GOV.UK Digital Blog

The US (and rest of world) should take a leaf out of the UK's recent initiative: GDS (Government Digital Services)

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

Aside from creating https://www.gov.uk/ which laid down a lot of principles on how to fulfil a government contract (as well as the foundations of what goverment websites should look like and how they should be developed), GDS is also looking at the problem of procurement.

The GDS team essentially are wrestling back from the big contractors the major contracts, breaking the work down into a large number of bitesize contracts and then farming them out to a wide variety of smaller vendors.

So instead of finding a Fujitsu/Siemens JV team, or an IBM Professional Services team, operating a £50m project, the plan is to offer 100 x £250k projects to a large number of smaller suppliers instead. Each project having a clearer purpose that is more able to be fulfilled.

Of course there are obvious overheads in managing so many projects, and of course some of these projects will fail. But... overall the savings will be such that the overheads are cheap, and the failed projects will only have a smaller impact on a major programme initiative than a failure would today.

The government contractors should of just built healthcare.gov as a data service and asked people like these guys to build an intuitive front-end for it. Then if people don't like the interface, they can do something about it :) This may also help to dissipate the traffic load and present the same data in more relevant ways to different types people. The idea of building apps as single, monolithic system is out-dated.

Even though I'm a Brit, some governments are making moves to modernise and open up their data for others to play with, over here we've got a great government-funded team working on exactly that (called the GDS). (http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/)

Frankly I think this is a massively expensive and missed opportunity for the US Government's digital service team.

Edit: Ignore this, its wrong. I was looking in the wrong place. Should have been http://gov.uk.

I've just (17:10 utc) at the source for http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ and http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/16/gov-uk-the-start/ there is only one occurrence of the string "google" in the page, and that is is link to a font called 'cabin':

<link rel='stylesheet' id='linen-accent-font-style-css' href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cabin:bold type='text/css' media='all' />

Doesn't look like they are using google analytics to me, at least not now.

This is an example of how to run a government IT project. Extremely well run team, excellent programmers and designers and using a lot of interesting technology. That's cool for the tech community but for the majority of the users the biggest benefit is a single location for everything. Direct.gov.uk was still a collection of links to lots of external sites but the goal with gov.uk is to have everything on one site. I think this is a great project.

Some background at http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/16/directgov-a-quiet-history/

"how cool it would be if somebody started creating an open source framework for EU e-government"

I agree this would be brilliant. I know in the UK the gov.uk site is all open source: https://github.com/alphagov

They recently published a blog post about how the New Zealand Government Online team used some of the gov.uk code.

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/07/26/working-with-govt-nz/

I'd love to see a pan-European initiative to pool resources and knowledge.