Digital Transformation at Uk.Gov

This week I attended the “Digital Transformation” event hosted by Dare and it did not disappoint. Leading off was Russell Davies – Head of Creative Strategy for the UK Government Digital Services initiative and a proponent of “Usability trumps Persuasion” paradigm in digital service platforms. In his own inimitable style with a dramatic opening to the 20^th Century Fox sound track, he described the process they had gone through at uk.gov to transform the experience for the citizen.

According to Russell, Digital Transformation is about "

making services better for everyone, not just people who use the website”

The strategic vision for the GDS programme can be summarised as:

The estimated economic impact of this vision, driving the Citizen towards self-discovery and self-service has been about 60 millions pounds of annual savings.

The process of digital transformation started with pulling together multi-disciplinary teams to map all the hundreds of services and microsites and identify essential services and weeding out stuff that wasn’t needed.  The transformation delivery paradigm was built around following key themes:

1	Understand user needs. Research to develop a deep knowledge of who the service users are and what that means for digital and assisted digital service design.
2	Put in place a sustainable multidisciplinary team that can design, build and operate the service, led by a suitably skilled and senior service manager with decision-making responsibility.
3	Analyse the prototype service’s success, and translate user feedback into features and tasks for the next phase of development.
4	Consistent User experience:  use a common design framework to ensure a intuitive, responsive experience which
5	No link left behind. Use tools to re-wire the service to the new platform without fan-fare so that the users do not notice.

Incremental Service Delivery

The platform delivery lifecycle was agile, user-centred and multidisciplinary teams distributed across several sites, delivering digital services in an incremental seamless manner.

Discovery: A short phase, in which you start researching the needs of your service’s users, find out what you should be measuring, and explore technological or policy-related constraints.

Alpha: A short phase in which you prototype solutions for your users needs. You’ll be testing with a small group of users or stakeholders, and getting early feedback about the design of the service.

Beta: You’re developing against the demands of a live environment, understanding how to build and scale while meeting user needs. You’ll also be releasing a version to test in public.

Live: The work doesn’t stop once your service is live. You’ll be iteratively improving your service, reacting to new needs and demands, and meeting targets set during its development.

Retirement: Even the best services may eventually reach retirement. That should be treated with the same care as went into the building and maintaining of that service.

One of the more controversial but immensely sensible thoughts Russell left us with was:

“ Don’t innovate, first get the basics right!”