Towards Governance-as-a-Service?
A blog about the tech and data governance strand of the OneTeamGov Bureaucracy hack, which took place on 3rd July 2019.
As with so many good things in the One Team Gov world, it started with a Tweet. This Tweet, from James, wondering if we could hack bureaucracy:
From the responses, and a follow-up post fleshing out what such a thing might look like, the #BureaucracyHack was born. Those familiar with government committed their time to come together to share and hack bureaucratic processes faced by public servants.
We trailed four workstreams we wanted to hack at in advance:
We left room for a fifth workstream to be pitched on the day, which centred around hacking democratic engagement. After a quick recap of the principles and practicalities of the day, we split into five groups and got to work.
Getting started with hacking governance
This post sets out what happened in the tech and data governance strand.
Our group was made up of a mix of people from central and local government, arms-length bodies, and friends from the private and third sectors (more from them later!). Luke set the scene by posing the question he and I had explored in our previous blog — can we design governance of technical and data-driven projects that speeds up delivery?
We began by sharing pain points — the bottlenecks and bumps we face in the oversight of digital and data projects*:
Grouping and prioritising these pain points allowed us to split into three smaller groups, each one focussing on one aspect of governance:
- Visibility of governance processes. From mapping existing governance to thinking of ways to promote good practice;
- User needs around governance. Not just the delivery teams being governed, but decision-makers needing to understand progress; and
- Prototyping potential components of a platform or service. With the aim of breaking down the governance of tech and data projects to allows teams to build governance that could meet relevant user needs.
For a rounded picture of what these three groups came up with, I’d encourage you to watch the video of the Show and Tell that our workstream delivered at the end of the day — it’s here:
My personal highlights (do share yours!) were the empathy map that Steve shared, and Thea’s insight that we might take inspiration from the GOV.UK Design System to build a library of governance components — read on for more!
[Part II] practical actions emerged from our hack
Rather than re(show and) tell this story here, I want to talk about discussions we’ve had and work we’ve done since the day itself — as we’re super-keen to convert the ideas and energy in the room on the day into lasting reform, (hashtag PracticalAction).
Discussions first. Sharing our thoughts on Slack after the event, Chris made an excellent point: that we talked about the governance of many different things, from getting projects off the ground, to data sharing, to scaling things up or down, all the way to starting brand new governance of entirely new organisations, all in one session — that many of these things require different governance.
A separate chat with Steve and Anna (who is at GDS) emphasised this, and also brought out the perceived tension between delivery vs governance that our friends and Hackney Council, Richard and Luke and I have explored — the desire of delivery teams to ‘get on with it,’ vs the need for strategic oversight often expressed by senior decision-makers.
What ties Chris’ scenarios requiring different types of governance, with this tension Anna, Steve and I discussed? Principles, as Georgina used in our Show and Tell, including:
- Are we doing the right thing?
- Are we doing it in the right way?
- Are we meeting the needs of delivery teams, senior leaders, external stakeholders the wider system?
These discussions are just beginning, and if you want to contribute please head over to our Slack channel. Or do as Steve has started to do, and blog about your thoughts on this immense issue:
Onto practical action: Luke has started the skeleton of guidance that might accompany Governance as a Platform/Service — but what might that service look like and how might it work? As per Thea’s excellent suggestion, we could have a pick-and-choose menu of features that lets people build a governance system (product, service, pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to) fit for their purpose. Features could include:
- A way to enter project governance data once, or ideally draw from existing every-day tools eg Trello
- Giving various people (product managers, other teams, CDO, org boards, x-gov boards etc) tailored view according to their needs — collect once, show many times
- Going further, an auto-update feature —using the principles behind GOV.UK’s data registers and Reproducible Analytical Pipelines, if the truth changes, the view of the truth must change. This would integrate software engineering tools and techniques familiar to agile development and modern data management
- An intuitive way to prototype such a product/service such as the newly-updated GOV.UK prototype kit, leading to a pick-and-choose system inspired by GOV.UK Design System
The rest of our actions are listed on Slack, and include:
- writing up the map of current governance processes created on the day
- developing prototypes of ideas floated on the day including an empathy map, stakeholder helpcards and maybe even a chatbot
- a governance discovery, starting in Companies House, and based on that,
- piecing together a minimum viable governance system.
Progress to date since the event has admittedly been slow — we’re all carving our time out of incredibly busy lives, after all. But given a bit more effort and momentum, I feel there’s real potential here for a new way of governing complicated technical and data projects, across the public sector and beyond.
To get there, we need your help — what can you do to hack tech and data governance?
