This article is more than 1 year old

The Government Digital Service: The Happiest Place on Earth

Consultants confirm: It's white, cliquey and everyone hates them

Conclusion

Slide by Tom Loosemore, Deputy Director GDS, 2013
Of the four goals, only the first can be said to have been achieved

GDS had four goals for government, according to its deputy director. It would “fix publishing” – by creating a single domain for government publications, rewriting content to make it more accessible and more widely used.

However, GOV.UK has been strongly criticised for confusing users and making government information less accessible. GDS' own staff described transitions to GOV.UK as “a nightmare”.

GDS would also “fix transactions”, with Mike Bracken CBE promising that GDS would take 25 of the most-used “exemplar” services, and by March 2015 turn them into services “so good, people prefer to use them”.

"Government need outweighs user need every every time. And the way around that is by making sure the product is so useful and so beautiful it cannot be ignored," Bracken told a US audience in 2013. [video]

The Labour Party pointed out that GDS had failed:

“The Cabinet Office has not hit its target of 25 exemplar services being live by March 2015, despite the budget of the Government Digital Service increasing from £9.7m in 2011/12 to £23.3m in 2013/2014. Spending by GDS on IT specialists has also notably increased in the last financial year, with a spend of £7.9m recorded in the latest data available,” Labour’s report (pdf) noted.

Only by “marking its own homework” did GDS turn alphas into betas, and betas into “finished” services, and then only hurriedly, after Labour pointed out it had missed its own target by a mile.

Today, few of the exemplars are truly operational or transformative. One, the “Digital Self Assessment exemplar”, is simply an email sign-up. Another, the digital front end to subsidy payments for farmers – touted by Bracken as a show-piece for GDS’ agile skills – has been scrapped, after its users reverted to paper and telephone en masse.

GDS furthermore promised that a new identity system would underpin UK government transactions with citizens, but it also failed to deliver this.

For now, both the Conservative and Labour parties continue to support the fourth GDS objective, “go wholesale”: become a software factory and box-ticker for regional public sector IT. This has been the focus of GDS strategy this year.

Our publication of the external consultants' report into culture and management should make them assess whether GDS is fit for purpose in achieving this fourth ambition, of “government as a service”. Or whether, as some now openly argue, the same goal can be achieved much more cheaply by the use of industry standard tools, parts and practices – and without the box-tickers. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like