81.6% of people are satisfied or very satisfied with how easy it is to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP). 84.5% of people feel secure registering with the system and 80.5% are comfortable with "identity providers"/certified companies.
These user satisfaction figures are taken from the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) dashboard on the Government Digital Service's GOV.UK performance platform. They are based on 11,687 responses to the ease of use question, 11,623 to the security question and 11,552 on "identity providers".
DMossEsq and other critics can carp all they like. They're wrong, GDS may say. Just look at those user satisfaction ratings. Over 80% of people are satisfied with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) or very satisfied with it. That's what counts. And "counts" is the right word. We're dealing with numbers here. And you can't argue with numbers ...
... or can you?
The user satisfaction statistics haven't been updated on the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) dashboard since 19 September 2016. There's no point guessing why but they're two months out of date.
As at 19 September 2016 847,433 GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts had been created and they had been used 881,914 times. That means that 1,729,347 identity verification transactions had taken place. Which means that the user satisfaction ratings are based on responses to about 0.68% of transactions.
"84.5% of 0.68% of people feel secure registering with the system" doesn't make for a knock-down cogent conclusion in favour of GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
Do the views of 0.68% of the population indicate the views of the other 99.32%? We have learned in the UK to be sceptical of polling results like this. The pollsters got the 2014 Scottish independence referendum wrong and the 2015 general election and the 2016 EU referendum.
They still get their forecasts wrong but at least the pollsters have become very careful over the decades about the wording of survey questions and the way in which they are asked. GDS don't have that professional hinterland ...
... and it shows. GDS ask how secure people feel, registering with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) – people may feel secure and yet not be. People may only be comfortable with using "identity providers" because they are misguided.
What we're left with is a question. How useful are GDS's user satisfaction statistics for GOV.UK Verify (RIP)? And we don't know the answer.
It's not just GOV.UK Verify (RIP). HMRC were talking about their on-line Personal Tax Account service the other day (PTA): "It’s still less than 12 months since the PTA was launched but, with 6.7m users and a customer satisfaction rating of 77%, it’s already transforming the way our customers can deal with us".
What does "a customer satisfaction rating of 77%" mean? We don't know. Not least because there is no PTA dashboard on GDS's performance platform. That's a serious gap in coverage.
HMRC have plenty of figures on the performance platform for other services of theirs. The figures haven't been updated for over a year, since September 2015. That's another serious gap in the coverage. A gap that the ONS, for example, or data.gov.uk with their years of expertise would not condone.
GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is ignored by most of PTA's 6.7 million users. And by the tens of millions of users of HMRC's other on-line services with billions of transactions to their name every year. They prefer to use the alternative Government Gateway.
That's the system the UK depends on to raise revenue to fund public services. What are the user satisfaction measurements for the Government Gateway? How many accounts are there? How much revenue has been raised through the Government Gateway over the course of its 15 years of operation to date? How much does it cost to operate the Government Gateway? We don't know. Once again, there's no dashboard for it on GDS's performance platform.
We don't know how much it costs to operate GOV.UK Verify (RIP) either. Another serious gap in the coverage of the performance platform.
We used to know that only about 70% of people who make the attempt can create a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account. The target was – and still is – 90%. But we don't know how much progress GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is making towards that target because GDS stopped reporting the figures, saying that they didn't tell us much. Yes they did.
Missing dashboards, missing data, suppressed data, unhelpful questions about feeling comfortable, ..., GDS's performance platform is not a good advertisement for data analytics.
Nor are GDS's attempts at data modelling. The GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account creation success rate for 16-24 year-olds will leap from 40% in the autumn of 2015 to more like 80% in early 2016. That's what GDS told us. Their assertion was based on a mathematical model. The mathematical model was wrong. No such leap took place.
GDS still make predictions about the account creation success rate: "The data we’ve gathered shows that if activity from [social media] accounts could be used for activity history, GOV.UK Verify [RIP]’s demographic coverage of the adult population overall could increase by 9%, and for the 16-25 demographic could see a potential increase of up to 38%".
But who believes that now? Probably not even GDS.
It was never clear why Mike Bracken, executive director at the time of GDS, was appointed the government's chief data officer back in March 2015. And it still isn't clear why data analytics is supposed to be one of GDS's specialities. The data simply doesn't support that claim.
Mr Bracken was ejected from Whitehall in September 2015 having made no progress on GDS's data skills in the intervening six months. His successor as executive director, Stephen Foreshew-Cain, lasted 10 months, ditto. Since 1 August 2016 GDS has had a director general, Kevin Cunnington, who said hello on 4 August 2016 and also:
I want to strengthen and accelerate the pace of change. I’ve read many times about the end of GDS, but it has always come back stronger than before. I want to tackle one thing head on: GDS will not be broken up. We remain part of the Cabinet Office with a clear mandate to lead digital, technology and data across government.
It is not clear why GDS has this mandate. Just because GDS know how to design a pretty front-end system it doesn't follow that they have the first idea how to analyse the data maintained by the back end.
81.6% of people are satisfied or very satisfied with how easy it is to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP). 84.5% of people feel secure registering with the system and 80.5% are comfortable with "identity providers"/certified companies.
These user satisfaction figures are taken from the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) dashboard on the Government Digital Service's GOV.UK performance platform. They are based on 11,687 responses to the ease of use question, 11,623 to the security question and 11,552 on "identity providers".
DMossEsq and other critics can carp all they like. They're wrong, GDS may say. Just look at those user satisfaction ratings. Over 80% of people are satisfied with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) or very satisfied with it. That's what counts. And "counts" is the right word. We're dealing with numbers here. And you can't argue with numbers ...
Selected UK local authorities are now conducting trials of the Government Digital Service's dead duck, GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
Generous to a fault with other people's money, GDS won't charge those local authorities – "GOV.UK Verify [RIP] accounts will be free to councils that participate for the duration of the pilot".
Other UK local authorities will have to pay for their use of GOV.UK Verify (RIP). How much? No-one knows. Not even GDS.
Suspend your disbelief for a moment and suppose that all UK local authorities depended on GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Some would pay for the privilege. Others wouldn't. GDS's generosity would inspire tensions.
GDS have further spiced up the recipe for tension with this little gem – there are "no plans to charge for the service being used by those outside the public sector". GDS aim to offer GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to the private sector for free.
This is the market in identity assurance that the ever-generous GDS have always said they wanted to create. While the London Borough of Merton would pay for it, the Royal Bank of Scotland would get GOV.UK Verify (RIP) for nothing.
That would be a nightmare. It is recommended that you now wake up and re-engage your disbelief. It won't happen. That's no way to run a market. It couldn't work. You know that even if GDS don't.
GDS are obviously worried about charging for GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Quite right, too.
The only way they can achieve any volume, they think, is to give the wretched service away for free. That won't work either. Ergo GOV.UK Verify is dead. RIP.
11 local authorities are going to try to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to issue concessionary travel passes. And 14 local authorities are going to try to use it to issue residents' parking permits.
The plan previously was to see if GOV.UK Verify (RIP) could help with issuing taxi licences as well. It was always a peculiar plan and now it's been dropped.
... and local authorities only want to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) if it saves them money. That plan hasn't been dropped. GDS still haven't provided a price list but they're going to have to soon.
What should we expect to see as these trials unfold?
Standardisation v. localisation This is quite different from the form we fill in here in the London Borough of Merton, for example. The two forms are doing one job. Why have two forms? That looks like the sort of duplication GDS normally abhor.
Getting everyone to use the same tools to do the same job is precisely the rationale for Government as a Platform. Are GDS happy to see different parking permit application systems developed in each local authority? Hundreds of different forms? Hundreds of different on-line application systems?
It seems unlikely while they are at the same time telling central government departments that they should all use the same (non-existent) payments platform, GOV.UK Pay.
Two years ago the BBC were belabouring local government. They were said to be wasting money by failing to standardise. Bull Information Systems joined in with the criticism. So did Skyscape. And the Taxpayers' Alliance. And Policy Exchange. GDS threw in their contribution by claiming that most government IT applications are about as difficult as the requirements of a medium-sized dating website.
Not a single local authority among them, of course, these critics are all confident because they've never done the job. Most attempts to share services between local authorities seem to fail. But the ignorant faith in standardisation remains.
As the pilot projects to which both GDS and the local authorities are committed unfold, expect to see an element of this tension between standardisation and localisation.
Data protection Right at the top of the form, before any other business, there's B&HCC quite properly reassuring its parishioners about the personal information they're about to enter on the residents' parking permit application form:
Brighton & Hove City Council is the Data Controller for the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998. This means that Brighton & Hove City Council is responsible for making decisions about how your personal data will be processed and how it may be used. The purpose(s) for which your data will be processed is Parking Permits. The information you provide may be used in detecting possible fraud. The information you provide will be treated confidentially at all times. Security safeguards apply to both manual and computerised held data, and only relevant staff/named disclosures can access your information.
If you have any queries contact the Data Protection Officer Tel: 01273 291207
That is a set of statements B&HCC can't possibly make if GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is inserted into their residents' parking permit application system. B&HCC will have no control over what information is collected, the uses to which this information is put, who can see it or where it will be stored. You can ring 01273 291207 all you like ...
... you won't get anywhere. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is the end of privacy. In Brighton, and Hove, and anywhere else it infects. As long as that is understood, these trials may proceed smoothly. If there's any objection to local authorities abdicating their responsibilities and throwing their parishioners to the wolves, then it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Exclusion Let's take it for granted that B&HCC need to know who is applying for a parking permit:
GOV.UK Verify (RIP) doesn't collect titles. Further, when you come to register for a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account with one of GDS's remaining "certified companies" which often aren't certified:
The certified company will also ask your gender. Anyone, for any reason, can opt out of identifying themselves in this way and choose an ‘I prefer not say’ option. You’re not required to provide an answer and - even if you choose to do so - the certified company won’t verify it.
But that's the least of B&HCC's problems if they rely on GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to identify applicants for parking permits.
The level of assurance offered by GOV.UK UK Verify (RIP) that the applicant is who they say they are is low. The US National Institute for Standards and Technology believe that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) achieves no proof of identity whatever, it's no more than a self-certification scheme.
And that's the case for people who manage to register. Lots of people can't even self-certify.
The verification success rate with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) hovered around the 70% mark for a while until GDS stopped publishing the figures. They had previously made 90% success a condition of going live. 70% is less than 90%. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) shouldn't have gone live in May 2016. It hadn't satisfied GDS's own conditions.
If B&HCC can only use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to get about 70% of applicants to self-certify – and it may be less than that – how is it going to save them money? They're going to need to operate other systems in addition. That looks like costing more, not less.
B&HCC may have a greater commitment to data science than GDS. Oh to be a fly on the wall when the Council discusses the merits of spending more money to automate the worthless self-certification of parking permit-holders.
It's quite a mouthful. There's a lot there. Let's take a step back.
GDS's "dream" was outlined by their ex-deputy director, Tom Loosemore.
"Just sort it all out for me"
The idea is that when government is fully digitised there will be no need to apply for anything, including parking permits. The government will know what you need and will provide it. (Pre-parking. C.f. pre-crime.)
There should be no need for the applicant to specify the controlled parking zone they want a permit for (A, C, E, F, G, H, M, N, O, Q, R, T, U, W, Y or Z), that should be deducible from the address GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has already provided. B&HCC know the zones, they're B&HCC's zones for goodness sake, the applicant doesn't have to tell them.
Ditto, B&HCC can find out whether the application is for a low-emission vehicle as soon as they have the registration number. Certainly if it's a UK-registered car – DVLA, DVSA and the car insurance companies are already sharing this data. And even for foreign-registered cars – at least in our dreams. There's no need for the applicant to tell B&HCC.
Is the applicant a Blue Badge-holder? B&HCC probably already know the answer, they probably processed the Blue Badge application themselves, there's no need for the applicant to tell them.
GDS believe that transactions with government should be "friction-free". Asking the applicant to confirm information B&HCC already has is just friction. Out with it.
In GDS's dream CCTV camera records and other records will have alerted B&HCC to the existence of a car which is about to be transferred to one of their parishioners and if the council just interrogate enough databases/registers they can easily work out who is involved and offer them a parking permit before the applicant has even thought about it.
Taking into account their income from all sources, their savings and their financial commitments, an algorithm could calculate better than the applicant whether to opt for the 3, 6 or 12 month permit and even – to save inconvenience/friction – take the payment from the applicant's bank account.
There's no need to issue a material parking permit, of course. An entry on a database is quite enough by way of proof of the entitlement to park for B&HCC's digitised enforcement officers. At most, the applicant might be issued with a digital certificate to be stored on his or her mobile phone as a receipt for the payment made.
Too much to expect from B&HCC?
You may be right. Perhaps this work should be centralised in Whitehall. There's no need to duplicate these functions in each local authority.
That is the at once childish and sinister vision of GDS's Government as a Platform. A panopticon in which algorithms exercise your will for you based on what the pious Mr Loosemore calls a "single source of truth", i.e. hundreds of registers full of personal information about you.
It's quite beyond them to bring it about, of course. GDS couldn't even computerise farm payments. It's all just "internet jibba jabba", as Mr Loosemore was told, on his way out of GDS.
When B&HCC and GDS sit down to re-engineer or re-imagine or "imagineer" the new residents' parking permit application scheme, let's hope that someone remembers the benefits of friction.
GDS approach local government now as supplicants. Local government is GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s last hope.
No doubt local government is generally kindhearted but they are in no position to take on what everyone else has rejected. Why should they? What does GOV.UK Verify (RIP) have to offer them? What do GDS have to offer them?
GDS will tend to fight the "local" in "local government". GOV.UK Verify (RIP) will take the "protection" out of "data protection". It will exclude large chunks of B&HCC's population. And all for the sake of what? Some pie in the sky imagineering about Government as a Platform.
Imagine being able to create a new service in hours, not months. Imagine being able to create two slightly different versions of a service, and see which one works best. And then, having done the research and iterated and improved the better one, simply killing off the one that didn’t make the cut ... Imagine being able to do that at negligible cost ...
Mr Foreshew-Cain took over as executive director of GDS when Mike Bracken left, at the same time as Tom Loosemore, in September 2015. Now he, too, is gone. As is Janet Hughes, GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s sometime funeral programme director.
"Wildly unrealistic expectations". That's the verdict on GOV.UK Verify (RIP) ...
The LDC say: "This document is the first iteration of the case for local authorities to transform their digital services through the use of GOV.UK Verify [RIP] and other common components". It's a piece of sales literature. What's the pitch?
A traditional sales line, everyone's seen it before, and some people may even still believe it.
The LDC add weight to their claims by citing supporting documents:
A combination of GDS gifts "lowers the barriers to ‘moving between suppliers’ and allows to switch from underperforming contracts4", for example, refers the reader to another document produced by the LDC.
And something else the LDC recommend "can achieve reductions of up to 5% of savings in local authorities expenditure5" is supported by reference to a CIPFA document. (Savings will be reduced by 5%?)
This is laudable practice, to provide independent support for your argument, but it makes it stand out like a sore thumb when you fail to.
The LDC give four examples (p.6) of how savings have been achieved by using GDS products, services and standards. Three of them have supporting citations ...
... and this one doesn't: "£111.44 million National Audit Office (NAO) approved savings through GOV.UK Verify [RIP]". No evidence of any such NAO approval has been found yet. This may explain the lack of a citation.
Updated 13.4.17
As noted above last October, 11 local authorities were going to try to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to issue concessionary travel passes. And 14 local authorities were going to try to use it to issue residents' parking permits:
Residents’ Parking Permits
Concessionary Travel Pilot
Brighton and Hove City Council
Brighton and Hove City Council
Buckinghamshire Councty Council
Buckinghamshire Councty Council
Southampton City Council
Southampton City Council
Northumberland County Council
Northumberland County Council
Camden
Camden
Hillingdon London
Hillingdon London
Chelmsford City Council
Luton
Barnet London Borough
Central Bedfordshire
Oxfordshire County Council
Essex County Council
Canterbury City Council
Hertfordshire
Tunbridge Wells Borough Council
Warwickshire Councty Council
Wigan Council
Newcastle City Council
Sunderland City Council
Next month the Local Digital Coalition (LDC) are going to lay on a showcase to "share the products we've delivered during the alpha phase of #VerifyLocal work - from prototypes to user research, and technical patterns to business case findings".
Will all 19 local authorities be there?
No.
It can be inferred from the LDC website that many local authorities have pulled out of these pilot schemes:
Eight of the original 14 local authorities (57%) have pulled out of the residents' parking permits pilot scheme and six of the original 11 (55%) have pulled out of the concessionary travel scheme.
An unwary observer might believe that there are still 19 local authorities taking part in these GOV.UK Verify (RIP) pilots. Neither GDS nor the LDC have blogged to tell us that 10 of the original 19 local authorities (53%) are no longer involved.
That's a pretty hefty attrition rate that's going to be showcased.
Updated 28.4.17
There's no progress on the concessionary travel pilot that the Government Digital Service (GDS) is conducting with local authorities. Or, at least, with the five local authorities left, out of the 11 that started.
Eight of the original 14 local authorities have pulled out but for the survivors: "A key step has been reducing the level of assurance required for parking permit applications, reflecting the fact that permit applications are less sensitive than other services for which Verify could be used". I.e. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is the wrong product to be using ...
... all a local authority really needs to know is that a car is registered at an address in their area. But, wait for it ...
... "Plans for the [Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA)] to enable checking of the vehicle registration to a given address have not been included in the current prototype as the agency is going through a transformation programme".
The residents' parking permits pilot is using the product it shouldn't be using and it isn't using the product it should be using. Good luck to the guinea pig residents of Buckinghamshire, Northampton, Sunderland, Oxfordshire, Tunbridge Wells, Sunderland and Cambridgeshire with that.
"The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation", as we used to say.
GDS's religious/political orthodoxy has been confronted with the harsh fact that they have promised to sign up 25 million people to the unwanted moribund GOV.UK Verify (RIP) in three years time. Shocked out of their usual ineffable complacency, their absurd response is to reduce the already low level of assurance offered by GOV.UK Verify (RIP) and to ignore the essential DVLA product that is needed to meet residents' parking permit needs.
Absurd. It makes for amusing theatre. But the digital transformation of government in the UK it ain't.
Updated 11.5.17
13 April 2017, DMossEsq's millions of readers learned that over half the local authorities taking part in GDS's trials of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) had walked away.
PT followed up on the story. Why are the councils walking away?
We don't need GOV.UK Verify (RIP):
When asked by PublicTechnology for their reasons for leaving the trial, two councils - Hillingdon and Southampton - indicated that they were happy that their existing systems. Southampton said that its existing online verification service for bus passes “provides a similar functionality to the Verify solution”.
We've got more important things to do:
Brighton and Hove - which left in February, just before the pilot entered alpha phase - said in a blogpost that it was “a great project but currently the timing isn’t right for us”, as the digital team “has a lot to deliver this year”.
Maybe later:
[Brighton and Hove] added that its plans for a virtual permits service “stands to benefit from a tie up with Verify at a later date”.
Camden made a similar point, saying that it had already invested in master data management, which it was looking at “fully integrating into the next phase of Verify”.
Wigan, Chelmsford and Newcastle councils all issued the same statement: “We are not participating in the current phase of the GOV.UK Verify [RIP] local authority pilots. We remain in contact with GDS on further GOV.UK Verify [RIP] developments and hope to include the system in local services in the future.”
“Councils are used to procuring not building tech. Councils mostly lack the skills to do discovery, work in sprints and collaborate cross border,” said Adam Walther, project director at FutureGov.
GDS don't understand:
“... [GDS's Verify local team] have probably underestimated the complexity of working with this sector, and lack some of the design, delivery and political skills.
“To move beyond central government to support other parts of the public sector requires more humility, better design and reaching out to partners by everyone involved.”
... Matthew Cain was head of digital at Buckinghamshire County Council ... said that some of the initial requirements and expectations were unrealistic - for instance on the level of tech spend available to councils and in asking for roles that “didn’t even exist in the authority” ... in order to make headway, there needs to be more understanding on both sides.
Maybe it would help if GOV.UK Verify (RIP) didn't verify people's identity:
Kat Sexton from Cambridgeshire County Council - which joined the trial at a later date - told the Socitm spring conference last week that GDS was working on allowing Verify to offer a lower level of assurance that someone is who they say they are.
Maybe it would be best if GOV.UK Verify (RIP) didn't do anything at all. That would make its use completely frictionless:
GDS have gone away and...they’re actually creating a lower level of assurance, which is great because we’ll be [keen to use] that,” Sexton said.
HMRC and DWP don't want to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
Why not use the Government Gateway, like "138 public services" already do?
These trials concern residents' parking permits and concessionary travel, relatively easy applications, and yet there's no progress – suppose GOV.UK Verify (RIP) tried something difficult like the social care of vulnerable children or the victims of Alzheimer's, the sort of problems local government has to solve all day every day?
... but that's quite enough to be going on with.
Eight of the original 14 local authorities (57%) have pulled out of the residents' parking permits pilot scheme and six of the original 11 (55%) have pulled out of the concessionary travel scheme.
Updated 18.8.17
11 local authorities started the concessionary travel pilot for GOV.UK Verify (RIP). When we last looked there were only five left. Now that Hertfordshire and Warwickshire County Council have pulled out we're down to just three survivors.
11 local authorities are going to try to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to issue concessionary travel passes. And 14 local authorities are going to try to use it to issue residents' parking permits.
The plan previously was to see if GOV.UK Verify (RIP) could help with issuing taxi licences as well. It was always a peculiar plan and now it's been dropped.
... and local authorities only want to use GOV.UK Verify (RIP) if it saves them money. That plan hasn't been dropped. GDS still haven't provided a price list but they're going to have to soon.
What should we expect to see as these trials unfold?
"... we foster a user-centred culture in GDS and across government by getting everyone involved in user research", it says in a Government Digital Service blog post today, Don’t forget! 2 hours every 6 weeks. "We have user researchers as part of agile teams, for example. That's part of our DNA ... Our natural state can be to look inwards [horror], towards our teams [awful], not outwards towards our users [that's better] ...".
This is all part of putting user needs first, rule #1 in the GDS Design Principles: "Service design starts with identifying user needs. If you don’t know what the user needs are, you won’t build the right thing. Do research, analyse data, talk to users. Don’t make assumptions. Have empathy for users, and [you] should remember that what they ask for isn't always what they need".
This initially clear picture is clouded by the genetically modified Government as a Platform (GaaP) team at GDS, who said in May 2016: "Everyone knows we start with user needs. Except we don't. We start with the needs of our team ... When we don't do this our research isn't useful to our team and they ignore it. There's nothing more pointless than doing research that no one listens to". That's one of their Eight principles for user researchers on Government as a Platform.
Should GDS "look outwards towards [their] users" and start with "identifying user needs"? Or is that "pointless"? Should they rather "start with the needs of [the GDS GaaP] team"?
Confusing, isn't it. Which one is the doctrine? Outwards? Or inwards?
"... remember that what [the users] ask for isn't always what they need" suggests that GDS can ignore their research data and revert to their prejudices on the grounds that the users don't know what they're talking about whereas GDS do.
We've been here before, in November 2013: "What does 'putting the user first' mean? Nothing? Whatever you want it to mean?".
We're not the only ones. See also June 2016's Digital Government: overcoming the systemic failure of transformation, where two Brunel University academics, Paul Waller and Professor Vishanth Weerakkody, point out that: "not much of a government or public administrative function directly involves citizens so a focus on the interface misses the point about 'transforming government processes' ..." (p.8).
And they're not the only ones. Our old friend Mark Thompson of the Methods Group and the Judge Business School at Cambridge University popped up in Computer Weekly magazine this month with Digital government isn’t about user needs – it’s more fundamental than that where he refers to the "stale, self-legitimising talk by public administrators about how they are building stuff to 'meet user needs' ...".
Have GDS already become stale and self-legitimising public administrators?
Are GDS part of the systemic failure of digital government transformation?
A bit of agile discovery work on the oldest rule in GDS's design principles book might help them and the rest of the world to get the user needs story straight.
"... we foster a user-centred culture in GDS and across government by getting everyone involved in user research", it says in a Government Digital Service blog post today, Don’t forget! 2 hours every 6 weeks. "We have user researchers as part of agile teams, for example. That's part of our DNA ... Our natural state can be to look inwards [horror], towards our teams [awful], not outwards towards our users [that's better] ...".
This is all part of putting user needs first, rule #1 in the GDS Design Principles: "Service design starts with identifying user needs. If you don’t know what the user needs are, you won’t build the right thing. Do research, analyse data, talk to users. Don’t make assumptions. Have empathy for users, and [you] should remember that what they ask for isn't always what they need".
This initially clear picture is clouded by the genetically modified Government as a Platform (GaaP) team at GDS, who said in May 2016: "Everyone knows we start with user needs. Except we don't. We start with the needs of our team ... When we don't do this our research isn't useful to our team and they ignore it. There's nothing more pointless than doing research that no one listens to". That's one of their Eight principles for user researchers on Government as a Platform.
Should GDS "look outwards towards [their] users" and start with "identifying user needs"? Or is that "pointless"? Should they rather "start with the needs of [the GDS GaaP] team"?
Confusing, isn't it. Which one is the doctrine? Outwards? Or inwards?
