Digital and data infrastructure

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The government has made some significant progress in digitally transforming some large-scale public services. Applying for a passport or paying car tax—these are simpler, cheaper, and clearer processes than they were 10 years ago. But there’s still much more to do, and plenty of other services that fall short.

In the last decade, led by the Government Digital Service (GDS), the UK government developed a series of platforms. These are the common components of public services, the building blocks that many services need: taking payments, sending notifications, verifying someone’s identity, having a public-facing website. Departmental lines of accountability mean that different parts of the public sector have a tendency to build or buy these components again and again, rather than build a central common platform and reuse it multiple times. By creating shared technology platforms like Pay and Notify, and making them available to the whole of government, GDS attempted to provide a common infrastructure for public services, saving money and improving the quality and consistency of the citizen experience of online government.

That didn’t always work, as the experience of GOV.UK Verify exemplified. But the UK is now a recognised global leader in digital government based on the progress made to date.

Platforms like this are essential public infrastructure, and investing in them supports mission-oriented government. The good progress made so far with Pay and Notify is undermined by the continued lack of similar investment in shared data infrastructure. Canonical sources of data that can be used across government remain rare but play an equally vital role. There is, for example, no single list of recognised countries used consistently across central government. (There was such a list—a Countries Register—for a short while, but disappointingly, it was defunded and disappeared.)

Establishing fundamental data infrastructure like this is not a simple task, but getting it right would be a huge enabler for supporting mission-driven government. Platforms and data infrastructure provide a set of building blocks that service teams can use with very little additional effort. The more infrastructure that exists, the quicker and cheaper it becomes for teams to run more experiments with different policy choices, at scale. Teams no longer have to build everything from scratch.

Beyond data, there’s also the technology—still all too often farmed out to “Big IT” suppliers of proprietary systems, at enormous cost and the loss of strategic flexibility and responsiveness. Government should not be beholden to suppliers, no matter how well-known their brand or how global their reach, if it means they lose the ability to configure and adapt systems for constantly changing circumstances. If a government is locked into a multi-year contract with a technology system it doesn’t control, there is no Radical How. Test-and-learn approaches can’t work if you can only make technology system changes once a month—still a common state in government.

Our experience at GDS showed that taking a “small pieces, loosely joined” approach was more effective. The technology infrastructure of government should be comprised of reusable, adaptable component parts, managed and maintained by in-house experts with the necessary deep knowledge. Some will be bought or rented from the market; some will be more appropriately built in-house.

Which brings us back to civil service capability again: it’s important to make working in government feel like a job that those technological experts actually want to do.

Enabling the Radical How will need a renewed commitment to common platforms, investment in data infrastructure, and re-energised innovation in procurement frameworks—something that successfully reshaped the vendor market in the early to mid-2010s, but has since drifted.

All this sounds far-reaching and radical compared with how the government works today. But it’s important to stress: this is not that radical, nor that new. The world’s biggest and most successful companies already work this way, and have done for many years. They are big and successful because they work this way. Because they are able to respond to changing circumstances rapidly, using experimentation and iteration as their primary tools.

Government can do the same. Other governments, in Estonia and Taiwan, for example, have done so. In the UK we made a start, with good results, but more recently saw a loss of political and public service leadership ambition to keep up the momentum. We’d like to see that ambition return.