Comments on: Question 3: Sharing the platform

By: Paul Clarke

Paul Clarke — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:48:07 +0000

I’m not entirely convinced by the question. As others have pointed out, for central government services there are economic and consistency advantages in having a platform that can be used by many areas of government activity. I am wary of the word ‘platform’ though – it can have too many interpretations for my liking. cf ‘Framework’!

What I think might lie behind the question is: should more be offered centrally to help more disparate public service players (public, private or voluntary) deliver digitally? And I’d offer a big ‘no’ to this. How many infrastructure rollouts have failed because they offered something that became too big to specify, too complex to procure and ended up being so slow that other alternatives had already got there ahead of them?

Digital technologies are fast-developing and fast-flowing. Good services will find a way to their audiences, and poor ones won’t. We’re not in 2001 now, where having a clearly navigable structure of websites was at the heart of digital strategy. We’re in a networked, modular world. To a great extent it doesn’t matter where services are hosted, what they are co-located with, or who actually operates them. If they are findable, and deliver benefit, then they thrive. Interfere with those natural mechanisms at your peril. (And please don’t use a ton of my taxes in trying…)

Disclosure: As Question 1.

By: Liam Slater

Liam Slater — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:28:19 +0000

The government should not be providing a single shared platform but should provide open standards for data allowing other public and voluntary organisations to impliment whatever systems they feel are most appropriate at a local level.

These standards should not rely on proprietary technologies and should be simple and flexible (a defined schema accessible through a choice of JSON and XML at least).

By: Alan Mather

Alan Mather — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 16:02:35 +0000

Let me start by declaring my bias. In 2001 I ran the team that either built or operated (sometimes both) UK gov’s central infrastructure (the government gateway, ukonline.gov.uk, knowledge network and the GSI; later we built other capability – direc.gov.uk, secure email, the criminal justice exchange and so on.
Almost a decade later I still believe that any government needs a core of central infrastructure. That doesn’t mean that there’s only one of everything or indeed only one of anything. But it does mean that there are enormous economies of scale (for government) in having only a very small number of things and enormous efficiencies (for the population at large) in being able to access definitive, joined up, secure content and services provided by government.
A good example of how a platform can be developed in central government are the various tax services offered by HMRC. Sure, they come in for lots of flak from those who will happily throw rocks from the doors of their rickety greenhouses, but they work and work well. HMRC provides self assessment as a service (SAaaS?) yet publishes the schema and the rules so that other providers can do the same; likewise with PAYE – you can fill the forms in online at HMRC if you want, but there is a vast market in providers of integrated accounting systems that provide far better PAYE than HMRC could (or would want to). We’ve come a long way since the debacle of the online fishing licence.
It’s 5 years since I stopped running central infrastructure and, whilst I believe I left it in a pretty good state, those who followed have made enormous strides that I only wish I could have done. That must be allowed to continue, with direct.gov.uk at the centre of it.
When I started in UK government, the website count was already over 1,000. It climbed soon after to over 3,000. Only recently has that trend been arrested and the count, whilst still too high, is being managed down.
As a consumer of UK government information, I want to be sure that I am accessing the most up to date, most relevant content. I don’t want to learn how government works and be forced to remember which department operates what services or how I need to access them. Likewise, I only want one password to access government services (via the gateway) although I understand why some would want more.
Direct.gov should certainly act as a platform and extend what it already does – it should aggressively aggregate and distil content so that the chasms between government organisations are largely hidden from my view (this was always the point of direct.gov of course). It should make that content available to those who want to reuse it (as it does now through its syndication engine) and it should continue to close down non-specialist government websites. All that remain should be specific departmental policy sites such as those for accountants where arcane policy advice needs to be made available but where usage is low.
Direct.gov should then re-open its search engine, taking it back to the original instance where search was pan-government. Any government website should be able to use that engine to search its site but also to provide links to direct.gov’s content (as sponsored links or “ads” down the side) so that any one on any government site can find content on any other site all through one managed engine.
Direct.gov should provide (and perhaps already does) mini-campaign sites for every department that wants to launch an online initiative, and provide a centralised ad engine that allows ads for those campaigns to be displayed on other sites (by provide in this instance I don’t mean some monolithic central capability but access to tools and services that can do this quickly and cheaply).
I applaud those who have navigated around central bureaucracy and used tools such as WordPress to create, often within hours or a few days, sites that meet specific needs or that handle sudden reorganisations of the government machine. But, that said, I innately believe that fragmentation of government content is a bad thing – I don’t want to figure out which of the 310,000 instances of the phrase “disability living allowance” is the right one. I want to be taken to the right one by direct.gov. And I don’t want different government departments spending money trying to keep each of those 310,000 instances up to date as the rules change.
The last part of being a platform is transactional. Should direct.gov move into directly providing transactional services into government? We always imagined it should and would. It hasn’t so far (short of providing skins for those who do provide such services). Increasingly I think this is a step too far and that it is better for departments to be required to open up the rules for their transactions and to provide white label forms that can be used by others alongside their own branded ones. The trouble here is that when sending information to government, I think I’d want to be sure that it was definitely going to government and that there was a near-zero risk of someone else seeing it (the napster version of Self Assessment where you could briefly share tax forms caused some chaos for a while). So there needs to be some kind of kitemark or audit process but, at the same time, people have to recognise the need for their own diligence as evidence by the recent iTunes problems where compromised accounts were used to boost the chart ranking of books and applications.

By: Chris Webster

Chris Webster — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:15:05 +0000

The sharing of the Directgov platform has enabled a signficant reduction in cost in the provision of government web-sites through the web rationalisation programme. The fact that these savings have not been taken as budget reductions should be a question for the departments and not for Directgov.

Going forward, the idea of a single shared platform needs to be rethought as more and more services connecting to more and more departments and local authorities. There needs to be a common shared set of services which include single sign-on to all services, content management (including semantic web), single view of citizen, personalisation capabilities, site feedback and review, payment engines and many more. This collection of services should be delivered through as services in the cloud (more than just infrastructure in the cloud) but designed to a common set of principles such that they can be extended and swapped as necessary.

In this way, in may be feasible for departments to adopt all or some of these services and only pay for the ones they consume. This will require a collective design that only Directgov can provide. Failure to do this will mean that the vision of a single point of access for all government information and services will fail leaving each department to do its own thing and the citizen left to engage with them all on a one by one basis.

By: Paul Nash

Paul Nash — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:53:02 +0000

Presenting content as text only is not inclusive. The range of content types should be included, video with sub titles, pictures and stories in text and audio. User journeys are informative for other users and mirrors the way in which some sectors learn to use services by listening to the stories of friends. Text should be available in different colours so the use of colour changers on every page is also important.

By: David Brackin

David Brackin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:40:42 +0000

Absolutely not at all. This is better done by the private sector. I can create and host a blog in five minutes for free using any number of services out there.

This is an IT contractor’s wet-dream: a never ending project with support fees up in the heavens.

By: Antony Watts

Antony Watts — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:26:08 +0000

Provide a common platform for all government organisations that legally enforce anything on me, or offer me any service. But absolutely exclude voluntary or community activities, these only muddy the water, cost money and can do it themselves.

By: DAVID URMSTON

DAVID URMSTON — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:54:35 +0000

Central Government should be setting the standards for the delivery of information to the public, which these other bodies should adhere to.

By: rex_Imperator

rex_Imperator — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:45:10 +0000

The current set up where Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh parish council has to procure and manage its own web presence is absurd. Hospitals should be deploying the resources they have on direct patient care, not the hosting of servers and web designers. This has to be a no-brainer. But it does require a common set of standards (see previous questions). It also needs not be the customary gold-plated central government solution. The platform and associated elements should specify which technologies can be handled (so everyone can use the same tools), a maximum file size and so on, recognising that not all recipients of this service can access the servers through ultra high speed broadband connections.

By: Ian Tresman

Ian Tresman — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:36:08 +0000

Central Government has no remit to share services. But it should make sure that superfast broadband (100Mb/s+) is widely available. The everyone will be able to provide a platform.