This post is really about the psychology of government supersites. If you like, these are the rules a Directgov (and hence a Betagov) tend to follow.
Things are changing, of course. The Government Digital Service are going to do websites and public services on behalf of the rest of us. There's no chance whatsoever they're just going to create another unaccountable hierarchy of executives.
1. Promise the world
When you invest a large amount of money into something which isn't designed to run at a profit, you can let your imagination run riot for what you're going to achieve. For Betagov, the ambitions are even greater than Directgov. They'd better get round to publishing some success criteria, with timescales and costings so that we can decide whether it worked or not at the end of the time period.
2. Use rhetoric as strategy
In other words, base your strategy on a phrase which sounds good. 'Public services all in one place' creates the Directgov problem. They used a catchy marketing tagline along with some flat-earth assumptions about 'cross-selling' to create the clunky, overpriced behemoth we've been stuck with since 2007. 'Useable online public services' might have been better for a mission statement; but sadly useable services don't tend to flourish on a government supersite.
3. Use hypothetical savings
As discussed in what happened to that £400 million, in 2006 the Varney report promised £400 million in savings through 'e-service improvement including website rationalisation, channel shift and shared infrastructure'. It also alluded to £250-300 million in savings from 'rationalising face-to-face provision across central and local government estates' and 'savings of 25 per cent of the cost of contact centre
operation'. That comes to over a billion pounds in hypothetical savings which never showed up in the three years after the Comprehensive Spending Review.
In his blog post 'The second lever' GDS' Mike Bracken estimated that close to 1 billion pounds were wasted in avoidable calls to HM government in 2009/2010 alone. Quite a dramatic figure. 'If we can move a fraction of these to compelling, digital transactional services with very high completion rates, the savings are quite clear.'
The stakes are high, then. GDS need to start publishing plans and timescales for how they're going to reduce that £1 billion per year in phone calls. After three years or so, that would surely justify their existence.
4. Charm the politicians
No-one likes Directgov the website, yet the supersite concept consistently appeals to middle-aged politicians. Most things on the internet flourish if they appeal to vast numbers of people, and vanish if they don't. Directgov exists wholly on the goodwill of small numbers of people in power.
Perhaps a grand sounding, cutting edge website and organisation helps reassure people who grew up before home computers; as well as keeping everything London-centric and making noises about hypothetical savings.
5. Live in its own bubble
Government supersites live in their own reality. As I said in my first post, we have to make special allowances for government websites. They don't live by the 'innovate or die' law of the real internet. This is why COTA boxes, the one paltry Directgov innovation in three years, was heralded as a bold step forward; and why GDS' online petitions for 10 Downing Street are showing up in GDS promotions for Betagov. £83,000 for something which allows people to give their opinion over the internet wouldn't be that remarkable in the real world.
6. Create jobs for suits
After four years I would have expected to meet some designers or developers at Directgov; but by and large, apart from the content editors, all you meet are managers and executives. They are a fixture at public sector conferences and their quotes appear in the press. Where are the people who build and fix things?
Things are changing, however - the Cabinet Office are currently recruiting large numbers of developers and designers. But are they better place in London, than placed with the organisations who provide public services?
7. Centralise control
Give credit where it's due. Nothing can go on Directgov without it passing through the editors. And Directgov does at least have a published style guide with consistent rules. Maybe the 287 websites which were closed by Directgov after 2007 all had terrible content. It's difficult to see how content writers and editors in the organisations who ran these organisations couldn't have achieved the same thing with less bureaucracy, however.
There are risks associated with all government communications being centralised in one or two buildings in London. The lower half of the current Alphagov design is essentially an advert for the government in power. It would be very easy to declare a state of emergency, lock down the government CMS and use the one government supersite to publish one's own agenda. Something to think about, unless I'm just getting paranoid in my old age.
8. Collective responsibility
It's difficult to find one person who will accept responsibility for the Directgov problem, as it is no-one's fault. The whole website was arguably Jayne Nickall's fault, which was why she resigned in November 2010. Apart from this, it's been impossible to improve the public services which have moved on to Directgov over the past four years. You speak to a franchise of managers and editors, but not to anyone in Directgov Central. You won't find a designer to improve your corner of Directgov - these jobs are outsourced, and no-one has time for your service.
9. Customer engagement
Again, give the devil his due - Directgov like nothing better than the notion of customer engagement. In the many years of attempted product relaunches and enhanced templates, they have spent large amounts of money talking to the general public. I'm not sure what they did with the less-than-enthusiastic responses to the Directgov Customer Focus Labs website they launched in late 2009.
The trouble is, customer feedback needs to be focused on specific things in order to create specific improvements. GDS tend to be selective when running customer engagement. Although no-one likes Directgov, GDS don't tend to run, say, comparative studies where you book your driving test on Directgov, then book it on a prototype of a tailored DVLA website. The latter might suggest the general public value a dedicated website for a government organisation, rather than a supersite. Gubbins' own customer feedback tends to suggest the latter. Then again, who pays the piper ...
10. Enforce 'One size fits all'
No matter what point you're trying to get across, it needs to fit on a 300-750 word generic Directgov article with minimal pictures, generic colours and little local navigation. Betagov are going down the same route, treating all government content as equivalent no matter how simple or complicated it is.
The single domain
If you're Francis Maude, the 'single domain' project sounds like something revolutionary, which will achieve vast savings, and help ensure your middle-aged party aren't left behind by all this frightening new technology which can, in itself, help win and lose elections. It seems strange that a Tory politician, from the anti-bureaucracy, free market mould should be so keen on something which resembles a Socialist command economy - less individual responsibility, more 'government knows best'.
In reality the "100s of sites, 100s of designs, 100s of platforms" represent an ecosystem of government web services which haven't been Directgov-ised. If we're going to continue down the road of absolute, centralised control, there need to be clear goals in place.
My prediction is that in three-four years time, someone else will be calling for a fresh revolution. And thus it will all start again.
