The value of ‘Government as a Platform’ in a crisis
Ecosystems of enabling tools and resources have proven their worth for public service teams needing to react quickly in response to COVID-19.
COVID-19 has reshaped the delivery and experience of public services. It prompted an overnight shift to remote working and forced the closure of face-to-face service channels. It’s a crisis that could be seen as a catalyst to fulfil long-held ambitions for digital government. But it’s also a crisis that has forced digital to become the default irrespective of whether or not citizens, or their countries, were ready for it.
Nevertheless, these months are a powerful demonstration of long-term digital government leadership and associated strategies that not only create operating environments where empowered teams can respond with agility and invention to unprecedented situations, but which seek to minimise digital divides and ensure the public have the necessary access to skills and infrastructure.
‘Government as a Platform’ ecosystems are the critical foundations that support and equip service design and delivery teams to meet the needs of their users. But building such foundations isn’t glamourous, it isn’t quick and because the returns aren’t immediate it’s harder to get the financial or political backing to do it.
Bringing these vital enablers of a digital state to fruition therefore needs committed leadership to champion a long-term vision and secure the necessary resources to create and iterate them over time. The experience of 2020 should strengthen the argument for developing these ecosystems in the months and years ahead to ensure that practical enablers and support are available if ever we need to use that word ‘unprecedented’ again.
Here are some overall observations about where we’ve seen the value of Government as a Platform in a crisis.
Move fast, don’t break things
One of the most important digital government foundations is web infrastructure. Because crises cause unpredictable spikes in demand for government information and services, resilient and scalable cloud-based architecture is one of the most important building blocks.
The quality of that infrastructure informs how well single government websites, digital identity solutions, payment platforms, and notification tooling can handle greater than expected throughput without breaking.
Equally important is that those enablers are built and supported in ways that make it as easy as possible for any team to spin up new services in response to emerging needs. Reducing the barriers to adoption for teams, regardless of where they are in the public sector, means resolving legal and commercial arrangements, offering low-tech options, providing good documentation and designing the user experience of onboarding and approval.
Beyond software, it means maintaining clear quality standards and useful guidance as well as sharing reliable, user researched interaction patterns and design systems that set baseline levels of quality assurance to accelerate the development of new services.
Establish a culture, not just a toolkit
Having access to good technology or service standards are not in and of themselves a guarantee that a team will design and deliver a good service.
This is especially true in an emergency where the imperative to deliver can translate into viewing standards and principles as a blocker to be bypassed until things get back to ‘normal’. But the design and delivery standards and principles we’ve seen established around the world are no luxury, they’re essential for ensuring trustworthy and sustainable services that work.
The perception of standards and principles negatively as a blocker or positively as an enabler reflects the service design and delivery DNA of an organisation. It is better to equip people with the right tools and skills rather than enforcing documented rules and policing compliance. And so, when crisis hits and instinct takes over, the instinct reinforces the ‘right’ behaviours of understanding users and their needs, respecting security, prioritising accessibility and being committed to measuring, learning and iterating over time.
This culture needs to be a public sector culture, not something advocated by a particular pocket of a particular organisation. Effective services can only be built by diverse, multi-disciplinary teams that default to involving the public (even if face to face contact is difficult) as they try to understand whole problems and design end to end experiences. These teams will naturally work across organisational boundaries to ensure that users avoid dead ends after being handed from one organisation to another. They will also be mindful of both public facing and internal processes to avoid the ‘swivel-chair integration’ of websites feeding paper based internal processes that require the presence of on-site staff.
Good services depend on good content
The COVID-19 crisis has shown the importance of clear, concise and reliable information to ensure government messaging is well understood, services obviously signposted, and that demand on the channels needed by the most vulnerable is reduced.
In the last decade countries have moved away from having separate websites for separate parts of government and started to consolidate around single government websites to provide a unified voice through a single point of reference. Removing the independent channels of separate parts of government requires strong leadership and the right backing to develop a new model for content distribution.
A single domain is not just a technical exercise in consolidating websites. Efforts to change the communication and delivery culture of government are vital in unifying communication, branding and messaging. Cross-government content communities embrace the habits of iterative, user-centred content design in their mission to smooth the complexity of government.
Content design as a discipline should not be neglected. Preparing good content is an active exercise, informed by data and evidence, to communicate clearly. The language of information and transactions shapes how easily users find services, and whether or not they can successfully answer their problems when they do.
Don’t do everything yourself (you can’t)
Government as a Platform ecosystems help teams focus on what’s unique to their users rather than devoting effort to challenges others have already addressed. A measure of domestic success is that these resources are used at scale, at every level and in every sector of government with minimal central intervention.
In the context of COVID-19 where the impact of a global pandemic is felt throughout the world this approach can be powerful. In reaching everywhere this crisis has left countries facing almost identical challenges at almost the same time. At times like these, multi-lateral principles of co-operation, openness and knowledge sharing mean benefitting from paths already trodden, mistakes already made and solutions already developed.
This highlights the benefits of a commitment to open sourcing code, working in the open and using open standards to support collaboration whether within your government, with non-governmental actors or across borders. Making the codebase for Government as a Platform components open source can mean the investment made by one country can provide teams elsewhere with short-cuts in implementing their own solutions. Amazon and GitHub are curating collections that can act as the first port of call for any country now considering how to develop the tools and approaches they were lacking.
In-house development of technical solutions is not always the right model and in a crisis, the demands of speed and scope in response may outstrip existing delivery capacity. Therefore, establishing an effective and trusted supplier base is another important long-term foundation. This will benefit from Agile commissioning approaches and embedding procurement, technical and commercial standards to safeguard access to data and intellectual property as well as assurance against a country’s quality standards.
Treat data with respect, not as an afterthought
At the start of the COVID-19 outbreak the data dashboard prepared by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University quickly became the go-to reference point for a composite snapshot of the most up to date status. That site, and others like it, were possible because of open government data. That the majority of countries published useful OGD datasets echoes the findings of last year’s OECD Open, Useful and Re-usable data (OURdata) Index of an increased global maturity.
However, less maturity is visible in data-driven design, delivery or evaluation of policy and services. As highlighted in The path to becoming a data-driven public sector, a long-term, comprehensive model of data governance (covering leadership, capability, regulation, architecture and infrastructure) is needed.
Although a health crisis, the fallout from COVID-19 has required access to data from multiple fields whether about individuals or in aggregate. This emphasises the importance of canonical data registers, secured by trusted access controls built as part of an explicit strategy to enable interoperability between different layers of government and across its different sectors.
Crucially, the use of data by government must always build, and never threaten, trust. Again, this requires long-term efforts to invest in practical steps that cover digital security approaches that balance risk with transformation, publicly accessible ethical frameworks to guide behaviour, regulatory frameworks protecting privacy on citizen terms, and tools that give citizens control over their data and any associated consents (increasingly forming part of their digital identity).
Equip the public, not just public servants
Encouraging a culture that designs good services, and invests in data, technology and practical resources can equip governments to react swiftly and effectively when crisis hits. However, those enablers have greater potential than making things easier for teams within government. An ecosystem of data and open standards, as well as constantly-improving digital services, can be a multiplier for the action of citizens, giving them the resources for creative responses appropriate to the needs of communities in crisis.
Digital identity is crucial in empowering individuals to prove who they say they are as well as increasing their control over the use and re-use of personal data. The challenges of COVID-19 in forcing interactions online have been lessened in societies where an ongoing strategic commitment from both public and private sectors has made digital identity part and parcel of day to day life.
Although some countries report almost universal coverage of digital identity, elsewhere it highlights digital divides that can not be quickly addressed. Coverage, speed, reliability and affordability of internet connections as well as access to devices are one part of this challenge. So too are issues of accessibility, literacy and inclusion where availability of the right assistive technologies or digital skills will determine the extent to which a forced shift online exacerbates existing societal inequalities.
An overnight response, years in the making
Developing a coherent and comprehensive Government as a Platform ecosystem is a long-term endeavour. 2020 has thrown into sharp relief how different elements of that model can increase the agility of government. This means that as we look to a future that may contain increased risk of greater shocks from the climate emergency or future pandemics, that services evolve with the speed that’s needed to continue to provide equitable, effective services to citizens everywhere.
Digital government efforts should not result in a situation where access to the internet determines your participation in the life of society. A Government as a Platform ecosystem should make it easy to design services that bring the physical, offline and digital elements of a service together, ensuring the same experience for all users, in all contexts, through all channels. Multiple entry points are particularly important in a crisis, where access to a service can be the difference between life and death.
Increasingly, the opportunities of service design and delivery are a priority for the countries we work with. It was part of the focus for the ongoing Digital Government Review of Slovenia and last year’s Review of Panama. In Chile, it was the subject of a dedicated analysis of ChileAtiende (a unifying public service brand) with the resulting report, Digital Government in Chile — Improving public service design and delivery, exploring how to equip teams for successfully designing and delivering high-quality services at scale.
Contact us if you’d like to discuss how we could support your country or public sector organisation establish its ‘Government as a Platform’ foundations for improved service design and delivery.
