delivering digital by default public services in the uk

Delivering Digital by Default Public Services in the U.K.

Introduction

Nearly 15 years ago, the “Modernising Government” white paper heralded the dawn of the first e-Government era in the U.K. Electronic access to public services, a rarity in 1999 when that white paper was issued, is now more common-place. For example, the HMRC Digital Strategy published in December 2012 notes that the department processes some 813 million transactions digitally each year, repre-senting an 85 percent increase. Software AG has played a significant part in this success and that of other public sec-tor organisations that were pioneers in this field.

It is certain that the way in which digital services are delivered will continue to change to meet the demands of their users. This is, in part, driven by the advance of technology. For example, the increasingly ubiquitous nature of smartphones and tablets means that these are rapidly overtaking desk-bound computers as the first choice of the user of digitally en-abled services. One small example of this change in user behaviour can be drawn from the experience of the e-petitions team. In early March 2013, a tweet to the Government Digital Service suggested that 45 percent of e-petitions usage was from mobile devices and this percentage is steadily increasing.

However, changes in how we use technology are not the only or even the primary driver behind establishing a culture of Digital by Default service delivery. Instead, the driver of public sector organizations should be a business goal: ensuring digital services are so straightforward to use that people will prefer them.

The ability to deliver great digital services against a background of increasing user expecta-tions, evolving government policy and the critical need to ensure the delivery of effective yet value-for-money services will determine who the true digital leaders are because they will be able to deliver more for less.

table of contents

1 Introduction

2 Enabling Digital by Default

2 Digital by Default – Five Key Themes

4 Digital by Default Services - A Framework for Getting There

4 Events

5 Process

6 Operations

7 Information

7 Connect

8 The Business Goal – Digital by Default Services

busIness whIte paper

Matthew smithDirector of Business Solutions Software AG

tim holyoakePrincipal Business Architect Software AG

Get There Faster 1

enabling Digital by DefaultThe challenge to U.K. public sector organisations set by the government’s vision for digital ser-vices is simple enough to understand. Such services have to be delivered so straightforwardly that those who are able to use them will choose to do so, while those who are unable to use them are not excluded.

While the vision and business goal are clear, the way to get there is perhaps not quite so obvi-ous to some. It is likely to be the case that the data required to support the delivery of digital services is buried deep within enterprise software systems. It is also certain that the business processes your organisation used in a non-digital or first generation e-Government world are not fit-for purpose in the Digital by Default world. Because of this, perhaps you feel a little bit like the lost tourist who stopped in a small village and asked for directions to the nearest town, only to receive the advice that if you wanted to get there, you shouldn’t be starting from here.

This white paper is intended to help you on that journey by signposting you around the byways and dead ends that digital services programmes can run into. To help you deliver value for the money, it will help you understand how to make the most of your existing IT and enterprise software investments while ensuring that you can deliver services of such value and convenience to your users they will confidently select digital first.

Digital by Default – five Key themesthe service user is paramount The only way to design great digital services is from the user’s perspective. The best develop-ment methodologies for implementing your user experience are the ones that are capable of maximising user engagement and buy-in as your digital service is developed. Agile development methodologies are the most appropriate approach because of their focus on early-and-repeated user feedback. During development, you must consider how to increase the agility and respon-siveness of the business processes, information systems and data needed to support the user. This is a significant challenge and, if it is not addressed early on, it can seriously impede progress towards the implementation of your digital strategy.

open standards are centre stageDesigning your digital services based on open standards is essential. The use of open standards to facilitate the creation of digital services allows public sector organisations to separate the ele-ments of each service that are bespoke, from the elements that can be delivered by commodity services—for example, those provided through the G-Cloud. Designing digital services using open standards will enable the public sector to dramatically reduce its dependence on large systems integrators and provide a more competitive and level playing field for Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) as well as providing a better platform for innovative ideas developed in-house.

Open standards are essential when considering how to cope with the pace of change in the devices available to your users. A decade ago, it may have been reasonable to assume that the vast majority of users were going to be accessing your service from a Microsoft® Windows® PC using the Internet Explorer® Web browser and to design accordingly. Such an assumption is no longer reasonable. The only defence against evolution and revolution in user devices is to design your digital service in a manner that facilitates such changes.

It is also important to understand that open standards are not the same as open source. Com-mercial Off The Shelf (COTS) tools and products are as capable of facilitating the creation of truly open digital services. You should evaluate using open-source software or COTS based on fitness for purpose, the skills of your organisation, and operational and life-cycle solution costs. Using a best-fit approach will typically lead to solutions with a mix of COTS and open source that organ-isations will need to align in order to construct a robust and scalable digital service.

Business White Paper | Delivering Digital by Default Public Services in the U.K.

The move to digital will revolutionise the effectiveness and efficiency of public sector services.

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business process transformation is an enabler, not a by-productOne consequence of the move to digital is the impact it has on the way organisations deliver. Well-designed digital services are capable of both improving organisational effectiveness—by providing information, interactivity and transactions, on demand, when the user needs the service—and organisational efficiency by reducing the costs of service provision. For example, a SOCITM survey of 120 local authorities conducted in 2012 concluded the average cost per digital visitor to a service was £0.15, compared to £2.83 by telephone and £8.62 using a face-to-face channel. Interestingly, a similar benchmarking exercise carried out by SOCITM three years earlier concluded that the average cost per visitor was £0.32, £2.90 and £7.40 respectively. Unsurpris-ingly perhaps, the cost of providing digital services continues to decline as the technologies available to support their delivery mature and more people choose to use them, while the costs associated with the provision of face-to-face services continues to increase.

This makes it clear the move to digital can revolutionise both the effectiveness and efficiency of public sector services. However, there is a real danger that these gains can be limited or even negated if the opportunity to improve the way end-to-end service delivery processes operate is not taken. Without considering how digital services can be used as a catalyst for transforma-tion, channel proliferation rather than channel shift tends to happen. Effort is then wasted in performing checks and executing business rules in the back office that are no longer relevant and opportunities for simplification are missed.

Integrating enterprise systems provides tangible benefitsFor digital services to be successful, the complexity of your enterprise systems landscape needs to be invisible to the user, yet the effective exploitation of the information held within it is essen-tial. Significant benefits to digital service users come from being able to retrieve data previously provided. Tangible benefits include the ability to use previously submitted data to help a user con-struct a new return or claim more quickly and more accurately. The intangible benefits of improved transparency and the greater trust in public services such visibility promotes are equally important.

While it may be tempting to expose Application Program Interfaces (APIs) directly from your en-terprise systems to the digital services channel, it is rarely the right approach. Considerations of data security, systems availability, capacity, exception handling and the need to use data combined from several sources to deliver an end-to-end digital service suggest that a more robust architecture is necessary.

accurate and timely Management Information is essential Well-managed organisations have always used management information to make strategic decisions about the future shape of their services as well as to detect and resolve operational problems and inefficiencies. In the pre-digital world, periodically running Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processes to move raw data into business intelligence tools was often suf-ficient. However, this kind of approach suffers from the significant latency introduced between the data relating to the service being collected and it being transformed into actionable infor-mation. While delays of hours or days in responding to and resolving operational issues may have been the norm for face-to-face or paper-based service delivery channels, user expecta-tions in a digital world are different. The reputational damage caused by a short, mid-week, evening outage of RBS systems in early March 2013 dramatically illustrates this pressure.

The challenge is then to supplement or replace the slow and cumbersome “business intel-ligence” approach to the generation of management information with one founded on process intelligence, which enables real-time in-flight process information associated with digital service delivery to be more accessible and comprehensible.

Get There Faster 3

Digital by Default services - a framework for Getting thereFortunately, while the challenges of delivering services to Digital by Default standards may seem overwhelming, how to think through what needs to be done and how to act on your conclusions is well understood. The steps you need to take are identical to those required by any other busi-ness challenge that requires IT capabilities to be aligned to the delivery of a business goal.


Using this “diamond” model can assist in the creation of your digital services roadmap.

eventsTo design an effective digital service, understanding when and where service request events are likely to occur and how they are most likely to be accessed should be your starting point. For example, at the time of writing it is far more likely that formal tax filing services will be ac-cessed from a desktop environment (using a Web browser to access forms or from third-party software packages). It is also usually the case that filing is left until the “last minute,” resulting in considerable pressures on technical infrastructures. Other digital services, for example, the ability to sign petitions online, have far less predictable workload peaks and are much more likely to be accessed from a mobile device because of the impact of social media.

Your user interfaces and surrounding content need to be designed around the events that will lead users to access your service. Getting these aspects right will have the consequence of your users choosing to interact with you digitally. For example, the eChannels solution delivered by Software AG for the Rural Payments Agency attracts a 98 percent approval rating from its farmer users with 96 percent of those users actively encouraging others to use the service. The consequence of this digital increase is that the associated software and hardware infrastructure must be of appropriate scale and responsiveness.

Software AG can help provide connectivity between users and their data. However, first, you should examine your processes. Because, in order for users to prefer digital, they’ll need to be confident that the business processes at the heart of your services are truly designed around their needs. Software AG can help you with this as well.

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processSince processes are your business, every digital service you provide will need to be connected to your end-to-end processes. Processes need to add value to the user and the service delivery organisation so their role is to transform inputs (for example, a tax return or a benefit claim) into outputs (for example, a bill, refund or payment).

Visualising the processes involved in digital service delivery as a transformation (and also each step in the process as a transformation) is the best way to focus your design on what is impor-tant in delivering value. You need to be able to model these transformations and understand the required resources and the controls that need to be in place to ensure that the service is delivered to expectations, every time.

Removing the mystique associated with digital in this way means that designing a digital service then becomes exactly the same as any other business design activity. You need to be clear about the users you’re designing the service for, what they are going to use it for and, most importantly of all, the benefit to your users and your organisation that you’re expect-ing to gain. The danger of moving straight to developing a digital service without this level of analysis means that effort, money and time are wasted on inappropriate activities that could be better spent (or not spent) elsewhere. However, it is equally important not to succumb to “paralysis by analysis.” By modeling the process well and using tools that permit re-use and easy sharing between stakeholders you will be able to re-visit it as part of a continuous improvement programme.

The importance of being able to model and manage change, and to reflect these changes in the way your digital service is delivered, is essential if you are going to get the best from your investments. For example, the biometrics exchange infrastructure delivered for the U.K. Border Agency by Software AG since 2006 has always had to be responsive to radical organisational changes (from UKVisas to UKBA to the restructuring announced in March 2013). Policy changes also have an impact—for example, the introduction of points-based visas and subsequent changes in the qualification rules.


Process as Transformation

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operationsOnce a digital service has been developed and launched, the live service (operational) environ-ment is where the crossover between business requirements and IT is most keenly felt.

At a business level, while it may be possible to delegate away the complexity of service de-velopment through the provision of APIs, it is never possible for a public sector organisation to delegate away responsibility for the smooth and secure running of the service.

Effective service management requires measurement. To manage a digital service effectively, it must be measured regularly, diligently and comprehensively. Such measures will help you to understand opportunities for improvement by seeing where waste and loss are occurring. They will help you to know when a digital service encounters an exception or a delay and how to deal with it without causing inconvenience to the service users. Most importantly of all, an operational intelligence regime based on measuring the performance of your digital service against strategic key performance indicators in real-time will enable your organisation to align the connections between your digital strategy and IT operations to the benefit of your users.

InformationThe quality of the information that you have and can provide to your users in-context is funda-mental to effective digital service delivery. Without coherent data, users will make decisions based on incorrect information and lose trust in the service. The consequences of poor data quality could be a failure to deliver the service when and where it is needed or result in a waste of resources by delivering services where they are not required.

Ensuring that accurate information underpins digital services is challenging, as it has to be derived from data held in numerous business and technology silos that are present within and across all public sector organisations. These systems all have their own version of the truth, so digital services reconciliation between these viewpoints is required.

The use of master data management tools and techniques can be very effective in addressing these concerns. For example, in a research project for Army HQ Land Forces in 2012, the de-ployment of these capabilities were found to be central in eliminating several millions pounds of overspend on logistics and consumables.

Regardless of the quality of the data you use to support a digital service, it can only help your users if you are able to present it to them in a timely manner. This often requires the data to be delivered in fractions of a second rather than the hours or days that are more typical for non-digital service provision. Today, in-memory technologies can cache terabytes of relevant and disparate data sets close to the point of delivery thereby reducing response times of requests to sub-second.


To manage a digital service effectively it must be measured regularly, diligently and comprehensively.

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Information integrated from on-premise and cloud apps enables the process of digital service delivery.

connectWhile the user of your digital services does not understand or care about the complexity of your enterprise information systems, in a time of austerity it is essential that such assets are sweated and re-used. The best way to do this is by enabling these systems to be treated as first-class citizens in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technologies expose enterprise application logic as re-usable data services. Orchestrating these services with data held in other enterprise systems and mashing it with data provided by APIs exposed from popular cloud-based apps is then straightforward. By using information produced in this way to feed the needs of digital service users, your exist-ing enterprise software and IT investments become the key enablers for the agile develop-ment of digital services, rather than a blocker of innovation. For example, Software AG’s ESB is at the heart of HMRC’s eDelivery platform and plays a key role in reliably and securely deliver-ing hundreds of millions of transactions through their digital channels, resulting in savings of tens of millions of pounds every year.


But perhaps the most important recent development in Software AG’s market-leading ESB in the context of digital services is that it is now the first with integral in-memory processing, support-ing the rapid delivery and manipulation of hundreds of terabytes of data. It is this capability that ensures rapid response times to user requests even when the precise piece of information may be buried deep within enterprise IT systems, stored on the cloud or required on the move from the latest mobile device.

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Get there faster

Find out how to power up your Digital Enterprise at softwareaG.com

about software aGSoftware AG helps organizations achieve their business objectives faster. The company’s big data, integration and business process technologies enable customers to drive operational efficiency, modernize their systems and optimize processes for smarter deci-sions and better service. Building on over 40 years of customer-centric innovation, the company is among the top 10 fastest-growing technology companies in the world and is ranked as a leader in 15 market categories, fueled by core product families Adabas and Natural, ARIS, Terracotta and webMethods. Learn more at www.SoftwareAG.com.

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the business Goal – Digital by Default servicesKeeping the business and IT parts of the diamond aligned is the key to delivering value-for-mon-ey digital services. Every organisation will have some capability against each of the points but achieving success will be determined by the level of your integration and cohesion across them.

Software AG can help you achieve this faster and more cost effectively through its blueprint for delivering digital services. Our solution is based on a standards based, integrated and comple-mentary capability set that includes:

•ARIS Business Process Platform

•webMethods Integration Platform

•Terracotta Big Data Platform

•The knowledge and proven experience of our people

Each of these capability areas makes full use of your existing IT estate and the promise of lower costs through the use of commoditised cloud infrastructure.

We look forward to engaging with you on your journey in delivering public services fit for the Digital by Default world. To get started, contact your Software AG representative today.


delivering digital by default public services in the uk

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