Reuse by Design - Chapter I

A greenfield Utopia — How would government work and deliver if we built it from scratch?

Read the intro to Reuse by Design here

We have seen some great work in countries like Estonia, Ukraine, Italy, or India that show how governments can build efficient and user-centred services. Could those be blueprints for us? How can we stop solving the same problems over and over again? How can we design more like Lego? What could a new digital centre look like?

I’d love to see an urban planning approach. Imagine a government town square (Meet other citizens and have a chat!) with a store (“Locally produced components!”), a library (Find all information about past/existing work), a university (Learn new things, develop standards, experiment), a market to showcase local produce (Discover current work) and a utilities provider to link everyone into the same tech and data infrastructure. This would cover a lot of common needs — and too many of them are currently developed in silos.

So what would we need to build better shared infrastructure that makes it easier and faster for the wider government to build better services?

• Components: libraries, share infrastructure and a new participation model
• Collaboration: new ways of working and enabling tech
• Culture: a culture of reuse and & incentives for departments

Components

Libraries, share infrastructure and a new participatory model

What do we have?

Quite a lot of good stuff! We have the GOV.UK design system, we have GOV.UK components like Pay, Notify etc.

What do we need?

A lot more of this. A LOT.

There are many more types of things we should share. I’ll talk about it in Chapter 2: Taxonomy and Productifiction — What are the things we can share + reuse? of this series and you can already read about Service Patterns: Part 1 — History, Opportunity and Challenges in the blog by Martin Ford-Downes

The issue with building shared components from the centre only is that it currently covers a relatively small part of the work that is happening. And the current model doesn’t scale well to be able cover more of the needs of all of the departments. We could do with a warehouse instead of a small store.

How can we get central share infrastructure that covers a lot more ground by providing the urban planning and will allow the departments to focus on the unique work their services require? The answers is a participatory model.

Collaboration

New ways of working and enabling tech

What do we have?

A lot of smart people and great work happening everywhere. People are willing to share and reuse but it is hard.

What do we need?

A way to harness all this potential: A functioning pipeline so departments can feed work into the centre much more easily.

• New ways of working

In our departmental Design System (That a lot of departments have one already makes the point that it’s not currently easy to share into the centre) we are currently developing service models on how the teams in our different departmental areas can run ahead and build things and share them back into the Design System. We are experimenting with the idea of a community-owned sandbox that significantly lowers the hurdles to contributing and offers transparency on the work that is happening. A similar model could be used to work cross-government.

More about this in Chapter 3: Building new Infrastructure and in a blog on the MoJ Design System team by Robertjmccarthy soon.

• Technology that enables collaboration

We are lacking a town square. We are not currently set up to easily collaborate and share between departments. I’ve learned this the hard way when I set up a Sharepoint collab space for the cross — gov Heads of Design to share documents and collaborate. Even though a lot of departments are moving over to MS, this is still a clunky and very manual process that doesn’t scale well and has a difficult user experience. And a lot of people still can’t access it. The result is very low engagement.

We need technology that makes it easy to work together instead of putting up hurdles.

Culture

A culture of reuse and & incentives for departments

Richard Pope makes a good point in Platformland (p114):

“Common components are an achievable aspiration that can transform public services, but experience shows that they are unlikely to emerge organically from government agencies. The institutional incentives are not strong enough.”

I couldn’t agree more — but this a problem we really need to solve. To significantly raise the amount of shareable material we need to find ways to enable it to emerge from departments . And we need incentives.

The strategy has been delivery for quite a while now. We are very focused on delivering fast — and working in a silo enables us to deliver fast. Of course this is short-sighted since in the long run we could deliver a lot more quality work in much shorter time if we reused instead of reinventing the wheel. So we need to shift the focus more long-term and cross-cutting.

What do we have?

• A lot of willingness to reuse — as shown in the success of the available components and the gov design system. Also in how missed the GDS Academy is.
• It’s even in the Service Standards! 13. Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns
• Mission-driven government specifically aims to drive joined up working between departments where so far “too often different parts of the government have pursued their own narrow goals rather than working together.”.

What do we need?

• Bake sharing and reusing into our ways of working. If you have interesting examples of teams integrating it into sprints / product lifecycles I’d love to hear them!
• Departments need their own local reuse infrastructure to efficiently reuse and share their own components back into the centre. We need people in all departments who’s fulltime job it is to make it happen. We can’t just hope it will happen — and we can’t just rely on the centre.
• Incentives for departments to develop components and share them into the centre need to happen on a budget level. And by central and departmental leadership 100% buying into it and all sides enabling it in their departments via love (it’s in the strategy and in the goals and is celebrated) and money (there is actual investment into it).

Final thoughts that keep me up at night

We still act and build services like a herd of small private sector start-ups and don’t really utilise our massive advantage: That we are at heart one giant public sector network that would be able to work incredibly efficient if we just had the infrastructure and the ways of working to do so.

What have I missed so far? How does your Utopia look like? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Coming soon: Chapter 2: Taxonomy and Productifiction — What are the things we can share + reuse?

Reuse by Design is a series of blogs by Nikola Goger collaborating with various smart brains working in the public sector.

Read all chapters here https://medium.com/share-reuse