Where’s the centre of gravity for conversations about how we can and should be leveraging the digital revolution for the benefit of society through our public services? I think about the flurry of activity when James Plunkett kicked off a debate a few months ago⬈ about ‘local GDS’ or the more recent excitement caused by the publication of Richard Pope’s <a href=“https://anatomyofpublicservices.com/”>Platformland⬈. Going back a few years, Mark Thompson has tried to get conversations going with a number of different analogies, whether Lego⬈, Heart FM, or Tesco⬈.
But these discussions are never sustained, and they never seem to make it past conversations and into ‘test and learn’ (to quote Philippa Newis⬈!) to identify which of these ideas might work better than others.
It feels like an institutional gap that an ‘Institute for Digital Public Services’ would fill. A home for the discussions. A place for convening and curating of ideas and practice. A way to consider the full breadth of public service, from central government to local government, with health and blue light services and everything else in-between.
Most importantly a place where the concepts and the theories can be prototyped, experimented with, and new things learned, with practice being developed and adopted along the way – turning ideas into reality.
Really love this reflection Dave. When you’re ready to staff it please give me a shout! Four reactions of my own.
Firstly, I do think the UK tends to have a bit of domestic myopia. The OECD would like to think it tries to offer some of this (certainly, I’d like to hope that some of my several years’ work wasn’t wasted). It’s far from perfect (https://bm.wel.by/2024/07/11/can-labour-unlock-the-value-of-the-oecd/) but I think its value is massively overlooked. And it’s not the only international actor that tries to convene and curate ideas and practice but whether UNDESA, World Bank, EU, Lisbon Council, etc what they have to say is very rarely penetrating UK conversations.
But that is a comment which extends only to the theoretical and intellectual aspects of what you’re speaking to and they don’t have the institutional heft to influence the UK. Not much of how those actors works is thought to speak into the practical application within the domestic context of a country as advanced and sorted out as ourselves that we’re are somehow above the insights of development banks and the like (hmm…).
Secondly (and inevitably) in the context of ‘local GDS’ I think of how the Korean government set up what I understand to be a research institute to think (and deliver against) the needs (specifically) of local government. While it’s not the sort of thing with the mandate to enforce anything it feels like the sort of structure that can balance the tension and be set up to equip and enable.
Thirdly I think in the domestic context this resonates with Gavin Freeguard’s pitch for a think tank with an explicit focus on digital and data things – https://gavin-freeguard.medium.com/a-new-thinktank-for-data-and-digital-in-government-4827b54b413b
Fourthly my return to the fray this week (https://bm.wel.by/2024/11/19/back-to-work/) reminded me about an old idea I pitched at the OECD for an ‘International Journal of Government Services’ styled along the lines of academic journals like Data & Policy (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/data-and-policy). But I think with a greater focus as a public facing vehicle for packaging up and publishing services related discussions and particularly user research (of different types, at different phases and from different contexts). Blog posts are good, public show and tells are amazing, and working in the open is important but I think there’s a lot to be said for the discipline of journal articles (and not just because of all the time I spent at the OECD writing along those lines).