Tell Us Once - The beginning

In 2006 Sir David Varney was tasked with looking into educing the number of times people have to contact public bodies when their circumstances change. He produced his Service Transformation report and as they say generated the catalyst for Tell Us Once.

At that time a number of intiatives were being strated under the banner of The Office for The Deputy Prime Minister. In 2006 that role was held by John Prescott. As a result of the Varney Report it was decided to setup a technical working group to consider how we could address the issues raised in the report.

So a small band of brothers and sisters was formed and the thinking begun. Under the Guidance of Simon Jewel, with myself as Architect helped by David ??? as BA, Helen Orlando on UX plus abley aided and abeted by Viviana Doctorovich and Damiann Watson we set about coming up with an idea.

The topic was 'Change of Circumstances' and 'Reporting it to the Government'. Very early on we coined the phrase 'Tell the Government Once' that quickly changed into 'Tell Us Once' taking the viewpoint from the government. The most obvious 'change' quickly raised it's head which was 'Reporting a Death' although we had lofty ambitions of 'Reporting a Birth', 'Reporting a Divorce' and 'Reporting a Change of Name'. Intrestingly enough a parallel team were working on 'Managing the Citizen Identity problem' so I spent so time working for both as we though Identity would be of important at this stage.

Our very early thinking did cause us to drift towards the concept of a 'Citizen Account' that we could do everything from even, at one stage, considering taking the whole Death reporting through probate as well! Early on we began working closely with HMRC and DWP soon taking in the likes of DVLA and IPS (the passport service). Swiftly followed by a number of friendly councils.

Having got to the point where we had a resonable idea of what we should do it was decided that a prototype would be needed and the call was put out to various companies to bid. The prototype should be web based and should integrate into a number of government departments. For me then began a couple of weeks isolation from my company as they were one of the contenders. Without any help from myself Solidsoft (Now Solidsoft Reply & Cluster Reply) were selected.

At this point the intiative became a full blown project and was taken ownership by DWP lead by Lyn McDonald OBE and her team. The aim was to produce a prototype of the system that would support Reporting a Death for HMRC, DWP, IPS, DVLA and 6 local councils. The system would be run for three months and the infomation gained used to design a full on program.

In addition to the software based approach a paper based version was setup at St Thomases hospital to allow the gathering of even more important data of how this should work.

The game was now afoot! Stay tuned for thye next great edition to the TUO story.

Disclaimer: I appologise for any names I have got wrong or forgotten. Please feel free to add them in the comments and I'll update the article.