This week Claire Harrison (Head of Architecture from CQC) and I had the opportunity to attend the Delivering Digital Goverment event run by Worth Systems in The Hague.
The event was focused on how digital has transformed governments across the world, sharing best practices and lessons learned. With speakers from the founding of GDS, like Lord Maude, as well as speakers from the Netherlands, and it was a great opportunity to meet others working on solving problems for users in the Government space wider than the UK.
A lot of the talks, especially by the GDS alum were things I had heard before, but I actually found that reassuring, that over 5 years later I am still doing the right things, and approaching problems in the right way.
It was especially interesting to hear from both Lord Maude, and others, about the work they have been doing with foreign governments, for example in Canada, Peru and Hawaii. The map Andrew Greenway, previous of GDS now from Public Digital, shared of the digital government movement was fantastic to see, and really made me realise how big what we are trying to achieve around the world really is.
The talks from some of the Dutch speakers were really interesting. I loved hearing about the approach the council in The Hague are taking to digital innovations, and their soon to be published digital strategy. One of the pilots the city are running in particular intrigued me; in an effort to reduce traffic, they put sensors onto parking spaces in key shopping streets and all disabled parking bays in the city. This gave them real time information on the use of the parking spaces, and where available spaces were and successfully decreased traffic from people driving around searching for spaces. They were now looking at how to scale the pilot an manage the infrastructure and senor data for a ‘smart’ city, working with local business to enable new services to be offered.
We also heard about the work the Netherlands has been doing to pilot other innovative digital services, like a new service that allows residents in an area to submit planning ideas to improve their neighbourhoods, with the first trial receiving over 50 suggestions, of those 4 have been chosen to take forward. We heard about the support that was given to enable everyone to take part, and it was nice to hear about the 78 year old resident who’s suggestion came 5th.
It was also great to hear from the speaker from Matthij from Novum, a digital innovation lab in the Netherlands, who talked about his own personal journey into Digital transformation, learning from failures and ensuring that you prepare for failure from the start. He also told us about some fascinating research they have been doing into the use of smart speakers, especially with the elderly, to enable better engagement and use of government services to those that need assistive technologies.
Realising that 30% of eligible claimants for the Dutch state pension supplement were not claiming it, they believed that this was potentially down to the complexity of the form. They hypothesised that smart speakers might be one way to solve this problem. However recognising that it was no good to make assumptions and design a solution for users without ensuring they had understood the problem their users were facing properly they did a small sample test with elderly users to see whether they could use smart speakers to check the date of their next pension payment (one of the largest contributors to inbound calls to the Sociale Verzekeringsbank), they found that not only could elderly users use the smart speakers, but that the introduction of smart speakers into their homes decreased loneliness dramatically.
There were other good sessions with James Stewart from GDS & Public Digtial on technology within digital, and an interesting panel session at the end. Every session was good, and I learnt something I heard something new at each one. My only grumble from the day was the lack of diversity in the speakers. Which the organises themselves put their hands up and admitted before they were called out on it. A quick call on twitter and the ever amazing Joanne Rewcaslte from DWP shared a list of amazing female speakers, so hopefully that will help with the next event.
One key thing I took away from the day is that the challenges are the same everyone, but the message is also the same, involve users from the start. In the practical steps everyone could start tomorrow, Matthij talked about ensuring you interview 5 end users, and some steps to simple prototypes you could develop to engage your users.
Lord Maude talked about the importance of a strong mandate, Novum talked about having a good understanding of the problem you are trying to fix at the start. The digital strategy from the Hague highlights the fact they want everyone to be able to participate and deliver a personal service to their citizens. As Andrew Greenaway said, they key thing is to “start with user needs”.
The other second key message from the day was that, as Lord Maude put it… “Just Do it!” A digital strategy delivers nothing, the strategy should be delivery, instead of spending months on developing a digital strategy, “you just have to start” by doing something, this in turn will help you develop your strategy once you understand the problems you are trying to solve, the people you will need, and the set up and way of doing things that works best in your organisation. This was a message reinforced by every speaker throughout the day.
The third key message was the importance of good leadership, good teams and good people. Talk in the open about the failures you’ve made and what you have learned. Build strong multidisciplinary and diverse teams. As Andrew Greenway said, Start with teams, not apps or documents. In the round table discussion on building capability we spent a lot of time discussing the best ways to build capability, and the fact that in order to get good people and be able to keep them, and to go on to develop good things, you need strong leadership that is bought in to the culture you need to deliver.
I left the day with a number of good contacts, had some great conversations, and felt reinvigorated and reassured. Speaking to Worth I know they are aiming to run another event next year, with both an even more diverse international cohort and an equal number of female speakers, and I for one will definitely be signing up again for the next event.
