT campaign site in beta at the beginning of July. Page views, users and sessions were all up by over 350% for July and August this year compared to the same period last year.

Action against misleading websites

GDS led cross-government action on the problem of misleading websites - third-party sites which charge for services that people can get for free, or at a lower cost, through GOV.UK. They usually exaggerate the benefits of their additional services, misrepresent what you can get through GOV.UK, or falsely imply an affiliation with government.

Identifying problem sites

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.

In June, 5 people who own or run websites like these were arrested under the Fraud Act, based on intelligence from the National Trading Standards Board (NTSB). They’re now on police bail with the cases expected to come to court next year.

Raising public awareness

We’ve also been raising public awareness about GOV.UK being the best place to go for government services and information, alongside our partners. NTSB released a video via social media in July to kick off an ‘Owl and the Copycat’ campaign. In early July ‘Which?’ published a feature How to spot a copycat website.

On 8 July the #StartatGOVUK campaign began to encourage users to use GOV.UK to access government information and services. This worked on the principle that a message is heard when everyone says it together at the same time. The message was shared through social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. We’re maintaining momentum through Twitter activity featuring some of the main services that are being targeted by misleading websites.

For organisations like a local authority or fire service, a gov.uk domain gives users confidence that the website is official and trusted. We updated the guidance on naming and registering government websites to make it simpler for organisations to decide whether they should apply for a gov.uk domain.

Redesigning services

GDS is supporting departments as they redesign and improve 25 of the most significant 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 make transformation work effectively. Then we want to 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. By the end of September, 3 services were in alpha, 16 in beta, and 6 were live.

Exemplar service transformation

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

• Renew a patent
• Civil claims
• Prison visit booking

So far users from more than 28 countries have renewed a UK or European patent using the new online patent service.

In June the online electoral registration service went live. Already more than 1 million people have used this service.

In July, the Visas exemplar released a public beta for users who want to visit the UK from mainland China. More than 200 applications were received in the first 48 hours.

At the end of September, we had 6 services live. We’ll have another 6 live by the end of December. We continually review progress with departments and report this on our transformation dashboard. At this stage, we anticipate that by the end of March 2015 20 exemplar services will be being used by the public as live or public beta services. 2 more, Universal Credit and Passports, will be available to the public before the beginning of the next Parliament. And 3 further exemplar services, Land Registry, Claim Personal Independence Payment and Agent online self-serve, will be available for public use during the next Parliament.

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.

Departments are working with GDS to pilot new guidance on governance for agile service work, to cover principles, processes, case studies and a range of resources like documents. In June we blogged about what we’d learned so far and asked for feedback on 6 principles. Using this feedback we published a first version of governance guidance in September.

To help demonstrate progress, new ways of working and approaches to service delivery, we’re encouraging departments to talk about their work, show the things they’re building, and share what they’ve learned. 9 of the exemplars were demonstrated at Civil Service Live, which took place at 4 locations on 5 days spanning late June and early July. And in September transformation teams across government came together at Sprint Beta in Bristol.

Sprint Beta in Bristol, September 2014

In July GDS hosted the StackMaps event to look at how the geospatial data government holds can be used to create and support high quality digital services. 2 exemplars - Rural support and Land Registry - were involved.

Other service transformations

Departments are already using the learning from their exemplar work to help them transform a broader range of services. For example:

• Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is working on 6 digital projects in addition to its exemplar work
• Home Office (HO) has more than 50 service transformations underway
• HMRC has 50 separate projects in its digital development portfolio
• Ministry of Justice (MOJ) has 10 digital products in development (including 3 at Office for the Public Guardian), most of which will be used directly by the public
• Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is working on 16 digital transformation projects (including 2 at Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency)

Other government departments continue to make their services digital by default. Examples are:

• Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) created a new online application service for Chevening scholarships providing a better service and a 20% saving
• FCO now has online appointment booking for consular customers in public beta (to do this it drew on the prisoner booking service developed by MOJ)
• Department for Education’s (DfE) Academies Conversion Online Service was launched in public beta

Meeting the Digital by Default Service Standard

The Government Service Design Manual, published in April 2013, aims to provide departments with 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 6 months. GDS teams undertook 22 assessments between July and September. Assessments are held for each service when it applies to pass between development stages.

Departments are now self-certifying services handling under 100,000 transactions each year. GDS trained a further 70 departmental assessors to do this from July to September.

We publish all the assessment reports on GOV.UK, including the departmental ones. Not only does this make the process open and transparent, but it also helps other services to understand the assessment process and its requirements better. We’ve published a dashboard on the performance platform to show trends in assessments, and have blogged about areas where services have found it harder to pass the criteria and what is being done to help them succeed in the future.

Helping more people use digital services

We want everyone who is able to use our digital services to do so. To design services that work for users, we need to understand:

• who can use digital services
• who can’t use them
• what help we need to offer people who aren’t online

To persuade people who are already online to use government digital services, we need to make them clearly preferable to the alternatives, and make sure that people know about them. We also need to work with a range of other organisations to help people currently offline to gain the basic digital skills they need to go online safely. If people can’t use digital services on their own, we’ll find other ways that we can support them so they still get the services they need.

Getting more people to use digital services - increasing digital take-up

We’re making it clear what we expect Service Managers to have understood and planned for on digital take-up before they’re assessed against the Service Standard. We’re developing take-up plans with a number of exemplar services to share learning and best practice.

User numbers are healthy and satisfaction rates good for the 14 exemplar services currently available to the public:

• Carer’s Allowance has already handled 100,000 digital applications
• there is already 95% digital take-up on Waste carrier registrations

Within 2 months of going live, just over 80% of those registering to vote used the new online service and a third of them used a tablet or mobile phone. That’s more than 1 million people, with a satisfaction rate over 90%.

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.

Currently about 21% of the adult population lack basic digital skills. The Digital Inclusion Strategy aims to reduce the number of people offline by 25% every 2 years, so that by 2020 fewer than 4.7 million people will lack basic digital skills and the ability to go online.

Working together

So far, 60 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. These organisations will have more impact working together than in isolation. Go ON UK has been coordinating activity across the private and voluntary sectors.

A delivery board drawn from these organisations has been examining existing digital inclusion activity to identify gaps and good practice. This is to identify how digital inclusion support can be provided most effectively. The board encouraged all charter signatories to sign up to digitalskills.com and add their digital inclusion activity to an interactive map.

The board has also established 2 working groups. The first is looking at how we can measure digital exclusion consistently in the UK, so we can track and understand how effective the partners’ digital inclusion work is in reaching the strategy’s targets.

The second is looking at how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and voluntary, community and social enterprises can be encouraged to go online, and how any barriers they face can be addressed by partners and government. The working group will report on its findings later this year.

The GDS digital inclusion team has been looking at how people use libraries to access the internet and how the signatories of the Digital Inclusion Charter might be able to complement and gain from the activities and services on offer. There is high demand for wi-fi in libraries and our partners feel that libraries do, or could, provide a good way for people go online.

Demonstration of equipment for visually impaired users

Understanding how complex government exemplar services are to use

Government services should be designed to support a wide range of people. The GDS digital inclusion and assisted digital teams have been supporting exemplar services in measuring how complex their transactions are to use against the Digital inclusion scale. This will help them understand how digitally skilled people need to be to use each service and what extra support people might need.

Building civil servants’ basic digital skills

The Digital Inclusion Strategy commits departments to ensuring that all their staff have the basic digital skills necessary to do their jobs effectively, and to use and improve online government services. This means ensuring they meet Level 7 on the Digital inclusion scale.

GDS’s digital inclusion team and Civil Service Learning (CSL) updated the definitions for ‘digital’ in the Annual Skills Review to reflect the Digital inclusion scale. This helps departments generate more consistent and reliable baseline data on staff skills and knowledge. It will also help departments understand what learning and development opportunities they need to provide. Departments will have completed this information gathering by November 2014.

The team also helped amend the wording of statements contained in CSL’s existing Self-Assessment Tool (which covers all civil service competencies) to help civil servants understand whether and how they need to improve their digital skills and knowledge. This was tested in July and August and went live in September.

The Department of Health (DH) is now using the digitally inclusive language that Go ON UK identified through national testing. It has already been used on the new departmental intranet.

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. What we provide for people who remain offline will depend on the service and the needs of the user.

No digital service will go live without appropriate support for people who aren’t online. Many people who are offline will be helped to 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.

Understanding user needs

The assisted digital team at GDS are helping departments establish assisted digital requirements for their services.

Piloting assisted digital support

Since June, the GDS assisted digital team has been working with the Carer’s Allowance service in Preston and Croydon to understand the barriers to using the online service, and what support they need to complete an application. In particular, it has highlighted that service users may still seek support even when they are digitally literate because they want broader advice or reassurance about the benefit and its impact on other entitlements.

The team has also been piloting the way in which support is described so that those needing it know what’s available. It is using the findings to refine messaging and to test and improve the way this support is described on GOV.UK.

Piloting assisted digital support with Carers Allowance in Croydon

Sharing learning

We’ve published a set of 8 personas in the Government Service Design Manual to help share assisted digital desk and field research with teams working on service transformation. They illustrate different types of people who might need help to use digital government services as they lack either the means, ability or confidence to do so independently.

We ran a series of workshops to help identify who should receive assisted digital support and the best way to provide it. We published guidance about this in the Service Design Manual.

Helping civil servants understand and use digital

The Civil Service Capabilities Plan, published in April 2013, and updated in June 2014, identified building digital skills as 1 of 4 priorities across government. We want civil servants to understand the internet and technology, and how they can be used to make government policy and digital services better.

Digital leadership

Three departments appointed new digital leaders during this quarter. They are:

• Department of Health (DH)
• Department for Education (DfE)
• Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)

Cabinet Office support across government

Recruitment

GDS’s Recruitment Hub continues to respond to a wide range of departmental requests for help in hiring interims and making both permanent and fixed-term appointments to 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 July and September, the hub was involved in hiring 16 people in interim or SCS positions, including a Deputy Chief Technology Officer in GDS and a Digital Transformation Director for HMRC. The hub has also filled key roles in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), DWP and the Ministry of Justice (MOJ).

This means we’ve hired more than 100 digital and technology experts in the 12 months since the Recruitment Hub was formed, many from senior roles in the private sector.

Guidance and advice

Between July and September we:

• improved the open internet tools guidance to include further advice on digital skills and more tools - this has now had over 49,000 unique visitors
• published and improved the community development framework
• supported the growing community of Service Managers by holding a service management forum - an opportunity for Service Managers to raise anything they want to discuss

Support for departments and professions

GDS and departmental colleagues ran sessions on how to improve digital skills at Civil Service Live, which ran in 4 locations in late June and early July. These reached more than 1,100 civil servants.

Civil Service Live

GDS ran 2 Service Manager induction programmes and 5 open programme events during the quarter, which between them involved around 50 people from 18 different departments or agencies. We also ran alpha and beta versions of a digital foundation day (a workshop for people involved in digital services).

GDS helped MOJ design organisational roles and processes to support Service Managers transforming digital services, as well as identifying processes and structures to help technology and digital to work more effectively together. It also supported ONS to shape roles and reporting relationships for Director of Digital Services, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Technology Officer roles.

The Operational Delivery Profession published its digital and IT skills matrix, guiding its users to digital learning resources based on their needs.

Improved digital training and development

The first members of a new Digital and Technology (DaT) fast stream started on 1 September. This scheme will provide career paths and training linked to current and future digital and technology roles in government. The Fast Track Apprenticeship Scheme has been extended to include a digital and technology scheme, with DWP and HMRC taking the first group of school leavers.

GDS started testing a skills matrix to support specialist digital and technology roles with a number of departments. The matrix defines the skills and knowledge needed to deliver digital services and technology in different roles, and guides people to different learning activities available to achieve these.

A digital landscapes masterclass was run, aimed at SCS. It was based on extensive research from the Oxford Internet Institute, looking at likely changes and developments around digital in the UK and what this means for government.

How departments are becoming more digital

Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)

FCO’s Digital Transformation Unit (DTU) published a range of new internal digital guides for staff. It also finalised a digital training curriculum, covering training for policy, communications and service delivery. The departmental digital champions network set up in the previous quarter grew to around 100 people.

DTU held a ‘Digital Week’ at the end of September, showing FCO staff how digital technology can help improve policy work, communications and service delivery. The Middle East and North Africa Directorate also made September its digital month and ran a range of events.

Following training by the DTU, FCO’s Media Office took on digital news publishing, part of increasing digital skills among all communications professionals.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC)

In July HMRC opened its new digital delivery centre in Newcastle. This will contribute to moving more of its transactions online for customers and is the first of its kind in government.

Department of Health (DH)

The DH digital team has published an overview of its digital capability strategy and a recent update on its progress.

The digital team worked with HR colleagues to ensure that digital skills and knowledge are part of the department’s recruitment and performance management practices. The departmental Digital Champions group tested the development of the new DH PolicyKit (formerly the Policy Making Toolkit) and intranet.

The digital team held the final set of planned senior manager coaching sessions with the Permanent Secretary, each of the 5 Directors-General and the Chief Medical Officer. A formal review of the sessions will be done by December 2014. Learning from these has been shared through the department’s ALB Digital Leaders Network, with Department for International Development (DFID) and the Digital Inclusion group.

DH held masterclasses on the use of G-Cloud and the Digital Services Framework for procurement leads in the department and its ALBs.

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

More than 1,000 people were involved in activities run by the departmental Digital Academy. They included:

• 45 students who completed the flagship 6-week course
• 10 students who have piloted a 2-week course
• 70 students who attended 1-day ‘Discover Digital’ events

A further 900 people took part through Civil Service Live, DWP Sprint events and apprentice inductions.

DWP’s Executive Team attended the 1 day Digital Academy in September to ensure digital is fully understood at the most senior level in the department. Project-specific sessions took place in September. These trained individual project teams (including Personal Independence Payment, and Fraud and Error) in digital ways of working, tailoring practical work to their specific requirements.

DWP recruited 20 apprentices to become developers within the department and took part in the DaT fast stream, with the highest number of placements in government.

Home Office (HO)

The department ran a Digital Week in July, part of a month-long ‘Moving to Digital’ transformation initiative, including events and workshops aimed at improving knowledge and skills. The department is following these up with digital roadshows going out to frontline services.

Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)

The department published a digital toolkit on its intranet to provide information, support and guidance for staff.

It ran a third ‘pulse survey’ in September to track and measure awareness and understanding of digital in the department. The results are expected in October.

Ministry of Defence (MOD)

The department published revised internal guidelines on the use of social media, for the first time explicitly allowing social media use for work-related collaboration across organisational boundaries.

Cabinet Office (CO)

The department ran ‘Code Club’ programmes covering staff from across the department and across grades, offering both beginners’ and intermediate sessions.

Digital working across government

The government is establishing or sharing common approaches across departments in a number of areas supporting digital. GDS and Office of the Chief Technology Officer(OCTO) lead on much of this activity, and they also support departmentally-led work where requested.

Technology leadership

The Technology Leaders Network was set up to ensure that government is equipped with the right technology to support great digital services.

Technology Leaders took part in Civil Service Live, talking to civil servants from all over the country about problems with government IT. They’ve also been writing on the Government technology blog about progress in their departments.

OCTO clarified guidance on technology issues. It updated content on the Service Design Manual, archived old ICT Strategy content from GOV.UK, and updated content to meet National Archives requirements.

Former Credit Suisse Chief Information Officer (CIO) Magnus Falk took up his job as the government’s new Deputy Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in September. He’ll be concentrating on developing technology leadership in government.

Identity Assurance

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 GOV.UK Verify service. GOV.UK Verify will provide a better, faster and safer way to prove who you are when using government services online.

We’ve switched over to a new design, based on testing both the new and the old interfaces with 1,000 people. This should make the service simpler, faster and easier to use.

Business and organisational users

Earlier this year GDS started exploring how identity assurance works when people use a public service online on behalf of an organisation or another person. This indicated there wasn’t a need for a cross-government identity solution for business users. GDS is now discussing with HMRC, DVLA, IPO and others what they might put in place where they need identity assurance for a business or organisation.

Privacy advisers

Specialist advisers are now helping identity providers and government services to develop complaints handling and issue escalation processes. This work will be aligned with the work of the Privacy and Consumer Advisory Group for Identity Assurance.

EU Regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions (eIDAS)

On 1 July the eIDAS regulation, which includes rules about mutual recognition of electronic identities, came into force. This means that it will become possible to use an electronic identity issued in one EU member state to authenticate a user for services being provided in other member states.

The UK government now needs to agree implementing acts and build an infrastructure for interoperability. The regulation allows a year for this to be done.

Buying digital services

We’ve built a new Digital Marketplace to provide a single place for the public sector to buy from the G-Cloud and digital services frameworks. It focuses initially on the G-Cloud 4 and 5 catalogues. The service became available for buyers to use and feedback on in August, and all existing G-Cloud services were moved as part of de-commissioning the CloudStore. G-Cloud 6 will be opening for submissions in October.

G-Cloud

G-Cloud allows anyone in the public sector to buy off-the-shelf cloud-based services on a pay-as-you-go basis, currently through the CloudStore. G-Cloud covers infrastructure, platform, software and support services.

In May, G-Cloud 5 went live and by July G-Cloud sales figures passed the £200 million barrier. Over half of this was with SMEs. The average monthly spend over the quarter was £20 million. We’re tracking progress through the G-Cloud dashboard.

Digital Services Framework

In November 2013, GDS and Crown Commercial Service (CCS) 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. There have been 23 contracts awarded to 18 suppliers, 10 to SMEs. The total value of these call-off contracts is around £11 million.

Digital platforms shared across government

Performance measurement

The performance platform, which provides structured data to help departments improve services, continues to grow. There are now 23 detailed service dashboards and 84 overview dashboards. All departments have committed to publish information openly and transparently about how their digital services are performing.

We believe in using data to inform design. GDS has helped exemplar services review analytics capabilities to identify what skills and tools each has available and to identify any problems. Increasingly teams have dedicated product analysis support. Over the last 3 months, we’ve used analysis to:

• provide more detailed conversion information on our identity assurance platform
• develop a full measurement plan for the National Apprenticeship Service
• understand traffic to misleading websites

We’ve also built tools to help GOV.UK content designers access user data more easily and gain insights into little used content.

In July, Cabinet Office Analysis and Insight team started blogging, to share its learning and expertise more widely across government and beyond. Work from the newly formed joint data science team (Government Innovation Group, Government Digital Service, Government Office Science) has also started sharing its early projects online through the prototypes page on the GDS performance platform blog.

Office for National Statistics (ONS) Data Visualisation Centre hosted this year’s Graphical Web conference at the University of Winchester in August.

Researching user needs

GDS set up a user research lab for government departments to use. The work it is doing to ensure that we build our digital services with a focus on user needs is gaining wider attention. For example in August The Economist ran an article on how the lab is helping to improve government services and increase our efficiency. It’s already running at 100% capacity and is booked up months in advance.

Over this quarter GDS alone tested services with nearly 1,300 users, over nearly 400 hours. This is in addition to work carried out across all departments. To share learning and increase consistency, we hold monthly cross-government meetings of user researchers. These are growing in attendance and cover a wide range of issues. For example the August meeting discussed user research and the service assessment, workshop tools and communications.

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 for the civil service. GDS wants 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.

Public Services Network’s goal is to provide a cost effective, high performance government network. It works with a wide range of stakeholders, including industry and local government. It has restructured into 3 functions to make responding to different user needs more straightforward: compliance, operations and product.

Crown Hosting Service started the procurement for a data centre facilities partner in July to provide services through a joint venture with government. They’ll choose a partner in early 2015.

The Cabinet Office [Technology Transformation Programme] has developed common technology platforms for all CO staff working with information classified OFFICIAL, covering the majority of information created or worked on by civil servants. It started moving ‘early adopter’ teams to the new OFFICIAL tier technology service in September. This will be extended to all other relevant Cabinet Office teams in the coming months.

The new technology will enable people to work flexibly and efficiently. Staff have a choice of devices (including 5 laptops and a selection of smart phones and tablets), new web-based tools to make collaboration within and outside the department much faster and easier, and more freedom to use online tools that best meet each user’s needs. And the support service will be transformed – promoting a modern, digital way of working and minimising disruption to users.

Open standards

The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government documents were announced in July. These set out document file formats that all government bodies will be expected to use so people can use the applications that best meet their needs when they are viewing or working on documents together.

GDS blogged about how Technology Leaders will make this happen and what this means for publishers of GOV.UK content.

GDS published 3 new standards proposals for public emergency alert messaging, sending meeting information or tasks and exchanging contact information.

Opening up government services and information

Action 16 of the Government Digital Strategy said GDS would open up government transactions so they can be provided easily by commercial and not-for-profit organisations, and put information wherever people are online, by syndicating content.

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 government 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 Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) for core government services.

We’ll also be recommending principles, standards and priorities for data formats and exchange during the autumn. The architecture team started in-depth work with HO, MOJ and DVLA on this.

In July the ONS Data Explorer and Open API was updated to make it easier for developers to reuse the data and give access to 2011 Census datasets.

DH opened up APIs of the NHS Organ Donor Register and Blood Donation Applications. This establishes direct links from the health transaction data to the GDS Performance Platform.

Digital policymaking

Earlier this year Cabinet Office set up a Policy Lab which will help policy teams to test how different design principles and methods can improve policymaking in the Civil Service. It has given over 350 civil servants practical experience of tools that put users at the centre of policy design. Its first project helped a couple of police forces look at the opportunities offered by digital policing by prototyping new ways for victims and witnesses to report crime.

The cross-government Open Policy blog went live. This complements other social media channels being used to promote open policymaking such as LinkedIn, Demsoc’s blog and the Open Policy team Twitter account.

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

• FCO’s Digital Transformation Unit worked with teams in Turkey, Egypt and New England on using digital tools to help supplement election monitoring, and followed up with ambassadors on ways to use Twitter network maps
• FCO also worked with the Cabinet Office Government Innovation Group to define a number of possible big data pilots
• DH launched a revised Policykit in September, to provide information, support and guidance to its staff and ALBs
• DH’s Care Act regulations consultation received over 1100 comments on a bespoke site built by the departmental digital team and it is piloting an in-house digital tool for coding the text responses, alongside traditional methods
• MOJ completed discovery on a project to build digital skills, focussed on policy and Legal Aid Agency staff; this includes setting up hack days to embed service design principles in policy work
• BIS completed its first consultation on Citizen Space (an online consultation hub) alongside outreach by both policy staff and the digital team (this generated the highest response for a science-based consultation for 6 years)
• BIS also extended its digital surgeries to respond to questions (including those about social media) from individual policy makers
• HMRC launched a social media pilot looking at which tools best support engagement with its users
• HO were the first department to use the Cabinet Office Policy Lab, and ran its second annual Advanced Policy School where participants learned about how digital tools could be used in policymaking