Ben Holliday

I’m planning to focus on service design more than ever this year. To deliver better government services we need to design them.

At digital DWP, the question I’m hearing more and more is “who is going to join up all the user journeys across our services?” It’s the right question, and the answer is “we are”.

The perfect storm. All the things

Service design in government feels like the perfect storm at the moment. To really succeed you not only need to bring together policy and digital. You also have to successfully design the operation of these services with the technology used to deliver them.

We started this year by looking at all the things we’re working on at digital DWP. The most important part of this view is how the individual products and features start to fit together as they become real, fully integrated services that people have to use as part of their lives.

It’s then not just how these services fit together. It’s everything that’s still missing.

Policy

If we want to deliver better services, policy and digital should not be separate things. To respond to the changing world around us, we need to deliver services capable of responding in real time. We need to be able to quickly see if policies work. We know that we won’t get things right first time and that it’s better to fail fast, and fix things cheaply.

This can’t be done if we continue to separate out policy thinking from service delivery. If we’ve learned anything, as summarised in the book The Blunders of Our Governments:

…decisions should not be made in isolation from practical realities

This is the real delivery and operation of government services.

Operations

To really transform services we can’t separate service delivery from real world operations. How the business and process of delivering the service operates around the experience of those using it.

We deliver better services when those on the frontline get to focus on helping those who really need help. They shouldn’t have to spend valuable time understanding complex systems, or dealing with limiting or sometimes broken technology. The design of our internal systems and business processes is more important than ever.

Technology

Technology gives us an incredible tool set to work with but it can’t solve service design problems on its own. We have to shape our technology, rather than letting it shape us.

We have to design the solutions we need, then push our technology to help us break away from old ways of working.

If we fail to deliver better services for people it won’t be because of a lack of technology, it will be because we didn’t have enough imagination.

Because, most importantly, people

For a user, a service is where it starts and where it ends in their lives. It’s the end experience people have with the whole thing. It’s every single thing that happens as they work through the situation.

Service design is the policy, the operational planning, the systems, the business process, but most of all it’s the people and everything else that happens.

Everything else-ness

I’ve now got this real sense of the “everything else-ness” in government. The rest of it all needs designing, even the non-digital parts.

I’m so glad that we have the digital by default service standard. It’s so important it’s not just a ‘digital’ service standard.

There’s no such thing as a digital only solution if your goal is to deliver better services. It’s not a credible strategy to just ‘go digital’. There’s still too much talk of tactical digital solutions – this fails to understand the importance of designing the “everything else”.

It all starts with how people find or get to your service, it’s everything in-between, and doesn’t end until the experience or what happens as a result of your service.

Good service design is being prepared to make the best use of technology. It’s built on an understanding of users’ needs and, at it’s very best, completely transforms the operational structures the civil service is built upon. Most of all it brings together and values the “everything else-ness” of the experiences we need to design for.

If we really are looking at the perfect storm, bringing all these things together, it’s terrifying but in a good way. It’s an incredible opportunity.

I’ve been trying to explain this to people I’ve met throughout government so far this year. Everything we do is service design, it’s just we haven’t quite realised yet.

I’ll be exploring this theme and much more in my Service Design in Government keynote talk next month.

February 7th, 2016. Posted in - Design

This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 18 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky, less frequently now on X (formally Twitter), and on LinkedIn.