Directgov is dead part 2

Time for a one-last, one-last post as Directgov is migrated to gov.uk. My prediction that gov.uk would fail to replace it by August 2012 in Absolute control: why Betagov will fail sort of came true, although it's mid-October 2012 so that seems somewhat churlish. Today I'm enjoying the post The emperor's new clothes and am looking to pick up some other perspectives:

Perhaps the departments will rebel, or the sponsors will move on, or delivery will be undermined by some cockups, or the team will tire of bureaucracy once they move into the transaction domain.

Well put. When Martha Lane Fox's warriors leave the citadel, they'll discover the real public sector world of organisations like Gubbins: labrinthine regulations, dreary call centres, moving targets, absense of digital strategy and, yes, resistance from people who work in customer contact like me. Come to think of it, have I changed my own point of view since I started writing this?

Anyway, as the original orange monstrosity is now offline, I have to applaud GDS for following through. Try to find that £1 billion in savings now, won't you?

£90.3m - money well spent!

I can't resist it. I was going to quit, honest. Yet how could I have missed this Guardian article from December last year?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2011/dec/09/national-audit-office-digital-investment-unclear-directgov-government-gateway-businessgovov

Benefits of government's £90.3m digital investment 'unclear'

National Audit Office accuses government of failing to measure the benefits of Government Gateway, Directgov and Business.gov

The government has failed to routinely measure the benefits of its main portals - the Government Gateway, Directgov and Business.gov - which together have cost £90.3m over the past three years, says the National Audit Office (NAO).

In its report titled Digital Britain one: shared infrastructure and services for government online, the spending watchdog accuses the government of making investment decisions without sufficient information on costs and benefits.

In 2005 the government began converging online services on Directgov and Business.gov in an effort to reduce its public service websites, of which there were more than 2,500. Since 2006 1,526 government websites have closed.

The NAO found only one instance where the government had estimated the benefits of its investment in online services. Business.gov, which provides government information for businesses, was reported to have saved business £21 for every £1 spent in 2010-11.

Although there are likely benefits to providing business information in one location, the NAO found that it was not possible to say how much of this benefit would have been delivered anyway, if the information had only been available from multiple websites.

There's another figure for how many websites got closed as a result of convergence - 1,526 in fact.

Sounds like that NAO report could be jolly interesting reading.

Here's my earlier speculation about the projected cost of government supersites and the reality: Whatever happened to that 400 million? 

Thank you, Slabman

Groan, I have to admit, after a three month break from posting that 'Directgov Must Die' has run out of steam. There are only so many ways to say the same thing. Tonight I couldn't even be bothered trolling the lastest smugfest on the GDS blog.

I might come back at some point when I have something new to say. In the meantime, I'd like to dedicate this post to Slabman, who has not only trolled GDS but taken time to comment on Directgov Must Die as well.

One day the madness will end!

Thanks to anyone else who visited, bye for now.

directgovmustdie@gmail.com

My groundbreaking new DVLA site

I'm not a web designer by trade, and working in the public sector my notions about the web are probably three years or so behind the rest of the internet. So, this is an opportunity for me to look deeply foolish. Here goes.

Here's the existing DVLA site at www.dft.gov.uk/dvla/ - 

interestingly, it's a microsite off the Department of Transport site, but the content pages exist on Directgov itself.

The DVLA site gives the following LHS navigation:

• Driver information
• Medical information »
• Vehicle information »
• Commercial services »
• Consultations »
• Recruitment »
• Freedom of information »
• Data release »

Then a further list when you go down a level, say, into 'Driver information' -

Driver information

Our drivers information can now be found under the Motoring section in Directgov. Directgov was created to provide all UK citizens easy access to public services in one place.  

Need a new or updated driving licence

How to apply for any type of photocard driving licence and how much it will cost

Change of address and name

How to use the Premium Checking Service

 

The links themselves go to pages of Directgov, where you immediately lose sight of navigation options and the other DVLA links:

 

In other words, the visitor is plunged into the Directgov problem. Quite a bizarre set up, but it reflects the business relationship between a supersite and its client organisations. 

The Government Digital Service (GDS) are looking to close departmental websites as well as Directgov itself. Here's the GOV.UK Beta version, which has minimal navigation, no DVLA logos and no landing page above it:

That individual page looks nice and clear. Does it improve DVLA's service to offer motoring information as atomised units rather than belonging to a hierarchy which visitors can easily grasp?

I expect the people from DVLA have an opinion. I'll see if I can get hold of any.

GOV.UK: 60 million users, 1800 user needs

Time to pop another GDS bubble, and this time it's a big one.

I thought about some alternative titles for this entry:

• GOV.UK: where the traffic comes from
• GOV.UK: Public services all in one maze
• GOV.UK: simplifying the impossible

Haha pretty funny ... I typed 'pubic' by mistake just then!

I should lead with the summary, Nielsen-style: GDS appear to be simplifying the public sector web, but they're using public (careful!) services all in one place as a design principle rather than an advertising tagline. GOV.UK is therefore guaranteed to be just as ineffective as Directgov at saving money while genuinely improving the public (fnarr!) sector. If they let the public (!!) sector run their own websites, they will automatically simplify public sector web content and allow us sorry them to make actual savings rather than hypothetical ones.

Do you actually need to keep reading? This entry is pretty much another cut and paste job. I said last time I'd try building something myself. I'm working on it, promise.

I'll reuse that blog title as a sub heading instead:

Simplifying the impossible

Plenty of GDS prose about the need to simplify.

Oh I can't wait for it. I was going to paste in the quotes then knock em down like skittles!! I'm going to say, 'but these are inherent problems from using a government supersite'. Here goes -

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/11/its-all-about-the-words/

One of Directgov’s main principles was to simplify government language, but it also tried to cover all eventualities.  This often meant that the content was full of caveats and jargon, making it hard to scan (and we know that people tend to scan not read).

Trying to cover all bases meant that we often bombarded  users with information that most simply didn’t need. For gov.uk we are working to make sure that users can find relevant content, read, understand and leave.

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/02/16/smart-answers-are-smart/

Inherent to the content strategy of the citizen beta of GOV.UK is hiding complexity and building tools before writing content. Much of the detail of government policy is difficult for normal folk to grasp and understand – and the proposition of GOV.UK is that they shouldn’t have to.

Smart answers are a great tool for content designers to present complex information in a quick and simple way. Defining what they are – decision trees? calculators? tools? is immaterial – what they do is provide a reusable technical framework to build a quick and simple answer to a complex question.

Tom Loosemore himself has tweeted to say:

 'Every superfluous page we create is one more dead end for an angry, frustrated, confused user ' - @GovUK team seeking the irreducible core

Thanks for that. No superfluous pages, you say?

but ...

as for the needs of multiple users and target audiences, the use of caveats and jargon, the endless amount of potential information you can offer ...

here it comes ...

these are inherent problems from using a government supersite

so what did you expect? I mean GDS. Not you, reading my blog.

Simplifying the impossible sounds like a noble aim. But the trouble with impossible things ... oh dear, blogs posts I don't need to write, sentences I don't need to finish.

All of this complexity of theirs comes from combining the whole public* sector on one website.

* remember in high school science when a kid used to say 'orgasms' instead of 'organisms'?

The Needotron

I stumbled across this yesterday. It looks like a big excel spreadsheet with merged, coloured fields. It's an attempt to simplify the impossible:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2011/09/19/introducing-the-needotron-working-out-the-shape-of-the-product/

Working out the exact “shape” of the gov.uk beta has been a long, difficult process.  Working out what needs it should meet, how best each need should be met and then defining how the whole proposition hangs together are hard problems.

you said it, not me. Then some more about the content strategy -

Starting the long journey from ‘articles’ to ‘user needs’

We started with long lists of pages and search terms from Directgov.  These we rephrased into statements describing something you might need from the government. Things like “I need to report a lost passport” or “I need to learn what Jury Service involves”. This gave us around 1,800 individual user needs, (or “tasks”).
We then

• Decided which of these initial 1,800 user needs should be included in the beta
• Aggregated those needs which made more sense to be together
• Assigned a format  to each user need (in gov.uk-speak a ‘format’ is a type of webpage or webapp e.g. a multipart ‘guide’, a simple answer page, a ‘find my nearest’ webapp. There are getting on for 10 at the moment)
• Assigned a priority to each user need

And so forth.

It does sound jolly clever when they start talking about webapps, though. And that Needotron of theirs. It's OK that our web strategy involves meeting 1800 user needs. We've got a Needotron.

Did I explain the '60 million users' in the title of my post? That's the 60 million people living in Britain. I'm being unfair, there - GOV.UK have only defined the adult population of Britain as their user base, so it's only about 49 million. Although I expect some under-16s will stumble across it occasionally.

One service, one website

The reality is, over half of Directgov's current traffic (and hence GOV.UK's) comes from the customers of only four government organisations: DVLA, Jobcentre Plus, the Student Loans Company and the Passport Service.

So, why keep talking about the huge complexity of public sector web content when you can split it into multiple sites?

Directgov still get £23 million per year. I have to assume GDS will get a similar amount to run GOV.UK.

GDS could spare a million pounds each, per year for a DVLA,  Job Centre Plus, Student Loans Company and Passport services website.

A website costing a million pounds would be a highly attractive, usable thing if each organisation ran it properly. That's a million pounds per year of design, hosting, graphics, and a dedicated professional web team.

Smart answers? Calculators? No problem. Get the code from JQuery. Syndicate the content? Easy.

For the DVLA one you will have a target audience (you can cut out everyone under the legal driving age, for a start). DVLA can start calling themselves 'we' again in their web content, rather than referring to the people providing the service in the third person. The website can have it's own tailored navigation and design, and some nice pictures of cars for users who need contextual images. I'd be astonished in DVLA didn't have some kind of web team already but let's say for the sake of argument they could spend £500,000 per year on designers, developers and writers.

Most of all, dvla.gov.uk would have fewer than 1800 user needs to meet.

Come up with autonomous websites for pensions and benefits and there'd be very few of those 1800 user needs left for GDS to meet with their own supersite. Not that they'd be out of a job, though. They could spend some more time producing sites for their friends in politics.

Wonder if the politicians' needs were among that 1800?

GOV.UK: the tea towel of the super site

If you work in the public sector, it's highly likely that the GOV.UK which is currently live is the one you'll have to put up with for years to come. Within 72 hours of launching the GOV.UK 'beta', GDS' attention was already drifting towards promoting - sorry, explaining - the sadly-misunderstood policies of its Coalition paymasters - all the nice things the government are doing.

It's quite likely that the vague yet upbeat feedback from GOV.UK visitors will enable GDS to go on ignoring the needs of people who work in public sector call centres, and our response teams who deal with the angry letters.  GOV.UK's design, taken from an abstract ideal about user behaviour, says the general public don't want any detail; hence,  GDS can abandon any logos, local navigation, tailored design or depth of content. It's a cunning approach because it means that GDS themselves don't need to spend too much time on content - it will fit into either a calculator or a fact sheet.

Fact sheet? Was that the GOV.UK thingy which wasn't a calculator, which had all the words on it? I can't remember.  We've been here before with the article page / chapter page concept Directgov cooked up back in 2006 or so. When it's not your content, 'web pages', of varying sizes, won't do; better to have a generic set of designs to plonk the words on to.

Otherwise you might have to spend time leaving GDS towers and visiting some ghastly public sector outpost where they've probably never even read .net magazine. 

It's an ideal way to manage a vast amount of public sector information. GDS, who are likely to have the same rotating cast of contractors as Directgov, won't need to fully understand anything they're putting online. It'll be a case of copy and paste.

The GDS party

Must be fun down there at GDS, according to Paul Downey:

Looking across the floor it’s difficult to tell who works for GDS and who doesn’t. There are no silos here; it is apparently not an elitist enclave. We don’t have assigned desks, sitting next to whoever we happen to be working with on a day-by-day basis. To succeed, GDS has to break down walls and work with domain experts regardless of where they’re from — the Whitehall project, which is in full sail, is a hubbub of graphic artists, designers, front-end developers, copy-writers and policy wonks from across government. 

Marvellous. Contractors, consultants and civil servants all sharing the love. That open invitation to spend time in the Gubbins call centre extends to them to, in case they stumble across this blog. 

I imagine working at GOV.UK is immensely fun and challenging. Building stuff is ace. And there's that tangible sense of excitement and purpose, one I consciously envy as I spend another day fixing bugs and dealing with complaints:

What we’ll be doing for the beta of GOV.UK won’t be finished. The design will be in beta as much as the rest of the site. We won’t get it right first time round. We’ll be putting stakes in the ground. Sketching out ideas we think might work, testing different solutions and setting a course for where we want this thing to head. It’s a huge, complicated task.

That was from Ben Terrett’s post on design on 19 January.  If it's true, maybe the GOV.UK we can see is only a work in progress.

Alas, Paul Downey suggests we're already stuck with the latest public sector web monolith:

I joined GDS because there’s nothing cooler than working on something that touches so many peoples lives. It’s not just the reach of the services being built for Gov.UK that I found attractive, but the importance placed on high quality, beautiful design and attention to detail ... I fully expect to to see the GOV.UK icons on tea towels in heritage shops in years to come.

GDS icons for GOV.UK

It's unlikely you'll be giving up any control to people who run services, then.

Let's see if they''re right about those tea towels, in five years time. I don't see any Directgov dog keyrings at Heathrow next to the Union Jack mugs.

But ambition is a noble thing, and I've no doubt there's plenty of talent at GDS.  It's a shame they've used a metaphor as a starting point. Ben Terrett’s post on design again:

In many ways the problem is similar to problem Kinnear and Calvert faced when designing the road signs in the 60′s. Before they came along Britain was littered with different signage systems all using different symbols, colours and typefaces which was at best confusing and at worst dangerous. With an exponential increase in vehicle traffic the government knew something had to be done. Kinnear and Calvert proposed one consistent system. One designed with the clarity of information as it’s goal. From then on Britain had a solution that became the definitive standard and was copied around the world.

Sound familiar? Swap signage systems for websites. Swap vehicle traffic for online traffic. That’s a challenge no designer could resist.

Prod that metaphor and it pops like a ... [remember to think up simile before hit publish]. A road system is something a central government has to control. Websites don't need to belong on one domain. We're still working from 'Public services all in one place' as a design principle; I believe I've covered elsewhere how this makes for mediocre, expensive, blinkered government web services. It's nice of GDS to admit GOV.UK creates a 'problem'; although they suggest this presents an opportunity for Blighty to lead the world again, rather than an inherent problem caused by using rhetoric instead of a theory which can be proved or disproved.


It's the opposite of the Tower of Babel: force the online population of the UK into one structure with one design and they'll all start speaking the same language.

Another rant over

I'm getting terribly lazy with these posts, aren't I? All I'm doing is copy and pasting. GDS are at least building things, something Directgov weren't committed to in any real way since around 2007. I should stick my neck out and build something myself.

Documenting everything they're doing in a blog is admirable too. Even if GDS are wrong, at least they're wrong in a transparent, accountable way. That could be their real legacy. I'll put their blog onto a teatowel.

Tom and Martha: do come and visit our call centre

This blog is dedicated to removing Directgov, a process which GDS have already started. However, to improve the public sector web, we need to get rid of the assumptions behind Directgov and get the people in charge to look for a fresh approach.

It seems strange that the Gubbins perspective is so different from that clever GDS team down there in Whitehall. I think spending some time in our call centre would do GDS a world of good. And if it turns out we're just yokels who don't understand their vision, they could use the time to talk us round.

The Tom and Martha show

Tom Loosemore of GDS and Martha Lane Fox appeared on BBC news to talk through the launch of GOV.UK. The interview starts with defending the supersite principle and moves through familiar themes - the government has too many websites (920 by Fox's reckoning back in August 2010); rationalising them all into one will reduce costs, drive people online, and improve the usability of government transactions.

By 5.07 Fox is talking about government's long term IT commitments, where the government signs long term contracts for 'hundreds of millions of pounds for services that are substandard'. In contrast, for GDS:

This is completely new way of developing. This has been a team of people, very small, very cost-effective, doing things iteratively, releasing things as they go, getting feedback; never saying, "this is what we're going to build, it's going to take us five years and it's going to cost us hundreds of millions" - quite the reverse - treating it a bit like a start-up but a start-up with the appropriate level of credibility and … gold-standard security. 

It's a seductive argument. However, we're talking about the entire public sector web here. I think some kind of plan is in order, with costs and timescales. No-one else in the public sector web has the luxury of providing services without a plan. The GDS revolution is in danger of producing more years of malaise.

The thing about 'revolutions' is that they only take place in countries with poor infrastructure and no free elections, where only a minority have a stake in the government. A revolution usually involves replacing one unelected cartel with another. Our previous regime didn't do much apart from shut down our websites.

Martha and Tom's week at Gubbins

I think a week answering the phones in our call centre would do Tom and Martha a world of good. The warriors of GDS really need to spend some time with the enemy. The people who work in actual public sector offices are likely to have a different perspective from London consultants who have a vested interest in a centralised public sector web. A 'smart answer' on GOV.UK seems just that - until you've spent days fielding calls from people who tried to find their answer and couldn't.

People in our call centres answer telephone queries which are both complicated and repetitive. Government information is demanding. Unfortunately, Gubbins use Directgov rather than a website designed around our users. Our online service is run by editors and consultants in London who have never visited our offices. GOV.UK has even less content than Directgov and no contextual pictures or branding, third-person content, and very little navigation to differentiate our service from anyone else's. So people are likely to go on phoning us rather than trying to find their answer online. 

Gubbins staff have a lot of negativity and cynicism towards that bloody awful Directgov website. No-one's told them there's a revolution going on. In between calls, Tom and Martha could show them a bit of GOV.UK and try to talk them around. It's not exactly BBC news, but Martha could even help address the digital divide, in case any of them are still using bits of paper to renew their car tax.

Serious offer. Do get in touch.

Betagov launch: how wrong I was

I'm the kind of contrarian who enjoys being proved wrong. In my posts Betagov, Betagov - wherefore art thou Betagov? and Dear GDS: when's that Betagov launch date? I strongly implied that the Betagov launch was going to drift and probably wasn't going to happen at all.

In Absolute control: why Betagov will fail I gave my criteria for Betagov to succeed. The first one was:


1. It's launched on time
31st of January 2012, I believe.

Yet here we have it in all its minimalist glory: www.gov.uk

I'll be happy to be proved wrong through criteria 2-5 as well. So, hats off to GDS and let's keep the skepticism for another day. 

Betagov, Betagov - wherefore art thou Betagov?

With apologies to the Bard. As you might recall from your A-Level English, Juliet's lament means 'why are you Romeo?' rather than 'where are you, Romeo'? Indeed, over 2012 people might be asking where Betagov has gotten to. They've got a lot of user testing to do before they come up with something that isn't worse than Directgov itself. Combining a government supersite with accessibility is like ... damnit, Dorian ... Shakespeare would have nailed that with a simile. What's wrong with you tonight?

Nonetheless, the question that the test subjects, the big players like DVLA, DWP and Student Loans Company and eventually GDS themselves are going to be asking is: why do you have to be a Betagov at all? What was so wrong with government services having a website each?

GDS are doing their homework, of course:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/27/search-data-user-needs/

There are over 300,000 searches carried out weekly on Directgov, with over 125,000 different search phrases. The most popular term, ‘jobs’, is searched for 4,500 times a week. At the other end of the spectrum there is a ‘long tail’ of 100,000 phrases that are only searched for once ...

Using this data to identify needs that are not being met by government can be daunting. However, it is possible to filter or group it to pick out emerging trends and unsatisfactory user journeys.

125,000 different search phrases. I would expect the number of different search phrases was somewhat lower on each of those 287 websites you killed and absorbed like some glutinous horror from a John Carpenter film. You're going to have your work cut out improving public services now.

It's OK though, you give one example of something Directgov's dramatic intervention managed to improve -

During the run up to a recent Christmas, a growing volume of searches that included the words ‘Christmas’ and ‘payment’ was spotted. We also noted that users were not clicking on the (irrelevant) results presented to them. Delving deeper, we were able to see what else those users looked for. This identified an unmet user need: benefit payment dates over the Christmas period. HMRC published an article on Directgov and, as we were able to supply the relevant keywords that users were searching for, the search engine-optimised article ranked well in Google quickly.

Do HMRC not listen to customer phone calls at all? Or check their own web analytics? I would have thought that people have been phoning up about their xmas benefit payment dates every single year since the dawn of the welfare state. Some local knowledge would have paid off there.

Luckily Directgov swooped and stuck their HMRC article on a seperate supersite; and thus another feel-good piece of anecdotal evidence about public services being improved by centralisation was born. [note before publish: explore Spielberg metaphor here].

I expect you've got your beady eyes on the vast HMRC website these days; not the complicated transactional stuff where you submit your tax returns, of course - just the pages of static content. They should be easy enough to prune, transplant and paint a non-branded Betagov white. You'll be needing some success stories in the next couple of years so converging HMRC might do the trick.

Haha, oh dear, I slipped into the second person again. I used that trope on my last post. Probably best I leave this one be. Maybe I'll go and comment on GDS a bit.

Dear GDS: when's that Betagov launch date?

Dear Government Digital Service (GDS),

To avoid making the same mistakes as Directgov, and condemning the public sector web to another decade of malaise, you need to change your approach. In theory you've been given absolute control and absolute authority. You need to use your powers wisely.  The first step? Abandon government supersites.

Martha Lane Fox's open letter was enough to save Directgov and put you on a path of even greater centralisation, based on the same hypothetical savings as Varney. Maybe this open letter will get you to start engaging with the public sector. 

What you've promised us

In theory Betagov (that probably won't even be what it's called) will have a huge impact on the UK public sector. It could even have a huge effect on life in the UK.

Fox and Francis Maude have promised a billion pounds worth of savings in the public sector web. As we saw in What happened to that £400 million? Directgov received £83 million over several years in pursuit of £400 million in web-related savings that never materialised. A billion pounds is a lot of money - chances are we'll notice having that extra amount in the bank. You therefore have a lot at stake.

If you succeed in creating hyper-efficient online services and close co-operation between government departments and bodies, much of the existing government infrastructure will become obselete. We won't need as many job centres, DVLA offices, or local authority offices; while the call centres and response handling offices for post will have a far lighter workload. Citizens will use online services without having to write to the government or call. In theory, Betagov could make much of the public sector vanish, in the same way that Amazon and eBay are laying waste to our high streets.

I assume my own job will be part of this billlion pounds in savings. Don't worry, my inner Tory rejoices at this. A lot of my job involves arguing with Directgov editors and emailing word documents around.

If Betagov creates a system where my job is performed more efficiently from London, and no-one needs to phone our call centres, I could go off and work in, oh, I don't know, ecommerce. I'd become a private sector producer instead of taking the government's money as a foot soldier in an army of bureacrats.

So when's the launch?

As far as Gubbins know, Betagov is due in January 2012, so it's being launched between now and a week on Tuesday. Directgov will be closed completely by August 2012.

Your blogs have gone a bit quiet on the matter. Why so coy?

You've published slides to show that in the case of 'Tax' and 'Going to court' Betagov shows some improvements on Directgov -

http://www.slideshare.net/DigEngHMG/betagov-content-testing-1312012-final

Smashing, that's a start. Your new supersite may work better than one which is virtually unchanged from five years ago.

You've shown that 'Betagov works better than Directgov for two sets of users, under two limited sets of conditions.'

Next comes the extrapolation. From Nick Breeze's blog post:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/13/quantitative-testing-betagov/

By way of context, if (and it is a big if) the same level of improvement were mirrored across the live service, a Betagov-style product could lead to:

• Over 1 million more user needs being successfully met each month (aka a million frustrating & expensive failures avoided)
• Users saving over 215,000 hours of their time each month
• Quantifiably lower levels of user frustration, and higher levels of user reassurance

Come on. Tell us how much that would save? Don't be shy. We love hypothetical savings here at Gubbins. Sometimes we dip into them and go for a slap-up feed at Witherspoon's. Mum's the word!

Hypothetical users

Time to re-cap Leisa Reichelt's blog post Opportunities lost – AlphaGov from 19 May 2011.

Who is the audience?

At no point that I saw did the AlphaGov team ever apparently think deeply about what kind of an end user they were going to prioritise. They talk about ‘thinking about who our users were’ and having a ‘user-base of all the entire adult population of a country’.

As User Experience practitioners we know that although you might want the whole country to use whatever you’re designing, you need to put a ring around the kind of users you MOST want to support ...

You can’t take a User Centred approach to design when your user is ‘Everyone’. You need to define who your users are. You must clearly identify the behavioural characteristics that you most want to support and focus on designing to best support these ...

AlphaGov sends a message that you can say you’re doing User Centred Design but you don’t have to show any evidence of a UCD process – audience definition, research, user involvement, design principles that actually track to specific behaviour attributes.

It's therefore going to be difficult to mirror the results of your testing, on two limited scenarios, across a supersite which offers a range of vastly different services.

And thus your new website will fail to offer the usable experience we should expect from a modern website.

You might improve the overall supersite experience, you might not. I haven't seen any navigation so far. Without local navigation, you get the Directgov problem.

But to build tailored navigation, information architecture and content, rather than 'one size fits all' pages spat out by your CMS, requires considering individual user experiences. In other words, you need to start treating motorists differently from people wanting to find out about their pension and people looking for jobs.

But it's a lot easier to do this on individual websites rather than government supersites. And the organisations who provide public services know a lot more about their audiences than you do.

Are you starting to see the problem?

What you can accomplish in 2012

We're already a year on from Martha's open letter to Francis Maude. Again, in theory you've been given 'absolute control' and 'absolute authority'. What are you going to do with it?

Redesigning and relaunching Directgov is the easy bit. The content is already there. Word 2003 documents full of tracked changes are flying around through cyberspace as we speak. It's funny how your technological revolution doesn't involve that much new technology. But you know best.

You'll probably encounter some resistance from the government departments and bodies who actually provide public services. Hopefully they'll be polite about it. But they'll have a 'myopic view of their own service' as you put it on that training course I went on in Hercules House. They'll want improvements for their own customers, not theoretical improvements for 'the entire adult population of a country’. The debates will become drawn out and complex.

Not to worry, when you do launch Betagov (February? time to publish that date somewhere) it's only for public feedback. Hopefully you can get that bland sort of 'yes looks better' and 'yes I'd tell my friends' feedback you can pass upwards to the politicians.

If you stay the course and don't allow Betagov to become another Project Austin, you will launch it in earnest and close down Directgov. I think August 2012 is somewhat optimistic, based on the amount of stakeholders you have currently using Directgov.

Let's say you will migrate the content by the end of 2012. Two years after Fox's open letter, you will have completed the first step of your revolution, replacing Directgov.

Years three and four - things start getting tricky

At this point, you're going to need to start producing some kind of measurable improvement in public sector usability, as well as the billion pounds of savings.

If you continue on the path of centralising the rest of the public sector on to a single domain, this will take up all your time and resources. You'll have crossed paths with HMRC by now - are you going to bring online tax returns, and a mountain of web pages on to Betagov as well?

Because the first two years of GDS' existence were spent on creating a government supersite, you'll have to stick with it.  Trouble is, the new Directgov will ensure that the front end for government services remains poor. They'll reach for a phone or letter rather than using online transactions.

You won't have addressed the transactions themselves, much. The power to change these will remain with the public sector organisations who process the application forms and own the customer accounts. You may plan to build and host new versions of the transactions under your direct control down there in Whitehall. However, this will take decades rather than years.

Governments will come and go, and as your existence relies on the good will of politicians rather than on users, you will need to keep proving yourselves.

The solution

There is a way out. Prove your absolute authority by giving us our websites back.

The majority of Directgov traffic is dominated by a small number of services - motoring, jobs, pensions and student loans, if memory serves. You call these 'flagship services', which is nice. Unless that's a euphemism for the most complicated services with the most demanding owners.

These are big organisations with their own web teams. Let them do their work. We're not converging all the public sector call centres into one, so why have we tried to do this with websites? Focus on something achievable.

Become an organisation that tracks the progress of government services. You will have the power to censure those that fail to make any progress, or even threaten them.

If you like, focus on reducing the amount of avoidable calls and lessons people make to HM government. Measure the overall number over time and get the public sector to put plans in place for how they'll get people to use online services instead.

When you discover an area of government where the rules are too messy and complicated to develop effective online services, feed this back to the civil service and parliament. Public services are only as complex as they want them to be.

The alternative? Years are going to go by while the theoretical savings, based on the experience of theoretical users, aren't going to show up. Expect commiserations from Martha Lane Fox while your board resign and retire one by one; or a new government move you and change your name again. 

I feel for you GDS, I really do. I wish I had more power myself - working on a public sector web team, you rely on government policies which change year by year. Websites can only do so much. Some transactions were probably easier to complete on bits of paper. Our customers will always give up and phone us when they encounter something tricky. You need to decide what is possible to achieve while you still have time and good will on your side.

Time to choose your battles.

Yours sincerely,

Your nemesis,

Dorian of Gubbins.

How to make Directgov work

It's a new year. Time for some positivity. There are some ways in which a centralised government organisation responsible for online services could work. It would be effective if we limit its scope and keep it to a budget and deadlines.

The trouble is, GDS is trying to be all things to all men. It's responsible for publishing web content; building a government supersite; enforcing standards of useability; saving money; and building toolkits and uniform government transactions. Phew!

Having responsibility for all these things create a conflict of interest: for example, Directgov are responsible for Gubbin's web useability, but don't tend to be critical of the Directgov problem which is a consequence of the rubbish website they make us use.

Here's a quick list of things which the Government Digital Service (GDS) could focus on in order to become effective:

1. GDS runs a government wiki

A government supersite can't hope to capture all the information people might potentially need when interacting with government. So, GDS should focus on creating a single government wiki to contain all the high level stuff, and let government organisations offer their own websites.

The version of Betagov due to go live at the end of January (February? They're being slightly coy with dates) will only contain generic information for each service, so it's shaping up to be more of a wiki than a web service anyway.

2. GDS becomes a government web standards authority

All government organisations need to have a plan to become WC3 compliant. GDS review the plans and check for progress; perhaps making annual visits to review the results of any evaluations or customer engagement.

3. GDS becomes the organisation which writes the cheques

As long as they don't become the people who build and fix the services themselves, GDS could approve funding for all web projects, ensuring that they keep costs down and figure in useability and accessibility in each project.

4. GDS focus on creating innovations

Didn't work with Directgov, or Innovate, as far as I can see; but GDS seem to fancy themselves as being able to create widgets and sparkly new code for the rest of the public sector. So, let them do pure research and take some of the development burden off the other government bodies

5. GDS become a government news agency

The Directgov paradigm is already focused on 'publishing' rather than offering services. Let Directgov focus entirely on awareness campaigns and leave the missing passports, renewing driving licenses etc to the bodies that provide these services. GDS spend a lot more time around politicians and the civil service than yokels who work in the public sector, anyway. It's a hierarchy thing.

5. GDS focus on reducing avoidable government contact

Ever work in a call centre? It's no fun. You spend most of the day answering the same old questions over and over again. People should find the answers on useable government websites instead. Didn't happen with Directgov.

So, again, GDS becomes an auditing body that ensures citizens don't have to spend their time phoning public sector call centers or writing angry complaint letters. Life improves for everyone. And apparently there's a billion pounds of savings to be made per year from reducing 'avoidable contact'. Sorted.

Happy new year.

Ten things Directgov actually does

As discussed in hands up who likes Directgov, Directgov actually doesn't do websites or public services. Not really. It creates generic web content for public services on a supersite. The tricky bit, the transactions, are still handled by the same public sector organisations, but they're given a Directgov logo. It spends its actual time and money on PR and marketing.

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.

Absolute control: why Betagov will fail

It would be a terrible shame if Betagov fails, just like Directgov failed. The people working on it have good track records and they're working on it with the best intentions. I wish them all the best. No, really.

Here are my criteria for Betagov to succeed:

1. It's launched on time
31st of January 2012, I believe.

2. Directgov is shut down on time
31st of August 2012. I'll be throwing a party to celebrate. See? No-one wants Betagov to succeed more than me.

3. Betagov achieves savings
Let's use Directgov's benchmark. For Betagov to succeed, they should publicly provide evidence that they have achieved actual savings. Let's give them, say, a year. We won't mention the £400 million again; any savings will do.

4. Betagov improves public sector web useability
Tricky one to prove. But apart from saving money, the point of giving absolute control to a team of people in London is to enforce high standards for online government services. I suppose they could create Directgov Dogs and COTA boxes for all? Let's give them a couple of years to achieve this.

5. Betagov abolishes government brands
We've seen how Directgov spent vast sums of money promoting Directgov, when they perhaps should have spent it on web services. But Betagov aims to remove all traces of Gubbins, Jobcentre, DVLA and Student Finance England from its new supersite.

What could possibly go wrong?

As I've covered in previous posts, government supersites are based on a series of easily-disproved assumptions about the way people use the internet. It has attracted disproportionate amounts of leverage and cash while producing web services which are mediocre at best. It's inevitable that pursuing the supersite dream will lead to new versions of the Directgov problem.

At the time of writing, the Betagov team is only just beginning to engage with the actual services they're supposed to represent. Sooner or later they will find out that the public want to be able to contact the passport service when their passport goes missing in the post, and no 'revolution' is going to change that.

Wow I'm really going heavy on the rhetoric in this post. What's up with me? This blog was supposed to be fun.

Again, if I'm proved wrong, I'll be the one throwing the party.

Directgov dog and the magic comments box

There is a lesson for Alphagov/Betagov in today's blog post. This is what happens to revolutions when they start trying to build and fix things.

The first casualty of war is innocence. After Directgov's £83 million pound annexation of public sector websites, in pursuit of £400 million in savings that, like WMD, were never found, it's easy to forget that the regime's victims included its own people.

Directgov Dog

This cute pointy critter showed up for a couple of weeks back in 2009, if memory serves. Directgov Dog is a rare example of Directgov delivering on one of their plans.

Naturally, it took a bit of outsourcing to get this online - as I mused in Hands up who likes Directgov? the organisation doesn't seem to employ people who design or build websites. 

I rather liked Directgov Dog, though. He was a bit of light relief when one was trawling through pages of web content formerly owned by Gubbins, which had been hacked, slashed and stomped into Directgov's generic and unusable pages, to try to find where one had left that pesky paragraph of information that caused all those arguments with the editors when they tried to cut it down and rewrite it.

Mysteriously, after a couple of months (weeks?) Directgov Dog disappeared without trace. I've never heard why.

If there's one thing Directgov do, it's customer engagement. Perhaps they surveyed an ethnic minority who perceives dogs as unclean; or worse, misinterpreted the icon as indicating pages about food.

Talking of symbolism, the reason Directgov is orange is because Directgov's  research found orange to be politically neutral. It's a shame Directgov's London-based execs haven't paid more visits to Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Sorry, I digress again. Directgov Dog was even shortlisted for a design award -

http://awards.designweek.co.uk/benchmarks/2009/category/public-sector/directgov/directgov.php

Here's the summary:

Directgov is a Government brand that unites all its public services, making it accessible for everyone to understand and use. Bostock and Pollitt conducted a complete overhaul of the existing branding. A playful dog character was created by using key elements of the brand, such as an orange arrow for its head. The animation explained the services and where to find them. Other elements of the campaign were brought to life by creative agency MCBD, which developed animations for television and print advertising.

Let me see, now ... that was 2009. The Gubbins pages of Directgov haven't changed since 2007. It looks like the complete overhaul was only applied to the home and top pages of Directgov, the ones the politicians see.

We were lucky enough to get one change in the three years between 2007 and 2010, however.

Comment On This Article (COTA) boxes

Directgov must have been spending a lot of time and energy closing down other people's websites between 2007 and 2010. They didn't seem to invest the £83 million in their own website at all. If they'd remembered to visit Gubbins during this period they might have amended The Directgov Problem. A solution - for example, tabs or local navigation - wouldn't have been complicated or expensive and would have brought the Gubbins content on Directgov closer to the level of useability it enjoyed on gubbins.co.uk back in 2007.

We did get COTA boxes, though, in summer 2010 -

Directgov were so proud that they launched this new function with a personal email from one of their executives, complete with his picture.

They even remembered to copy in Gubbins this time.

To this day, the Directgov wikepedia entry contains details of the for-Directgov-groundbreaking achievement:

Comment on this Article

In April 2010 Directgov launched a "Comment on this Article" feature on each page. Users can give articles five ratings:
• Very useful • Quite useful • Unsure • Not very useful • Not at all useful

Directgov also invites users to leave comments (up to 500 characters) about how the page could be improved, but asks that users don't leave any personal details like name and address.

The data captured from Comment on this Article will be used for customer insight and product improvement. An overview of monthly ratings is available here http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/SiteInformation/DG_188378.

There was also a Directgov TV channel on Freeview at number 106. It closed down in 2010.

 Oh, that's a shame. the overview of monthly ratings is no longer available.

Hey, there's a forum post about the Directgov TV channel. Apparently they bought the license back in December 2008 -

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=951216

DirectGov new Freeview channel from Teletext

---

Teletext have obtained a licence for a Digital Television Programme Service (DTPS) called DirectGov.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/tvlic...monthly/200811

I bet that was expensive. Must remember to look up that loose end some time. Directgov TV.

Why a comments box was really really tricky for Directgov

A comment box isn't hard to make or implement. If you Google 'html contact box' the options come up fairly quickly. Most modern Content Management Systems allow you to implement the code yourself. So, if you run your own website and services for your own organisation, this would be a trivial improvement. If you create a comments on your own website, you can route it to the department or team who should be getting the comment.

Comments boxes become complicated when you implement them on government supersites.

If you have been forced to use Directgov you no longer have control over these small, cheap, localised improvements. You wait for the grace of Directgov to bestow one upon you.

The changes become vast because you have to have them agreed by (I presume) multiple executives and committees. Plus, Directgov don't have people who build and fix things (at least none that I've met). And the budget is being spent on adverts and cute pointy dogs and digital TV stations instead of websites. After all, the politicians won't notice whether or not Directgov are delivering comments boxes.

Gubbins had to request the results of the comments boxes to be sent to us. The first batch arrived a few months after they were launched. Of course, Directgov doesn't tailor its service to the various organisations it represents; so they were sent to a central team who had to censor out any personal information, sort it and forward it to the Franchise team, who forwarded it to Gubbins.

The COTA results showed that the 'Not at all useful' rating was, on average, over 50% of the results. Come to think of it, it's a shame that  Directgov feedback page has been taken down. Anyway, the results were sort of useful because we could compare the ratings across different pages and get verbatim comments. We still get these from Directgov every few months, as long as we request each time them and are prepared to wait.

I just went in and made a COTA comment to Directgov just now. A very constructive one involving Martha Lane Fox.

The future of web gizmos which we can do but Directgov can't

When it comes to innovation, government supersites with highly paid executives talk a good game, but we've seen how the reality ends up as pure spin with no substance.

At the time of writing, at the end of nearly five years and £83 million of Directgov convergeance, all Directgov had to show for their talk of improving the public sector web were COTA boxes and a few weeks of Directgov Dog.

Returning to Sharon Cooper's conference comments as reported by Computer Weekly in May 2011:

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2011/05/500-rogue-gov-websites-nabbed.html

"We are thinking, should there be a DirectGov in five years time? Or should there just be a wholesale market-place of open APIs so every transaction is available, so that anybody can use that transaction and embed it in their own service?" said Cooper. "Should there just be a great big asset database on which we can build a version of DirectGov?

It's interesting that a senior Directgov executive should be considering a future without a Directgov, or even Alpha or Betagov. The 'wholesale market-place of open APIs' is certainly closer to Directgov Must Die's liking than a small group of London-based suits spending millions on marketing, with a tri-annual, derisory innovation for the people who actually run services.

I started Directgov Must Die in less than a minute, thanks to Google. The innovations don't come from governments. The commercial, decentralised, capitalist web spat out the code for comment boxes well over a decade ago and it's there for anyone to use, immediately, for free. Unless they're on Directgov.

I'm afraid, then, that the solution is for the government to go back to writing cheques for individual organisations to run their own websites, so that we can take our pick from the best technology out there. Whether than means a comments box or our own pointy dog.

What happened to that £400 million? Part 2

Er, I'm stuck now. I Googled 'varney report savings' and nothing came up about whether the £400 million savings predicted by Varney was actually saved. Nothing whatsoever. Did they save only £200 million? £2 million? £2? 20p? A 2p chew?

You can put together the total running costs for Directgov if you check a couple of sources -

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2009-06-30c.282044.h&

Jim Knight (Minister of State (the South West), Regional Affairs; South Dorset, Labour)

The costs for Directgov in each financial year since 2004 are set out in the following table:

Financial year	£ million
2004-05	5.1
2005-06	10.5
2006-07	12.8
2007-08	13.9
2008-09	30.7

...

I believe after this the figures were approximately - 


2009-10 - £30 million
2010-11 - £23 million

... bringing the Directgov total to £126 million, over seven financial years.

Have I missed any millions here and there? According to Hansard, 'Expenditure on Directgov increased in 2008-9 in recognition to its increased importance in the Government’s strategy for online delivery of public services.' - in other words, the £83 million invested in Directgov since Varney, approved by the Comprehensive Spending Review in 2007, was to achieve the £400 million of savings by converging websites.

So, where's our extra £400 million?

Haha, only kidding, government is a big, complicated thing. You can't expect theoretical savings to appear on actual balance sheets. As Cross pointed out, Varney's figures were 'back of a fag packet' calculations. No-one seriously expected to save an actual £400 million.

Bit of a shame for Gubbins, mind you. Remember, our costs went up when we converged to Directgov. We have our own customer transactions which we maintain ourselves and are paid for out of Gubbin's annual budget.  They're painted orange with a Directgov logo at the top, but they're essentially built and maintained by us.

Y'know if Gubbins had pledged to save, say, £5,000 a year by automatically switching our office PCs off every night, HM Treasury would have the right to see these savings somewhere on a balance sheet.

For Directgov, normal accounting practice doesn't seem to apply. As I said in my first post, we have to make special allowances for government websites.

I’d go direct, guv

Directgov's spending was cut in 2010 along with other cuts in the public sector. At the height of Directgov's 'success' they were spending £7 million per yearon marketing. That's the figure I seem to remember, anyway. It's a bit hard to find on Google now.

As recently as February 2010 Directgov were commissioning a £2.05 million TV ad featuring various B-listers, earning the censure of the Daily Mail - 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1253496/How-star-studded-Government-TV-advert-featuring-Kelly-Brook-Helen-Mirren-costs-taxpayer-2million.html

A star-studded Government television advert - featuring the likes of Suggs from Madness and Kelly Brook - has cost the taxpayer more than £2million.

The eye-watering cost of the Directgov campaign includes the production, airtime and hiring the celebrities.

Quite a price tag for marketing a brand which would be closed down within a couple of years. If they do get rid of Directgov. But that's another story.

Hey, look. There's the Directgov problem again from a commentator -

The first time I saw the advert I was shocked by the self-indulgence of it and the ridiculous number of celebrities. I'd rather they spent the money on improving the clunky DirectGov website.

- Chris Z, Warwick, 24/2/2010 23:07

Sorry, I digress. The funny thing about this episode is that the Varney savings were still being cited three years after the Comprehensive Spending Review had started:

But Mike Hoban, the communications director for Directgov, said: "At a time of economic uncertainty it is essential that we give everyone in the UK easy access to important government information about taxes, benefits, job opportunities and education.

"Directgov will save the government £400m over three years. Therefore this is an investment that is important in helping the government save money."

Hang on a sec ... this was February 2010. The web convergence program had already been running for three years. Hoban was talking as if the £400 million savings were going to be made over the next three years.

It would have been an ideal opportunity for Hoban to have shared a spreadsheet of actual savings from the various government organisations who had closed down their websites to join Directgov; seeing as by then, Directgov had already swallowed £96 million of taxpayers money in pursuit of this £400 million.

Digital by default

As far as government white (orange?) elephants go, Directgov is a snip. Compared to £2.7 billion reportedly lost on a replacement NHS system, £96 million on an unloved orange website, and £400 million of vanishing theoretical savings will soon be forgotten by the general public.

The point is, when a government organisation runs its own web services, its expenditure shows up on balance sheets. After each financial year, the government can audit them on what they've achieved with their budget.

When you centralise web services into a government supersite, it becomes more difficult to account for expenditure. The ideals are too lofty, the aims are too vague, and the politicians don't want to be bogged down in the details. It happened with Directgov.

Let's be fair, though. If we haven't saved £400 million, at least we cut down on the number of government websites out there. According to Computer Weekly in April 2011:

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2011/05/500-rogue-gov-websites-nabbed.html

Sharon Cooper, director of strategy and innovation for the Government Digital Service, told a recent Inside Government conference the unit had achieved Varney's target off shutting all unnecessary public sector websites and subsuming them into DirectGov by March 2011.

It had shut 287 websites by 5pm on 31 March, converging 95 per cent of all public sector information into DirectGov. But it had found another 500 websites that must be axed.

"There are still another 500 out there because we found a lot more in the process of trying to shut them down and that work is still going on," said Cooper.

Oh dear, were they hiding? So, we're still investing public funds to reduce the number of government websites, even though after five years, there is no evidence this causes any savings.

Again, as she mentioned Varney, this would have been an ideal opportunity to share a spreadsheet showing £400 million in savings.

Erm ... I'm confused again. How do you measure 'information' unless you work in quantum physics? They're reported that statistic as if it's a real number.

Real numbers versus Directgov numbers

287 is a real number, mind you. It wouldn't be hard to email 287 organisations and get them to say how much Directgov saved them.

Presumably the total comes to at least £83 million pounds - the running costs of Directgov, post-Varney. That means £289,000 per website.

A professional website can be built for £10,000. I'm no expert on web infrastructure but I imagine the hosting needs of a government organisation would run to roughly the same amount of money. So, a new information-carrying website could have been built in 2008-09 and hosted for three years for £40,000.

Seven such websites could have been produced for each website which was converged onto Directgov. I would expect that if you ran user testing on said £10,000 website it would perform better than the same information being presented on a government supersite.

Y'know, a broke graphic design graduate would probably build you a decent information-carrying website for £100. Maybe I'm being naive about how much websites cost in the public sector? This is all getting terribly confusing.

Remember, Directgov only hosts pages of text. It has no interactive functions, unless you could COTA boxes and the email service. The transactions (people ordering a new driving license etc) are still hosted by the organisations themselves.

So, like the Varney figures, this all sounds ever so slightly fishy.

That '500 websites' number sounds a bit made-up too. Did Varney have 787 websites in mind when he came up with those £400 million of savings? By the sounds of things he forgot to tell Directgov.

Post script

Returning to the Daily Mail article:

But Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude called Government advertising and marketing spending ‘out of control’.

He added: ‘Labour seem more focused on squandering our money on vanity PR projects rather than actually addressing the pressing problems of the country.’

It's interesting that the £2.05 million on an advert attracted Maude's condemnation at the time; but £126 million on a government supersite didn't influence the direction of government web services under Maude's control after he took power.

What happened to that £400 million? Part 1

Quick history lesson. I've just read up on this stuff myself, this very morning. In December 2006 'Service transformation: A better service for citizens and businesses, a better deal for the taxpayer' was published by HM Treasury. Sir David Varney's report recommended the following:

On ‘e-services’:
19. Directgov and Businesslink.gov funding be put on a more secure basis within the 2007 CSR to develop them as fully transformed services;
20. in the 2007 CSR, the Government investigates a funding arrangement for Directgov and Businesslink.gov that puts these services on a stable financial footing, incentivises
departments to contribute to services that secure cross-government benefit and allows for
the expansion of functionality of these services;
21. sponsorship and leadership rests with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for
Directgov and the Paymaster General for Businesslink.gov;
22. government establish a clear performance indicator for citizen and business facing website rationalisation, which focuses on establishing firm targets to reduce progressively the number of websites over a three year period. In particular rationalisation targets should include:
- a freeze on the development of new websites providing citizen or business e-services
created by departments, agencies and non departmental public bodies, unless
authorised by the Ministerial Committee on Public Services and Public Expenditure
Sub Committee on Electronic Service Delivery — PSX(E); and
- by 2011, almost all citizen and business e-services migrate to Directgov and
Businesslink.gov and all e-transactions are provided through these two primary
websites. This means that all departments will have one corporate website, utilising
shared infrastructure and all other sites will be closed;

Here's why:

2.14 The taxpayer should expect savings from the improved efficiency of government, driven by a focus on reducing inefficiency and duplication. For example:
- by the third year of the 2007 CSR, early estimated savings for face-to-face services of
at least £250-300 million per year from rationalising face-to-face provision across
central and local government estates, before taking account of the potential savings to
be made by sharing provision across central and local government and from shifting
demand to cheaper channels;
- by the third year of the 2007 CSR, savings of 25 per cent of the cost of contact centre
operation (around £400 million per year), before rationalisation options are
pursued; and
- up to £400 million saving over three years associated with e-service improvement
including website rationalisation, channel shift and shared infrastructure, if every
department rigorously applied the agreed policy.
2.15 These savings should form part of the Government’s value formoney programme being taken forward as part of the 2007 CSR.

Marvellous idea. Instead of multiple services and websites, you converge, rationalise and centralise to save money. There are well over a billion pounds of savings in those paragraphs, but the one we'll focus on is the £400 million on web hosting.

On 21 December 2006 a skeptical Michael Cross from the Guardian covered the Varney report in his Guardian article When good ideas for government sites go bad citing the £400 million figure

A new plan reckons the government could save £400m over three years by rationalising this virtual real estate. ... As usual with economy drives, the proposals are a blend of common sense and back-of-fag-packet calculations. They appear in a report by Sir David Varney, former chairman of HM Revenue and Customs, published with the pre-Budget report earlier this month. The big idea is to converge the 4,000-odd government websites into two - Directgov for citizens and Businesslink for businesses. The ambition isn't new, but Varney proposes mechanisms that might make it happen.

I haven't come across the calculations Varney used to come up with £400 million either, although I expect they're out there somewhere. 

Varney did happen, up to a point. Large public sector services such as DVLA, Jobcentre and student finance are now on the Directgov platform, although the transactions themselves often remain with these organisations. Instead of a DVLA website, information about driving licenses lives on Directgov. At the time of writing there are still large, un-converged services such as www.hmrc.gov.uk with 120,000 web pages. 

But there was always a catch. Cross' warnings go to the heart of The Directgov Problem:

Varney proposes a freeze on all new websites providing e-services unless authorised by two cabinet committees. By 2011, he reckons, "almost all citizen and business e-services" will have migrated to Directgov and Businesslink. This will leave all departments with one corporate website each, with all other sites closing down.

At a time when government says it is encouraging frontline innovation and devolution, this is centralisation gone mad. Channelling all public services through a single desk in Whitehall has long been a Treasury dream, but goes directly against the spirit of the web. There is no evidence that centralisation will do anything other than stifle innovation. By all means, let's have a strong core service. But let's also allow public servants with bright ideas to launch them locally. The potential improvements are surely worth more than a few million saved on hosting fees.

As far as innovation goes, the only change Directgov came up with in the last three years were changing the links from black to blue, and installing the ill-fated 'Comment On This Article' boxes at the foot of pages.

But let's not get off track. The main saving which comes from Web rationalisation is on hosting fees. There's no mention of reducing public sector web staff, such as myself; curiously, Varney only focuses on increasing Directgov at the expense of public sector websites.

Saving money at Gubbins

I can't speak for any other public sector organisation but for Gubbins the savings didn't happen. We already have enough web infrastructure to run a basic website to contain the Gubbins information held on Directgov. Our human resources portal, for example, is more complex as it involves actual transactions rather than pages full of text.

We still build and develop the Gubbins online service ourselves, although it's painted orange and we have to run all our decisions by a rotating cast of Directgov editors and managers, which has added to our costs.

As I've said, Varney could have recommended making savings by making people like me redundant. The Directgov editors are simply duplicating my job by writing and publishing our web content. Sadly, sitting hundreds of miles from our call centres and IT staff, they don't actually know much about our service. Creating a centralised bureaucracy hasn't improved our service or reduced my workload. So, I'm still here.

Maybe Gubbins is a unique case, and that £400 million has been saved elsewhere in the public sector web?

I'll do some more digging.

Hands up who likes Directgov?

Not Gubbins, that's for sure. Back in 2007 we began the process of shutting down our own website and moving the content across to Directgov. We had our own website, just as we have our own forms, letters, marketing, call centers, IT, mailroom, lawyers, accounting, printing, reception and tea lady. We clean our own offices. None of these things are run from Whitehall. But it was deemed that our website should be.

In 2007 Directgov were already running a Product Review. direct.gov.uk was going to get new colours and layout. It was a brave new world. Directgov accepted they weren't very good and needed to change.

We didn't have anything planned for gubbins.co.uk. Everyone agreed it was fit for purpose.

We went ahead and converged anyway. There were a few tense meetings about it at Gubbins board level. One of the Gubbins board also sat on the Directgov board, although I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.

The migration of Gubbins

We turned the Gubbins web content into Directgov web content. It wasn't easy. Because of The Directgov Problem we couldn't trust our customers to navigate Directgov properly. So, we had to put everything on big pages. There are no anchor links to help people find anything. We had to make the most of it. Our service is now run from Directgov and our letters and publications were updated to send customers to direct.gov.uk/gubbins.

I work in the web team. We don't like it. As a rule of thumb, an update which took an hour now takes a day on Directgov. We can't make our own updates. We have to send everything to a Directgov editor in a word document.

We keep getting different Directgov editors to work with. When a new one starts, they don't know anything about Gubbins. They don't seem to know much about writing for the web either. When we send them something to update, they rewrite it. When we explain why we want something written a certain way, they argue. When we want a new page, they have to submit a form to the shadowy Publishing Board, who we've never met.

According to Government on the internet: progress in delivering information and services online By Great Britain: National Audit Office 2007, the UK is the only country who has tried to 'centralise content' across the public sector web. It's funny that no-one's run research to see if centralising content actually works.

Directgov gave us access to the Stellant CMS and Speedtrap analytics, but these are slow, old and tired. Chances are they haven't been replaced since 2006.

Moving to Directgov was supposed to save Gubbins money, but our costs have gone up. We have our own web infrastructure, so we haven't saved any money on hosting. We have the same number of writers and developers but they spend their time negotiating with people from Directgov.

We still run the same online services. Directgov the website doesn't really do anything. You can't book an appointment with it. To do that, you have to leave Directgov and move to gubbins.direct.gov.uk. We still run these screens but they're painted orange and have the Directgov logo painted on them.

Every time we build or fix something, we have to run it past the Directgov editors, the Directgov design team, the publishing board, and usually some other executive with a clever job title who we haven't heard of before.

'Why can't we get our website back?'

Dear me, if I had a penny for every time I was asked that.

Our directors still don't like it. One of them worked out the move cost us an extra £200K of avoidable phone calls. Half of the people who phone try finding the answer to their question on the website first.

Our call centers don't like Directgov either. They keep asking why we have to use it.

Our writers and marketing people don't like it. They keep writing 'we' when we have to say 'Gubbins'. We have a teeny Gubbins logo on our landing page of Directgov, rather than a website built by our own designers.

Our customers don't like it. When we show them a gubbins.co.uk prototype build by our own designers, they prefer it.

Our stakeholders don't like it. Even people who don't work on the web for a living know about things like local navigation, breadcrumbs and tabs. 

The product review in 2007 didn't come to anything. Or Project Austin, which came after that. Apparently everyone is excited about Betagov although Gubbins aren't so sure.

Directgov don't like Directgov

You'd think there was someone out there who liked Directgov. But Directgov the organisation don't like Directgov the website either.

You'd think there was someone out there who could say - we built Directgov. We've shown that it's improved the public sector web. The design is fit for purpose. It's as good as any website that was built by the private sector.

Such a person would be a web designer. But Directgov doesn't have any web designers. At least none that have ever visited Gubbins. It has plenty of publishing, PR and marketing people. In fact, that's all it seems to have. They outsource anything technical or anything which involves building websites.

In late 2010 Directgov paid Gubbins an actual visit. They didn't meet our web team, of course, just the board of directors. It was about the time Jayne Nickalls and the top brass all resigned or retired.

They admitted Directgov wasn't very good, just as they had in 2007. However it was 'not Directgov's fault'. Plus we'd had the benefits of cross selling from the Directgov platform. And there was a radical new Directgov on its way called Alphagov.

Let's just hope it happens this time.