Previous:Learning from Canada
Q. Let's talk about Direct.gov, which is the Web site where citizens are accessing their online services. When did this first come to fruition, and how has that evolved since then?
A. Direct.gov has been around for about four or five years now, and it started off as being a shared resource by a number of departments. It was successful to a degree but what it kind of ended up with was because it was a shared resource, instead of being truly integrated, it was on a similar Web site, and it has a section about benefits, transport, etc. The integration level was really quite thin.
The change that we have encouraged and orchestrated in the past year or so is to integrate that more so that people really can come in and address it in terms that matter to them.
With a lot of these things we started off more in information provision, and then started pushing transactions in there, so there's quite a lot to do in building up the transactional capability of it. What we're doing now is we're defining a road map for Direct.gov, and at the same time, we're targeting a reduction in other Web sites in government.
Q. So you're integrating these content with Direct.gov, are you getting rid of any of these government Web sites?
A. Yes. But it's not a shallow integration; it's not just taking content and moving it across, but taking the intent and optimizing it. What you will discover is there is less stuff; fewer pages than there are at the moment. That's because we're integrating stuff properly and we're getting rid of rubbish. The target is for that process to be absolutely complete by 2011.
Q. Why did you want to get into this line of work, and what is it that you enjoy the most about the work that you're doing now?
A. When we went to our last delivery council meeting with all these slides about government, the lady who's running 'Tell Us Once' stood up and said, 'This is boring, service transformation is fun.' Very rarely in public service do you get the opportunity to do something that is genuinely fun, exciting and innovative. Working on projects like this you can actually see something tangible and that was the attraction for me. For this particular time, and in my view, in order to get anything done, you need three things aligned.
You need financial leadership, political leadership and executive leadership. You need all of those three things absolutely in line to achieve anything. The trouble is that those three things very rarely align. But in the U.K. at the moment, we just had what is known as an Operations Spending Review (OSR). We operate in these three-year cycles, and periodically, we kind of stop and take a blank sheet of paper and we say, 'We're just going to look at this right from the ground up again.' So this work is part of the OSR.
At the executive level we have a new Cabinet Secretary, Gus O'Donnell, and of course we're having a change of political leadership. So uniquely, and unusually, we have all of those three things aligned. With service transformation as being one of the key objectives, the cabinet office has got three priorities and this is one of them.
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