Common standards can help drive innovation, while improving the user experience, writes John McMahon from IEG4
Technology should not operate in a vacuum. What matters most is user experience. Because of this, the best, most modern, customer focused tech companies should want to integrate to as many different IT systems as possible - preferably without the potential drawn out involvement of legacy back office system providers. Doing what's right for the customer is more important than protecting the fiefdoms of software and IT suppliers.
This is never more important than in the public sector, where poorly integrated, legacy IT systems are holding back service provision. It was noted in August 2018 that the Metropolitan Police was using 750 incompatible IT systems, preventing information sharing and as a result draining public resources.
Common standards, or lack of, in the public sector IT industry also contribute to the problem. Until recently, there were very few examples of standards one could use; IT systems could be implemented or evolve with little or no thought for future integration.
A lack of commodity IT is another issue. In many areas within government, people may need to pay for something and receive notifications. Historically, in central government each department would pay multiple software suppliers for different versions of systems which made taking payments and sending notifications possible. In doing so, they weren’t taking advantage of their scale to procure smarter. More importantly, they were not standardising any of these mechanisms across departments.
Drill down to local government level and virtually every individual local authority will have different solutions for taking payments and sending notifications to their residents. Indeed, the issuing of notifications is probably delivered via many different systems within any one single council.
This three-way challenge of integration, standards and commoditisation of IT really shouldn’t exist in 2019.
There has been some progress from the Government Digital Service (GDS). Their GOV.UK Pay and Notify offer interesting alternatives to the public sector’s traditional department-by-department and organisation-by-organisation procurement.
They are:
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free/low cost compared to the alternatives;
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using the very best practice in terms of API design;
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enabling a council, for example, to potentially deliver all its notifications via a common method and enable more communication via alternative channels such as SMS;
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looking to be further enhanced at no cost with smarter functions such as being able to pay via Apply Pay;
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and great examples of Government-as-a Platform (GaaP) services.
On the final point, they are GaaP services because they provide the ‘plumbing’ to enable a payment or notification service for any use case, rather than a public sector organisation procuring multiple systems that achieve the same (or worse) outcomes. Making a payment or sending a text message need not, and should not, require every individual council to have a different mechanism of doing so and paying for the privilege.
Standards make innovation possible
The Digital Blue Badge Service (DBBS) is also a good example of where standards can have a big impact on tech innovation and implementation benefitting user experience.
As a user’s Blue Badge application is processed, real time and template driven notifications are sent via the GOV.UK Notify service to the customer, based upon the preference they selected at the time of their application. Customers are kept updated and can even track the progress of their application through a back office API that is called upon during the creation of the application.
This is what, at IEG4, we call process ID. In the situation where the customer has an outstanding payment, they are automatically notified using GOV.UK Notify, and when they do make the payment, they do so by using the GOV.UK Pay service.
If the technology instead had to integrate to 10 systems across different councils it would be difficult to provide the constant status updates and payment function for the DBBS. This would hinder and damage the overall user experience, as the customer would see less of the process and the status of their application.
In this day and age, when customer experience is key across all industries, the public sector cannot fall short.
New scope
For years, the lack of standards meant that the crucial parts of local government and citizen interaction, such as notifications and payment, were unnecessarily complex. Having common standards means that the public sector’s technology partners have a new scope; they can provide technology that focuses on where it can make the biggest impact on people’s lives, whilst delivering the best user experience.
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