3: Designing and delivering public services
Chapter Contents
Estimated read time: 2 minutes
When OECD Digital Government Reviews reflect on service design and delivery they do so using in-country interviews, organisational surveys, peer insights, the OECD Framework for Service Design and Delivery, the OECD Good Practice Principles for Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age, and the comparative data drawn from the relevant parts of the OECD Digital Government Index. That Framework analyses the three pillars of 1) context, 2) philosophy and 3) enabling ecosystem that inform the ability of countries to design and deliver services.
The UK’s ambitions for proactive public service design and delivery are commendable, but there’s still a considerable journey ahead to fully realise these goals. While aiming for at least 50 of the government’s top 75 identified services to reach a “great” standard by 2025 is a step in the right direction, there is a need to delve deeper. It’s not just about ticking boxes or meeting targets; it’s about fundamentally transforming how to design and deliver services that truly meet the needs of citizens. That demands an approach to the missions of government that works out from all the opportunities of putting these ideas into practice for all civil servants, not limiting them solely to the practice of technologists.
As with other parts of this review I am not drawing on the extensive interviews, surveys and comparative data which the OECD team would access in conducting a similar exercise. As a result, some of these opinions might be better informed than others but all of them are my own, and my own only, so where I am drawing the wrong conclusion or making the wrong point I look forward to being corrected. Some of that might be subjectively wrong, some of it objectively so – in either event please educate me, and in particular share excellent examples where existing strategy, practice and impact are demonstrably having a fantastic impact that I am unaware of and have overlooked.