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Kick starting collaboration in Local Government



Producing digital services should be an iterative process, as documented in the Government Service Design Manual. People's expectations of digital services are constantly evolving and Local Government is not immune to this. Ongoing change in what Local Government does also affects what needs to be offered online.

Factors like newer and different types of device, improved connection speed and improved availability of connection are altering what people expect they can do digitally and where they can do it. The flip-side to this change is what can be done online is always expanding and many councils have a channel shift programme to exploit the potential savings of using digital services to a greater extent.

If you're not developing and continuing to improve a digital service with the customer in mind you're probably not meeting their expectation fully nor are you getting the full benefit of channel shift. This is where something like a council "Appstarter" could come in.

So let's say I'm looking to create new digital service and I have a limited development resource with which to create it. I'd go to Appstarter, write a brief description of what I wanted and break the work down into chunks. The author could specify which resources they had and what they needed. A extremely basic version of this could look like:

Digital service for residents to report missed bin collections.

Have: C# development.
Need: Database development, Graphic design, Web design , UX design.

Those interested in collaborating to produce something could then pledge their skills and time to fulfil one of the roles in creating and continuing to improve the service. Yes, this would make the project more complex than buying something off-the-shelf, but it wouldn't need project managers for each participating authority, as each council buying and implementing (or developing) their own system most likely would.

There are more possibilities if the proposed solution has a budget. Appstarter could be open to SMEs who don't have all the skills but could work on some aspects of the creation and iterative improvement. It could be that the entire solution is supplied by SMEs, facilitated through Appstarter.

Obviously there would need to be some sort of qualification criteria for SMEs, but this would be a one off task and sharing out work amongst a number of different smaller suppliers eliminates the risk of having a single point of failure.

There will be situations when this approach might not be appropriate, Problems to resolve with it will be identified, but Appstarter might save money on procurement, enable collaboration and save work, provide a better service to customers which in turn could save money through more channel shift.


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