The Transforming Government Services team mission (at the Central Digital and Data Office) is to share good practice in digital and data across the public sector.
CDDO is responsible for the Service Standard and the Service Manual, and in our previous blog post we talked about the need to update them. The main focus of our guidance and assurance processes is transactional services. However, many parts of government are thinking (and delivering) beyond that.
Why we’ve been working on a service definition
As we explain in a recent blog post, we want to expand our guidance to include more information about services that are not narrow, simple and transactional. The Top 75 Services programme champions services that take ownership of the users’ experience across their full, end-to-end journey and all of the organisation’s activities that support it. For example not just the process of applying for a new passport, but all the checks that happen behind the scenes, the producing of documents, and the sending and receiving of them too.
Getting the scope of your service right is very important as it affects:
- the way that users experience them
- the way that they are measured
- the way that they are assessed and assured
- the strategy for delivering and improving them
There have been successful attempts to define a service and there’s usually a close relationship between the definition of a service and its scope. However, we’ve learned that scope does not itself define a service. It’s all about understanding the outcome that you want to deliver. A broader or narrower scope says more about the organisation’s ambitions.
So now we feel it’s time to introduce an official definition of a service for the specific purpose of focussing on outcomes, and tying all of the different types and scopes of services together.
How this definition is helping teams across the Government Digital and Data profession
We have been using this draft definition for a while and have found that it’s helping organisations across government in the following ways:
- aligning service teams and service assessment panels around the scope of transactional services and the scope of whole problems, during a service assessment
- scoping the Top 75 services to measure their performance
- helping organisations scope services ahead of delivery
- providing a structure to support organisations with their service transformation strategies
We’ve had feedback on this definition from hundreds of colleagues across the public sector.
How the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has been using the definition to shape their transformation strategy
“In Defra group we have been trialling the service definition as we implement our Digital and Data Transformation Strategy.
The Defra group includes a collection of government agencies and departments, working closely with different partners, industries and communities, all across the country. We have a wide range of policies and a diverse family of organisations with delivery accountabilities.
Our Digital and Data Transformation Strategy is similarly ambitious in scope and scale. So we needed a way of deciding where to start, as well as deciding what to prioritise.
Defining our priority services is helping us do that.
In the Environment Agency and Natural England we are working to review what we know about the organisations’ services today, and which existing or new services are priorities for us all. The outcomes we need our services to deliver include, for example, clean and plentiful water, enhanced animal health and welfare, and plant health.
As a group of organisations with a strong scientific and operational focus, we are keen to deliver outcomes through more than a single, transactional, citizen facing service. For example, in areas such as flooding, multiple services contribute to outcomes like saving lives and protecting properties. Here, we deliver our policy intent through services that focus on flood forecasting, warning and awareness. These services are delivered to citizens, staff in our ministerial department and agencies, as well as external organisations.
The service definition has been a useful tool to help identify the parts of Defra group that need to come together to deliver our priority services, and provide clarity around which of our organisation’s activities are a priority for transformation.”
What a service is
When we talk about a service, we mean all the things that government collectively provides to deliver an outcome for all of its users, through any path a user takes to reach their goal.
What we mean by an outcome
An outcome is made up of 2 elements:
- something a user actually needs or a goal they want to achieve
- something government has to deliver, like a new policy
There are 3 levels of outcome that all contribute to these needs. Using ‘Apply for a driving licence’ as an example, these are:
- the outcome you deliver as part of a specific process or step in a journey, for example a user understanding that their driving licence application is being processed
- the wider outcome you deliver when you collaborate across organisational boundaries - for example, government is confident that a citizen has passed a test, is properly licenced and has the right documents
- the overall outcome government and users actually need, for example being able to legally and safely drive a car on the road
An overall service outcome is often part of an even wider user journey. For example, a user’s need to legally drive a car on the road could be the result of moving to an area where there is less public transport, or needing to transport a relative they care for.
A user journey could be triggered by someone’s change of circumstances or aspirations, a news story, a change in government policy or a government campaign.
When government delivers an outcome, a user usually gets something along the way that has a policy intent behind it. Examples of what a user gets could be:
- permission to do something - registering to vote
- money - through a benefits claim
- confirmation of a payment - when paying taxes
- an artefact of some kind - a driving licence
- information - checking for flood alerts
For government or ‘internal’ users, the examples could be:
- permission to do something - when applying for a training course
- money - through claiming expenses
- confirmation of a payment - when booking travel
- an artefact of some kind - a security pass
- information - checking a payslip
Some services deliver multiple different outcomes at different times.
What we mean by things that collectively provide an outcome
To deliver an outcome for users, a service usually includes a number of different things, including:
- user-facing and internal systems
- people and the tasks they carry out to run the service
- products and processes
- buildings and infrastructure
For users of a service this includes all the things they interact with, like:
- using search, navigation and guidance to understand what they need to do
- choosing the channel that’s best for them
- completing one or more digital or non-digital steps
- all the relevant checks, casework and processing after the transaction
- support if they ask for help or an update, or if they complain
- getting the right outcome
And to make sure the service works for everyone, it has to work across all channels such as:
- websites
- apps
- campaigns
- text
- post
- phone
- face-to-face
A service also includes all the technology and data that supports its operation from start to finish.
Usually it takes more than one part of government to deliver a whole service. On the way to getting an outcome, a user is likely to interact with things provided by several different organisations, functions and professions. For example:
- ministerial departments like the Ministry of Justice (MoJ)
- arm’s-length bodies like the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency (DVLA)
- the Government Digital and Data function
- the Operational Delivery profession
Next steps
We’ll be publishing the service definition as guidance in the Service Manual.
Let us know what you think
We’d love to hear your feedback.
You can:
- leave a comment below
- contact us on the #servicemanual channel on cross-government Slack
- Email CDDO Services team
2 comments
Comment by Robin Hayden posted on
Having participated in the discussions on some of the previous definitions of a service, it's good to at last see a definition that includes "the overall outcome government and users actually need".
There is one thing I think's missing. Whilst it may be the case that "Usually it takes more than one part of government to deliver a whole service", in many cases it also needs not just parts of government but private sector too. For example any service that includes part of government making payments will include a private sector organisation, a bank, to deliver the overall outcome users actually need of receiving the payment.
Comment by Nick Tegg posted on
Having got the definition perhaps now is the time to apply it across government so that services and their outcomes are described in a common format. Can this definition be applied by DSIT/GDS to the One Login service? Then we can all have clarity on what the purpose, scope and outcomes are of the service. That will enable a debate on potential non- governmental outcomes desired by a single identity ecosystem. Such as governed under DIATF, capable of use with non-HMG relying parties, interoperable with commercial wallets and subject to agreed identityassurance principles.