Does the Service Standard work for Local Government?
A few years ago along with many others I had a small part in helping draft the Service Standard, a replacement for both the Digital Service Standard and Local Government Digital Standard.
Four years on, whilst the Service Standard has been adopted by some digital teams within local government, my far from extensive research failed to find one council where it has been full adopted across their entire organisation, although some elements have been in some larger councils.
So why is that??
Perhaps it's because the Service Standard describes how services can be built by the very few public sector organisations where large, fully multidisciplinary teams of user researchers, services designers, content designers, UX specialists, developers, and so on exist?
In reality, for local authorities such as smaller districts which make up the majority of councils in terms of numbers, that kind of team will always be unobtainable.
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The second factor is that no matter what size the council, there isn't the right governance structure within that local authority in place, and my guess is it's just too much of a leap to go from the practice of buying something, switching it on, and hoping for the best, to designing services according to the standard.
So what's to be done?
I think we need a new, more inclusive digital service standard for local government. Something that can be used by every council, and because councils will always buy in products, something that can be applied as part of a procurement process too, to ensure every digital services is consistently good.
It's something I'm going to be looking at in 2024 and if you or your council are interested too, or you have a view on using the existing Service Standard in local government, then please do let me know.
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1 年It is a robust and potentially a standard that falls in line with the recent evidence around how local government should work. But some of those principles in the standard then call for the amalgamation of services, and the increase in people engaging and talking to each other. However, many reading this standard will have a digital paradigm and potentially assume that this relates to digital design.
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1 年Thats an interesting question for those that are used to central gov and service design. On the other hand, I most of my work over the past 20 years is in local authorities, so I certainly have some understanding of your write-up. I dont see it as only one reason, and I am sure you dont too, but he characteristic off local gov are very different to central gov, and I believe that is the place to start. This simple comment is not going to flesh out all the intricacies that I have in my head, but I am happy to contribute in another more direct way if I an be of help.
Product Manager | Making digital services work better for users and organisations
1 年Great post Phil - an area that holds a lot of interest for me. One thing that I found when working in local government was that the Service Standard applied much more to transactional services than those that had multiple interactions over time. It’s hard to break a service like social care into individual services that the Standard can be applied to. You’re prompting me to get my own blog post written… ??
Strategic Design Lead at Methods
1 年Some great points Phil. I'm very pleased to see my home council of West Berks has invested in the kind of digital skills you bring. I'm on mat leave until June but would love to contribute to the discussion if there's an opportunity to once I'm back to paid work. I think the role of spend controls in central government has been crucial to the effective application of the service standard in that context and the absence of it is likely a reason there's been inconsistent and at times poor application in the local government space. A very worthy topic to progress!
Public sector problem solver
1 年Hey Phil, very much with you on all these comments and would love to chat sometime? Not sure if you’ve come across the Local Digital Declaration that DLUHC have??https://www.localdigital.gov.uk/declaration/? It was designed to be a bit of a stepping stone into those principles of the standard but with an awareness of the constraints local authorities are working in. It was written with LAs and there are a large number signed up. In reality, the monitoring and evaluation of how LAs are interpreting and putting this into practice hasn’t really happened (I think DLUHC commissioned some insight into this last year but I haven’t seen the outcome of that yet) I think Dave Briggs has some good thoughts and?#opinions?on this:?https://sensibletech.co.uk/was-the-local-digital-declaration-too-ambitious/