I think your insight about ‘agency approaches’ would play out across the digital teams of most government departments. Especially these days when the commissioning routes are so chocked off, if you can’t deliver in-house then the chances are the ‘project’ isn’t going to happen.

I agree that we have learned a lot from working with and observing the private sector and our direct suppliers, particularly the SMEs.

Most of it is good learning, which is readily applicable. In some cases, we’ve had to retool their proccesses for our ends – I’m thinking analytics where we have been more interested in ‘engagements’ than ‘sales’ or in moderation where our interests are more deliberative than supportive.

And, you are absolutely right that between departments there is alreasy a collaborative community of practice, exchanging ideas, documentation and setting up learning environments such as the Heads of Digital Engagement network, which was grassroots run at first.

But in a sense there is also competition. It’s based on credentials rather than finacials and it is very, very healthy. Who can do more on less? Who can get the most traffic with the least cost? Who can sustain a series of webchats the outputs of which are considered valuable by the responsible policy desk? We’re not in a race, it’s not me vs you but it is a challenge.

Here we try as much as possible to pretend we are a small agile agency and to give everyone a say in how the team progresses and delivers, that would be much easier if you could avoid much of the creeping death civil service bureaucracy.

The competition aspect is something that would concern me though. I’ve always thought we really thrive in a non-competitive atmosphere – ie there’s no reason not to share our best practice and ideas.

Can you imagine if FCO digital and BIS digital were suddenly in financial competition with each other? Might make things a bit less rosy.

That said if anyone was seriously considering this I’d be interested!

Jenny