Transformation at scale: when Public Service becomes digital
How the inventors of bureaucracy are becoming champions of innovation
By Claudio Vandi, Maxime Basset, Thomas Lacquemant
States and governments have bad reputation for innovation: their teams are considered slow and their processes archaic.
However, over the last few years, they created some of the most advanced structures to support innovation at scale. All organisations can learn from them.
Public sector is the largest client of Service Design and Innovation.
At the same time, states around the world are creating digital agencies or acceleration-like structures to transform public service from within with the goal of improving performance and user experience.
In Europe, GDS (Government Digital Services) in the UK and MindLab in Denmark are among the best known structures. Italy missioned a former SVP from Amazon to lead the “IT Digital Team”: a team of digital experts on sabbatic leave from companies and universities around the world.
In France, public digital transformation and innovation initiatives are also flourishing, namely through Beta.gouv: an acceleration platform that creates startup-like teams to build digital public services.
It works through 4 steps:
Beta.gouv started as a project from the Ministry of Modernisation but today is a common framework that each department can use for its own services. If you’ve read our article about Innovation Portfolios, this looks pretty much like one.
Since 2017 NUMA has been one of the main partners of the beta.gouv program, specifically for the French Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Ecology. We also work with a similar structure within the City of Paris (Startup de Ville).
Here are 3 things we learned from working with public partners that can apply to any company willing to innovate at scale.
1. Knowledge is the ground for scalability
Creating an innovation portfolio and a community of innovators is the best way to scale your innovation efforts.
Scalability happens when teams share resources and learnings.
Beta.gouv is a good example of that: public servants, developers, data scientists and designers work across multiple teams to optimise resource allocation and share their experience across projects. Every week, they share learnings and help each other during a standup meeting.
GDS spreads learnings by building guidelines and design assets that any project can use to piggyback on previous projects.
In public service, knowledge is shared beyond the project teams, it is openly accessible: from giving access to early-stage versions of the new services to presenting performance metrics to publishing the open source code of every project and opening data so as to encourage their reuse.
All this allows to create an ongoing conversation with users and stakeholders instead of collecting one-off feedback when the service is shipped.
2. Don’t get lost in execution
When it comes to innovation we are often confronted with the “leaky bucket” bias: executives think that if they want more innovation on the market they should add more ideas at the beginning of the funnel.
This is rarely the case. Just consider that the average duration of major public IT projects in France is 6.2 years. Good ideas exist but most of the time they get lost in execution.
The way we tackle this problem with beta.gouv is by focusing on delivering usable “beta” version of projects in weeks instead of months. The last project we have been working on is called Work In France. It aims at helping foreign students to get temporary work permits in France. It was built in one month and already receives half of the total requests.
Once the first version is published, you are out of the Powerpoint limbo and it becomes easier to improve it and bring other stakeholders on board.
Having a team fit for execution and a methodology of time-boxing is also key for moving forward. That’s why startup accelerators like us are today major players in Corporate Innovation: when speed of execution is the essence, they are a better partner than traditional agencies and consultancies.
3. ROI is more than financial return
Measuring ROI of innovation initiatives is key. But limiting ROIs to financial results is blind.
The success of innovation can be of saving money, saving time, acquiring or retaining users, or simply moving from guessing-based to facts-based decisions.
The first results of our recent project Work in France show metrics that can easily be converted in savings: half of the total amount of requests are submitted through the platform. Processing time is ten times quicker and continuously monitored for improvement.
GDS also does a great job in sharing the impact of its projects: on the vehicle tax service you can for example see the overall number of transactions and the “service cost” per transaction. A good service means reducing this cost to the minimum.
Next time you have to define KPIs for your projects, try to measure impact beyond financial returns.
In a nutshell:
- Focus on knowledge to achieve scalability
- Execute fast to escape the Powerpoint limbo
- Think beyond financial ROI.
We hope these learnings from public sector innovation will help you transform your organisation at scale.
Work with us
If you want to discuss about how to build execution-oriented teams to create digital services in private or public companies get in touch with Maxime, Products & Services Design Lead or Thomas, Public Innovation Programs manager.
Learn more
Everything we learn through our projects is also shared in our trainings, from Design Thinking & Lean to team coaching (in French here).
Take a look at it or contact Claudio, Learning and Transformation Director.
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