Government digital service: is the feeling mutualised?

Government’s use of digital media is undergoing radical change. As digital media use has become more mainstream  and critical – first to communications, then policy-making through engagement and more recently for transactions – so too has government steadily rationalised its digital operations. That trend is now coming to a head with the establishment of the Government Digital Service, which will provide centralised services, a single domain and web platform for all government departments and [most of] their agencies to use.

That each department and agency will no longer have its own, separate domain, CMS, hosting arrangement, support contract, analytics account and maybe central web team is genuinely radical. But could the delivery of government digital services be more radical still?

Frances Maude’s speech at Civil Service Live 2011 made me think so. In that speech he floated the idea of giving public sector staff the right to form new mutuals and bid to take over the services they deliver. Could government digital services be a candidate for mutualisation? In this post I suggest that it could.

What might service transformation learn from the world’s most fearsome mammal and a wax-eating bird?

My fiancée and I are hoping to go on an safari honeymoon in Africa later this year.

If we go, I would really like to see a honey badger and a honeyguide.

The honeyguide is a bird that likes beeswax but can’t break into bee hives. What it does is catches the attention of a honey badger, which loves honey but isn’t so good at finding the hives.

Off they go together, the badger following the bird till they reach the hive. The badger then rips open the hive and both get their reward.

Both these independent organisms can exist without beeswax and honey and without one another, but they combine their skills in a wonderful manner to achieve a shared goal.

These special symbiotic relationships happen throughout the natural world. I think that they ought to happen in the world of public services too, especially in the context of citizen engagement with public services online.

What did you do during the Flu, daddy?

The ‘Swine Flu’ pandemic is far from the threat it was. We must remember it as a genuine threat – 14,711 died worldwide, with 390 of those in the UK – but now the government response is being scaled back.

COI was proud to play its part in spearheading efforts to educate the public about the pandemic and keep the information flowing as the situation unfolded. The virus was unpredictable and as this was the first pandemic of the digital age there was limited scope for communications planning and our efforts had to be flexible and fleet of foot.

From April 2009, I led a small COI Interactive team tasked with coordinating the ‘owned’ and earned’ digital media response; but with the general scaling back, I have now been ‘stood down’ and assigned to other campaigns and projects.

There will be formal evaluation efforts to properly assess the contribution made by government communications in limiting the impact of the virus. The aim will be to capture lessons learned. From my vantage, the integrated communications worked well – alongside a healthy dose of responsible coverage by the media – and those contributing to the digital efforts should be pleased with the results.

Still, having had opportunity to reflect, I’d recommend 10 additions to our response:

1. Place at least as much importance on mobile and web as any other media
2. Create one UK site for the public to access official information, advice, services and updates
3. Establish a centralised and automated repository to gather stats from all relevant public sector websites, and make these available as ‘raw’ reports and dashboards
4. Intervene in the social web to correct misformation, answer questions and build up engagement with the general public through regular webchats and podcasts
5. Provide ‘toolkits’ of content and apps for bloggers and community site managers, including – for example – symptom checkers
6. Use mobile to distribute updates and access codes to key at-risk groups
7. Encourage peer-to-peer exchange of official information and messaging through social network apps – for example ‘I’ve taken the following measures, so should you’
8. Release as many raw data sets and visualisations as possible to demonstrate spread and status
9. Collate local situation updates and make available through a centralised application
10. Use social media monitoring to optimise editorial content and tactical paid-for-search activity

In summary, future pandemic communications ought to benefit from a single destination site for all citizens, use of the social web and mobile to encourage engagement with official sources, more automated collection and sharing of data, and a greater frequency of content updates using all available rich media.

Choose a different ending

Went in to visit the Google’s Public Sector team this week to pick their brains on YouTube. Charlotte and Katarina had lots of interesting things to demonstrate, but I was most taken by a video they showed me.

Made for the Metropolitan Police by Spike, ‘Choose a different ending’ is one of the sharpest uses of YouTube I have yet seen for a public sector campaign.

It’s more of a play than a watch; check it out at www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFVkzYDNJqo and the campaign site at www.droptheweapons.org.

Insighful and hardworking creative, using the technolgy and the channel superbly; not preachy but makes you think twice. I think this might have an impact; it’s already caught on and seems to generating the views from exactly the intended audience. I’m really keen to locate an evaluation.

What Happens After Next? 10 issues for the future of digital engagement in government

Once upon a time social media was radical; now ministers regularly use it. Once ‘Transformational Government’ was an item on an agenda, but now it is the agenda.  And, the Power of Information recommendations were just ideas; now they are in practice.

As yesterday’s concepts become today’s policies, those concerned with digital engagement in government are afforded the opportunity to think about tomorrow’s challenges.  Here are 10 that have been playing on my mind…

1. Encouraging data-sharing but also reassuring the public and stakeholders on data integrity and security;
2. Approaching digital engagement as something that has costs associated with it rather than being a way of doing everything for free;
3. Investing thought and effort into exploration of the potential in municipal ICT and localised networks;
4. Managing and sustaining ‘everyday’ digital engagement as it becomes a party political issue;
5. Crowdsourcing problem-solving while ensuring that it is complementary to good governance rather than an alternative to it;
6. Giving civil servants remote access to systems to enable secure, mobile and resourceful working;
7. Creating a charter of democratic engagement entitlements and responsibilities for government and the public;
8. Developing an understanding of how to prioritise cross-border cyber-cooperation in order to mitigate cyber-conflict;
9. Improving the use of energy-efficient IT to underpin digital engagement;
10. Developing standardised digital engagement metrics suitable for use in the public sector and embedding their use.

Please query or add to the list…

This is talent… Tube Poker

Ministers are pretty chatty on average

Visualisation of ministerial webchat replies

I’ve managed and evaluated a few ministerial webchats in my time, and I’m expecting to run a few more.

When organising a webchat two questions always pop up.

One, how many questions will be received? The answer has to be: how long is a piece of string, or more accurately, how interesting is a piece of string. Sometimes you get 50, sometimes 5000.

Two, how many questions can the Minister expect to answer in the time (usually 60 minutes)? That’s an easier question to answer with an inclination, but recently I’ve been wanting to give a more precise answer. So, I thought I’d try to get one.

The aim was to get an average number, not produce a league table. A league table is pointless because each webchat attracts different questions requiring different answers that take different lengths of time to satisfy.

I restricted myself to ministerial webchats (no senior civil servants) and those run on departmental websites or channels. All webchats were text-based (practically all are) and run after 2005. Some ministers appear more than once, because they’ve done more than one webchat (dates available if you want). All the webchats had to be public-facing to count.

I found the transcripts through site archives and allowed myself to search back as far as three pages into a Google search. I think it was a pretty exhaustive search, but please let me know if I’ve missed any. I then counted the ‘replies’, which in webchat parlance count as answers. I did the count manually but thoroughly, though I accept there may be a reply missed or added here and there.

The answer: on average a minister manages to answer 21 questions in a webchat.

Twitter on

I’m on Twitter now too.

Thought it was about time to give it a go.

You there too? Let me know and I’ll follow, as they say.

If you were designing…

Been thinking about if I were to design the ideal football website, how would I go about it?

What about you? What conventions would you keep? Where would you make a change?