Thoughts on Local Digital Collaboration
By: Tom Harrison
Tags: Service Design, Uk Housing, Local Government, Digital Transformation

Thoughts on Local Digital Collaboration

Various things have stopped me blogging this year, but here’s a belated first of 2019 inspired by the awesome work of those involved with the Local Digital Fund, in particular those we’ve been working with at Southwark, Gravesham, Lincoln and Orange Maple on our discovery project into the housing repairs process (weeknotes from the project are here).

Digital and UCD in Local Government

I find it interesting how some people I’d think would be all over design thinking don’t get it, or think sporadic (often token) “consultation” efforts mean that they’re already doing it. Some orgs also seem to view it as being intrinsically linked to digital technology and so pigeon-hole it as an IT thing rather than something that can improve services across all channels. As a consequence engagement from senior leaders isn’t high enough for user research to inform policy, limiting impact. On the technology side, many IT departments seem to be spending lots of money doing yet more enterprise IT but calling it digital because it’s on a newer tech stack.

While not ideal I don’t think the above is cause to be unduly gloomy. We’re past the point of no return for UCD and digital in local gov, the arguments have been had, the trailblazers have proven it works and the battle at sector level has been won. Every local authority will eventually end up doing this, we just need to get over the obstacles in each organisation whether it be money, a lack of interest or competing priorities that deprive organisations of the headspace to fully engage with new ways of working.

The question then is how can we use the work of the trailblazers to help colleagues at other councils make a sufficiently strong case that they can get the senior buy-in they need for it to be successful?

Collaboration: Greasing the wheels

Two typical questions for anyone advocating anything new tend to be “who else is doing this?” and “how much will it cost?”. Fortunately, for many services there are now enough well designed examples that something approaching a best practice design pattern might be identifiable. These services are likely to be transactional like missed bin collections or ordering parking permits and improvements made to them will move the needle less than improvements to more wicked problems around health / social care with more acute impacts on individuals, but for gaining buy-in for service design this is a benefit. The stakes are lower, the user base larger and I suspect (evidence base pending) that solutions are fairly standard nationally, as opposed to social services which I’d assume are more dependent on the demographics of a given area.

A key opportunity for collaboration then is in helping to answer those questions by collating all of the existing user research and design outputs from other councils (i.e. into the local digital user research library) for a given service, identifying the common themes and defining the common service pattern — the objective of our Local Digital Fund project.

The catch here is that the level of confidence we have that any derived pattern is “common” is going to be dependant on how many organisations we have feeding into it and how much variance there is between their findings. The Nielsen Norman Group famously identified that about 85% of usability issues can be found by testing with five users, so there’s potentially some useful work to be done in future to identify how many councils need to independently arrive at the same service pattern for us to confident that it would work across the vast majority of councils.

Local Government as a Platform

Armed with an evidence base of corroborating research findings from multiple councils and a common service pattern we can then get into the territory of building local government equivalents to Gov.UK Notify and Pay. Whereas these are available as finished products however, I think the opportunity for services like LocalGov.Digital Housing Repair is slightly different.

Ultimately there’s no substitute for speaking to citizens about services. Having those conversations, even if they tell us nothing we haven’t heard from other councils, helps the service internalise the lessons in a way that secondary research never can. Additionally, different organisations have different budgets and different priorities. What is needed then isn’t just a finished product, it’s the research library, service pattern, alpha and beta products that precede it.

Where budgets are tighter grabbing a final product that’s been backed with an evidence base is a lot better than anything the big suppliers are providing. Where a service is a high priority it makes sense for an organisation to do things from scratch, deviating from the common products where required to deliver the best service possible. The majority of services in the majority of councils fall somewhere in between these two extremes, so having access to each stage of the product lifecycle and using local research to decide what stage to jump off at provides much more flexibility to individual councils. Additionally, these being freely available makes it easier for smaller suppliers to enter and compete in the market.

The Prize

There’s a long way to go but I hope that collaborating in this way between local authorities will help pique the interest of more reticent senior leaders whilst also derisking the opportunities for them. I also think it’s a sustainable model that the Local Digital Collaboration Unit, LOTI and other regional bodies can continue to facilitate once we’ve spent all of the money in Local Digital Fund and ultimately, I hope it can lead to more conversations like this:

“I want to take a UCD approach to this service”

“Who else is doing this?”

“These seven councils, look”

“And how much will it cost?”

“Well we could integrate a couple of free things and based on the others save this much money, but once we’ve done that I’d like to reinvest some of the saving into taking a deeper look at something”

“OK…”