Public sector staff access to cloud based productivity tools

Finding ways we can work together better across boundaries

Back in early December I posted a couple these tweets that restarted some old but still interesting conversations.

While certainly not a new topic it’s still one that doesn’t feel like anyone is actively working to resolve, many years after it was first identified as an issue.

Digital work in government can be broadly divided into two categories, both of which contribute to Tom Loosemore’s definition: “Digital: Applying the culture, practices, processes & technologies of the Internet-era to respond to people’s raised expectations.”

The first is the creation of high quality services for citizens to interact with government. GDS has been key to this via functions like spend control, the Digital Marketplace, the introduction of the Service Standard, platform components, the GOV.UK Design System and the large amount of high quality information in the Service Manual. In addition, a very large number of local and central government organisations have been creating excellent user centered services covering a huge range of user needs.

The second is enabling civil / public staff to transform their organisations to take advantage of the great increases in efficiency and collaboration enabled by 21st century technology enhanced ways of working.

This is a very hot topic in local and national government at the moment with much discussion around digital skills. Again GDS has been leading on this via the creation of the Digital Academy with impressive upskilling also being driven by many other organisations in government.

However, the core of this change is not zeitgeisty buzz-phrases like AI or machine learning, but instead is really about picking up new core skills around collaborative working enabled by cloud based tools.

Which leads us to the issue I started out with above. There’s an ever-increasing need for collaboration between civil / public servants across multiple organisations. Discussions on data sharing are becoming more frequent and GDS is doing sterling work on creating cross-organisational services by empowering service communities. In addition Local Gov Digital and MHCLG are working hard to bring together local government authorities to collaboratively build new digital services.

However, we’re still stuck in a situation where every time a group of people from different government organisations meet we struggle to find a single system, beyond email, where we can collaborate without using unofficial “shadow IT” systems. For many their access to the internet at work is significantly restricted in ways that are different in each government organisation.

The most commonly requests tools in those situations are:

• Video conferencing
• Document storage and real-time shared editing
• Wikis
• File storage (e.g. for images, video, etc)
• Lightweight project management tools

The problems for those of us those of us that would like to address this situation include:

• No clear agreed understanding of what online collaboration tools civil / public servants need to do their jobs
• Significant lack of clarity as to who in different public sector organisations is responsible for which internet sites are available to their colleagues
• No insight into the drivers and incentives of these decision makers
• Limited understanding of the difficulty in updating existing systems to enable access to cloud collaboration tools

My suggestions for a way forward are:

1. Undertake and publish user research with a wide range of civil / public servants to discover their needs in this area. Encourage active discussion on multiple platforms.
2. Use that research to define a number of “civil service personas” (possibly similar to the existing civil service profiles).
3. Begin collating a non-public list of people who have responsibility for internet filtering in various public sector organisations.
4. Undertake and publish user research with that group to discover their user needs, incentives and constraints.
5. Invite that group to a closed forum to discuss how the current situation can be improved. This would ideally be by creating an agreed cross-organisation “whitelist” of accessible internet sites.

Each of those steps is complex and will require time and, especially in the case of the user research, money. As a first step I would like to start putting together a group of cross-public-sector volunteers who would begin this process by starting to build the private list of those people responsible for internet filtering by finding out who that person is in their own organisation.

If you’d like to be involved in that group — please drop me a line to dave@bowsy.co.uk.