Breaking siloes with a service catalogue
Date: 16 May 2025
In the Digital Prevention Services Portfolio, we’ve created a catalogue of our products and digital services, to help us tackle the problem of siloed working. Siloes are inevitable in any large organisation, the NHS included. The trick is to accept that and come up with tactics for dealing with it.
The need for this became clear when we surveyed teams working on digital vaccination services about the challenges of meeting the NHS Service Standard principles. Many people pointed out problems created by siloes, saying things like:
“Being able to collaborate with other teams isn’t easy…”
“[We have] difficulties collaborating across teams, departments, operational and portfolio areas.”
“[It’s] hard to know who to contact across the wider NHS England.”
These comments made us ask:
- How can we make this easier?
- How can we help colleagues learn where each team sits, how all the different teams relate to each other and what they’re all working on?
A catalogue of services and products
That’s why we’ve built a catalogue of our digital services and products. This includes all the teams who are making contributions to digital prevention services — regardless of where they sit on the official organisational chart.
You can see where they are in the organisation, by selecting the “By organisation” tab at the top of the page. You can also browse by status, including discovery, alpha, beta, live, and retired, by platform, by theme and (my favourite) by users.
The concept is nothing new. NHS England has a Service catalogue, for external stakeholders, which has useful detail about our technical enablers. With our catalogue, it is designed to meet specific internal needs and helps everyone understand who owns what.
The catalogue has a single entry for each product or digital service and from there we can add useful links. This includes Slack channels, URLs of prototypes or live start pages, entries from our NHS Digital prevention services design history website and more. The catalogue groups entries in different ways, such as by theme, to show relationships or commonalities, which is essential for collaboration. For example, it can show similar digital enablers or teams working towards the same outcome.
This version of the catalogue doesn’t yet do things that will take longer to work out. It doesn’t list whole services like “Get a COVID-19 vaccination” because these services are built by many teams across different areas, making ownership complicated. But we think it will be achievable to catalogue these services in a future version.
Silo-busting features
This catalogue is designed to help teams and leads to:
- clearly articulate their scope and identify who else they need to work with
- self-organise to design across organisational boundaries
- discover related services and dependencies
- share and reuse design patterns to avoid duplication and unnecessary variation
- understand the wider context
- spot duplication and gaps
Looking ahead, the potential is huge: what if we could show success metrics? What if we could map entries to needs and show the size and scale of each service?
Help us improve
This catalogue is a first version and we want to iterate and improve. A small team worked on this, including our colleague Vicky Teinaki, who died earlier this year.
Her thoughtfulness and dedication to collaboration inspired all of us. Vicky’s contributions exemplified the very spirit of this project, and her impact will continue to be felt in this work and beyond.
If you’ve got feedback about the service catalogue beta, the simplest way to send it is by email, to me, at caroline.finucane@nhs.net.
