User-facing services vs enabling platforms

Here is a dichotomy that has been on my mind recently: user-facing services, or enabling platforms? What’s an ideal relationship between these two? It’s not some grand plea nor is it directed at anything or anyone in particular. I just like working through things in writing, and all this blogging is giving me FOMO.

An organisation like GDS is special because it is responsible for both the front door to government, and the platforms that help teams across government build great services. The fact that we do both is what makes us more than a sum of our parts. More than just a digital publishing arm and more than just a platform shop. I guess it makes it also makes us quite a complicated, unusual organisation, which may have made it hard to establish a clear mission at times, but I’m not convinced that any of it is really that unusual?

Government is a very complex system, with each part of it responsible for delivering a bunch of services to achieve the policy outcomes they care about. There are hundreds organisations involved: the fact that all public services in the UK feel more or less the same is a minor miracle, and testament to the amazing design choices made over the last decade.

Radically improving the public’s experience of government, which we’re obviously quite keen to do, requires an ability to affect change across the entire system. Because delivery of services happens everywhere, platforms are a fantastic way of doing that. They scale the benefits of digital transformation better than anything else. We need more and they need to be so good that departments want to adopt them.

But, how do you know which platforms to build, and how do you get it all to add up to a greater whole? You need a stupidly clear north star. Some things need to be true about that north star. It needs to be:

• about some aspects of your intended user experience that the platforms enable
• a work of fiction, because it defines a future state
• pretty shiny so that it appeals to a wide range of people
• quite risky, because otherwise it’s not ambitious enough

Yes, this work is a marathon and a slog, whatever – but in order to deliver on the ambition, we need to do some wild future-shaping and sketching and playing. Shiny things can catalyse change, create shared incentives across teams, and enable funding. I’m not entirely sure if this is what he was talking about, but I really like Eliot’s phrase of “building belief and momentum”. Yes, it’s a risky game, but we’re adults and we should be able to take calculated risks, and there’s no other way to radically improve things.

And look, I’m a designer working on GOV.UK. I care more about the things that the public actually interact with over anything else. How public services look and feel is really important, with real impact on people’s relationship to government, and their ability to interact with it. Oh, If you’re a really senior person reading this – we need a design director! There’s going to be a lot of change to orchestrate, and having a designer close to the centre of power will help you make better decisions that help redefine the experience of public service in the UK for the better.

We need a culture and a plan that takes both platforms and experiences for the public into account, cleverly manages the dependencies between them, and unlocks the multipliers that platforms working in tandem with experiences for people can afford.