Posts tagged "Digital Government"

Digital transformation is a phrase that gets thrown about a lot in government circles at the moment.

It means different things to different people. This makes it impossible for people to really understand what you mean when you say it.

I’m not the first to write something about this. Simon recently wrote about how the phrase is misused. Matt has also written good things.

It’s been a fortnight of big announcements.

Mike has announced he’s leaving. Leisa is going home. Tom, Ben & Russell have decided to move on. We’ve also said goodbye to some others – Andy, Lindsey, Sam and Mark.

There’s been lots of noise about what this means for GDS, for ongoing digital transformation, for the future of IT in government.

If I said this hasn’t all been unnerving and concerning, I’d be lying. I’ve spent a lot of time this week wondering what this means for me. Is it time for me to move on – do something new?

A year ago today two of the government’s biggest websites, Directgov and Business Link, were switched off and GOV.UK became the official site for information and services. The last 12 months have flown by. It’s interesting to see how much the site has changed over the year as it continues to develop.

It’s now the home to 75 government departments and agencies who are publishing announcements, policies, publications, consultations, statistics and blogs on over 45 different topics. It’s publishing information and statistics on government transactions including how many people are applying for a Lasting Power of Attorney each week, the things that stop people applying for car tax online, and the digital take up of the replacing your driving licence transaction.

Yesterday (3rd July 2013) I have a talk about Digital by Default at Civil Service Live (an annual conference for civil servants) in Bristol.

There was quite a bit of interest in the talk (the venue we had was packed), so I thought it would be useful if I replicated the talk online and provide a bit of commentary.

Hello

I’m Dafydd Vaughan.

On Friday, the Government announced that it is intending to close up to 75% of the 820 public sector websites it has identified. The announcement coincided with a report from the Central Office of Information (COI) outlining statistics for central government websites. These figures show that 47 websites have cost taxpayers over £127 million in the last financial year.

If you dig a little deeper into the figures you can see that central government has spent £14m on Strategy & Planning, £15.8m on Design & Build, £23.8m on Hosting & Infrastructure and £9.7m on Testing (these are categories that COI requires under their TG128 standard). Despite their efforts (gathering this kind of data is by no means easy) I have concerns about the quality. For example:

We are nearly two weeks into the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat and there seems to be a lot of work going on behind the scenes to prepare for the start of the new legislative programme tomorrow (Tuesday).

Of course, with a new government brings a new direction. Steph Gray, a former civil servant working in the technology arena has written a fantastic overview of what might happen to public sector IT over the next parliament. While these potential plans seem to focus on large scale IT projects, we’ve already started to see the effects of the new government as it has attempted to make its mark.

Just over a year ago I joined CF Labs as one of the developers working on innovation and making data publicly available. When I started, Consumer Focus was a pretty new organisation still getting to grips with its role and getting everything into place so it could undertake its duties properly. In the middle of all of this fun, the three man CF Labs team was put together to experiment with a new way of doing things.

It has been exactly nine months since I started my job at Consumer Focus Labs. In this time, we’ve published our Recalled Products website, some data on the Digital Switchover in Wales, been contributing to a blog following our attempts to get data out of Tesco and are producing our new StayPrivate website.

Sometimes I come away from the office and struggle to see what we have actually achieved. When you are stuck into day to day work, it is quite easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Hello? Is that Birmingham City Council? This is 2001, we’d like our website back!

There has been a lot of talk on Twitter today about the launch of the new Birmingham City Council website. Without a doubt, Birmingham have successfully launched one of the most delayed and expensive websites of the last few years. After being delayed for 6 months (original launch date was expected to be March 2009), and going significantly over budget (costing a total of £2.8 million), you’d expect the site to be the best thing ever developed.

Last week, Neil Williams from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) published his draft Government Twitter Strategy. I think its about time someone sat down and produced a document like this. Some people have responded to the document negatively (as expected), some positively, and some have completely missed the point.

I wanted to spell out why I’m pleased Neil has written this document.

There is a lot of skepticism about new media in Government. Many people are scared about it – I partly believe this is because of the lack of control. With ‘old media’ people had a pretty good idea of what they were getting into. With ‘new media’, its well, new, big, scary and uncontrollable.

Yesterday, Richard Pope and I launched WhatTheyClaimed.com, a site aimed at digitising and collating all of the data from MPs expenses.

The website is based upon a system I built a few weeks ago to monitor our own expenses at Consumer Focus Labs . The site was designed to match the processes at Consumer Focus, but when Richard and I realised that MPs expenses were being published, we realised we could make use of the same codebase with a few minor changes. I need to note at this point that the website was a personal project and not supported by Consumer Focus.

Earlier today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Dublin, Robin Christopherson from UK charity AbilityNet gave a talk on website accessibility. I’ve seen quite a few different talks and sessions on website accessibility and understand how important this topic is. This talk however really hit home – Robin is blind and gave the whole presentation & demonstration while using a screen reader.

I understand how screen readers work and have tried out some myself, but seeing someone use one in a real situation was really humbling. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it is to use a large part of the internet for someone who suffers from a disability that affects their ability to use a computer.

A quick update this week!

Last weekend I was pleased to launch CllrTweeps. The new site, inspired by TweetMinster, aims to list every local councillor in the UK who is on Twitter. After our first week online, we have already tracked down and verified the first 100 councillors using the service.

Unless you’ve been in a cave (or outside of the UK) for the last few days, you’ll know that we’ve been experiencing the fun of a ‘severe snow event’. The exact definition of a severe snow event remains unanswered, and I’ll leave the debate over whether what we’ve been experiencing is severe to another time. What is important, however, is that a large number of schools have been closed because of the snow. The BBC reported earlier that over 500 schools were closed today in Wales alone.

A few days ago I came across an article about the branding of the Dutch Government. It appears that they are fed up of having different brand for each of their 200(ish) departments and ministries. Instead, they are developing a single ‘Government’ brand that will be used for everything the government does, irrespective of the government.

This strikes me as a great idea – not only could it save money by just having one brand instead of 200, but it could help people recognise the work that government does.