£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? 

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.

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.