Why the Future of GOV.UK is Hyper-Personalisation

Flat white with oat milk. Except on Fridays.

They don't even have to ask at your favourite coffee shop. They already know.

This is the kind of thoughtfulness that people seek from the brands they interact with on a daily basis. Tailored, relevant, and effortlessly helpful.

But it doesn't simply improve customer experience, it builds trust.

And at a time where building trust in our institutions is more important than ever, government should be grabbing opportunities to make citizens feel seen and understood with both hands.

The new?GOV.UK?App announced by Peter Kyle represents a step in this direction. But the truly transformative potential of hyper-personalisation, where every interaction is tailored based on a comprehensive understanding of each person's unique circumstances and needs, remains largely untapped.

Hyper-personalisation goes beyond remembering your previous interactions. Instead, it's about understanding the full context of your life circumstances and proactively delivering services tailored specifically to you.

Imagine council tax assessments that already know about your recent home improvements. Or customs forms that recognise your business's previous international shipping patterns. Childcare benefit applications that seamlessly connect to your employment records.

That's not just convenient. It's transformative.

But true hyper-personalisation must be dynamic. It learns and evolves with each interaction.

If you navigate?GOV.UK?looking for information about starting a business, then return two weeks later, there should be acknowledgment of the steps you have taken in your journey. The site should adapt accordingly. Perhaps offering registration forms for VAT, suggesting local business support programs, or highlighting relevant tax deadlines.

A truly adaptive?GOV.UK, as an app or website, wouldn't just remember your preferences; it would evolve with each click, each form completion, each search query. This provides a service that does more than just saving your details. It's a service that understands and anticipates.

Hyper-personalisation also enables continuous improvement of services through real-time learning. Each interaction presents an opportunity to better meet user needs.

For example, a Universal Credit applicant who struggles with a particular section of a form is providing valuable information not just about their own journey, but about how to improve the service for everyone. In response, dynamic changes could be proactively delivered.

In case it wasn't clear, hyper-personalisation will be enabled by AI.

As such, three critical elements must be rapidly explored to enable hyper-personalisation across government services:

1. Common data models that allow different departments to speak the same language when describing citizens, businesses, and their interactions with government.
2. Standardised APIs that enable secure, controlled access to information across departmental boundaries, with proper governance and consent management built in.
3. Models-as-a-Service that bring AI capabilities to where the data lives, rather than trying to centralise sensitive information in one vulnerable location.

These three elements also serve to highlight why hyper-personalisation could be severely impacted by data fragmentation. The current state of affairs in government involves 465 departments, each with their own data silos, disparate platforms, and lock-in at scale across cloud.

In fact, the current cloud landscape in government, dominated by two major providers and characterised by costly sprawl of proprietary platforms, should be seen as a root cause of data fragmentation. The cloud status quo severely limits the potential for hyper-personalisation.

Breaking free of this constraint requires embracing multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures that enable data interoperability, improve data gravity, and allow data processing to occur seamlessly across environments, breaking down the artificial barriers between departments and services.

Importantly this incorporates all 465 departments, where processing data securely on-premise, on-site with edge, or in the cloud at scale, are just a few use cases that qualify the need for hybrid-cloud.

Not to mention the benefits of unified, scalable platforms that can leverage data in heritage VMs to refine AI models that support dynamic services deployed in containers. This activity does not need to happen in distinct platforms. And should certainly not be replicated over 465 times.

But, data fragmentation is about more than inefficiency. It's about whether we could miss the biggest opportunity of the decade to dramatically improve the way that users engage with government.

Anyone who has worked in the civil service will recognise that data interoperability already supercharges government capability.

National security is improved when the Home Office can access information captured by the DVLA. Tell Us Once, hosted by DWP, makes life easier for citizens in the most challenging of times, by sharing data across multiple departments. And, while it's an imperfect identifier, a National Insurance Number helps to connect the dots of your data across countless government services.

Hyper-personalisation is the evolution of this essential work, and will deliver services that truly set the UK apart on a global stage, and realise the vision of Government-as-a-Platform.

However, while government contemplates the future of modern services, citizens are experiencing seamless, personalised digital experiences elsewhere in their lives. The gap between consumer expectations and government capabilities is at risk of growing wider each day, subsequently undermining existing digital government successes.

The coming?GOV.UK?App will give the nation a taste of the government's appetite for hyper-personalisation. But without addressing fundamental infrastructure challenges, it risks becoming nothing more than an alternative way to access the same siloed services.

Open standards and interoperable platforms aren't just technical preferences. They are strategic necessities.

This ensures that we can move beyond the historical mantra "How can we make our existing services more digital?" And towards the vision outlined in the blueprint for modern digital government.

“Thousands of teams across the public sector are already using our world-leading digital components. We need to do more of this and build the underlying infrastructure that makes it easy for teams across the whole public sector to work together.”

Hyper-personalisation will be a manifestation of this common underlying infrastructure.

The place to start will be understanding that an open, hybrid approach, that preserves choice and prevents lock-in at scale, will enable every department to contribute to services that anticipate user needs and remove friction, all while strengthening privacy and security.

For UK citizens who expect more from government services, and want to trust that institutions still serve their needs, enabling hyper-personalisation might be the most important shift we can make.