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We invited experts from GDS and the ONS to explain the importance of data standards as part of the Data Standards Authority launch. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Alison Pritchard: Hello and welcome to this month's episode of the Government Digital Service Podcast. I'm Alison Pritchard, the Director General at GDS - before taking up appointment at the ONS [Office for National Statistics] as its Deputy National Statistician and Director General for Data Capability.    So I'm delighted that, although I'm moving, I'll still be part of the wider digital and data transformation agenda through ONS’s digital and data services, and our work on data governance boards.    GDS is responsible for the digital transformation of government. As part of that, we’ve set a vision for digital government to be joined up, trusted and responsive to user needs. We're focussing on 5 pillars to get that done, one of which is data - the focus of this podcast.    Government holds considerable volumes of data in a myriad of places. But often this data is inconsistent, incomplete or just unusable. If the government is going to realise the benefits data can bring, we'll need to fix the foundations. And one way of doing this is by focussing on data standards.    GDS is leading a new authority, the Data Standards Authority (DSA), that focuses on making data shareable and accessible across government services. The metadata standards and guidance we published in August were our first deliverable. They cover what information should be recorded when sharing data across government - for example in spreadsheets - to assure it's standardised and easy to use. It's a step in quality assuring how government data is shared. Our focus on standards is one part of the bigger picture around better managing data to assure better policy outcomes and deliver more joined-up services to citizens.    That's all from me. I'll now hand over to Vanessa Schneider, the podcast host, who will be speaking to technical leads from GDS and ONS about how we take this work forward. Enjoy the discussion.    Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you Alison. As Alison said, I’m Vanessa Schneider, Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS and your host today. Joining me are Rosalie Marshall and Tomas Sanchez. Rosalie, let's start with you. Can you please introduce yourself and what you do?   Rosalie Marshall: I'm Rosalie. I'm the Technical Lead for the Government Data Standards Authority. That involves a lot of recruitment, looking and getting work streams off the ground relating to data standards, and just looking at the data standards landscape in detail.   Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you, Rosalie. Tomas, could you please introduce yourself?    Tomas Sanchez: Yes. So I'm Tomas. I'm the Chief Data Architect for ONS [Office for National Statistics]. And I'm responsible for a bunch of things related to data architecture and data management. So one of those things is the ONS Data Strategy. And amongst the various things that my division in ONS does is best practices around data.    One of the things that we work on is data standardisation. So apart from that, I'm also quite keen, and responsible to talking to various departments across government about all the things that we do with the aim of, you know, being on the same page of best practises and so on. And this is how we got in touch with the Data Standards Authority and other streams in central government.   Vanessa Schneider:  You mentioned that your area covers data standards in government. What does that entail?   Tomas Sanchez: So basically, the whole point of standardisation is to make sure that everybody uses the same things, particularly related to data. And it is, it is good that ONS is trying to do this. But we cannot do this by ourselves. Doing this in a coordinated way through, sort of, central authority like the DSA is very helpful.    While ONS has its own standards, to do what we need to do in ONS, there is, we need to agree amongst the different departments of what it is that we are trying to standardise, and the scoping of this and what things we’re doing first and we are doing second and so on is part of what the DSA is about.   Vanessa Schneider: Rosalie, so you work as part of the DSA. How do you work together with Tomas on this issue?   Rosalie Marshall: So, yes. So this is a joint actually endeavour between the Government Digital Service and ONS. So we're actually partnering up on the Data Standards Authority. So while we are at the central point in GDS, we are working very closely with ONS and actually a number of our team members will sit within ONS.    The good thing about being virtual is that we've really been able to work very tightly together and department lines haven't played much of a part.   Vanessa Schneider: So, as Rosalie mentioned, the Data Standards Authority is very new. Would you mind sharing with the listeners how it came about? What kicked it all off?    Rosalie Marshall:  So the Data Standards Authority was kicked off about roughly at what was probably just over a year ago now in terms of idea. So that was done by DCMS, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports, who at that point looked after data policy for government and they worked with a number of departments on this bid, including, it was mainly actually GDS and ONS. So we've been working together now for a while on what this should look like. And since March, it's become a reality.   Tomas Sanchez So when I joined ONS in 2017, apart from looking internally at the office to see what we should do internally for better practices in terms of data management, we also thought that it was very important to look across government and see what other people are doing so we can learn from others and hopefully maybe others can learn from us eventually.    One of the things that we did is setting up the Cross-government Data Architecture Community, which was just a community of practitioners around data architecture and data management, which of course included data standardisation, amongst other things. Apart from this community, we also got involved in a number of forums in central government, looking at data and data usage and data infrastructure and other things, such as, for example, the Data Leaders Network. And it was within these conversations within central government that we got in touch with DCMS and GDS, who were also thinking about how to work on data foundations and data infrastructure for government to enhance data sharing, data interoperability, and just how to use data better in government.    And it was that way that the idea of creating a central authority in charge of fixing one of the fundamental problems of data, which data standardisation tends to be. So as Rosalie mentioned, we worked quite a long time with them for various reasons. Listeners might remember that there was supposed to be a spending review in 2019, which never happened. So that gave us a lot of time to think about how to go, how to, how to do this. And eventually we did put a bid for the budget this year, earlier this year.    And then that's how the Data Standards Authority got funded and the rest is history obviously.   Vanessa Schneider:  So looking to the future of the DSA, what are your immediate next goals? I know that you've put out pieces of guidance, for instance.   Rosalie Marshall: So the big ones are, we've got an API catalogue that is trying to, it's not a workstream that is actually setting a standard in data, but it's helping us with our journey on standards because we need transparency of where data exchange is taking place.    I think it's important that we mention that, you know, we are looking at data flow as a priority. There's a lot that you can do within departments in terms of governance. But really, we're looking at that boundary and the data exchange that is happening between departments and how we can improve that.   So as a first off, you know, we are getting the API catalogue into a service or product that is really worthwhile for departments to use. We want to make sure that there's a lot more uptake of that catalogue on there to increase transparency of development taking place, but also so we can understand the standards that are being used by APIs. So that's one workstream.   So one of the big work streams that we got off the ground is relating to metadata standards. And that was a very entry level piece of, very entry level standard, in some ways. We're recommending that we follow schema.org and Dublin Core and also csv on the web. So that's a recommendation that we are now working with departments further along on their metadata journeys. We got a workshop coming up on the 2nd October that we'd like as many people to join as possible to understand where everyone's at.   We're also looking at standards in relation to file formats and doing some work there. And then I think there's 2 areas which probably Tomas is best placed to talk about and that’s around what we're thinking about at least. So it's it's probably too early days, but at least we can share some of the thinking that we're doing around some of the identifiers and also data types as well.   Tomas Sanchez: So Rosalie, mentioned about identifiers, I think the overall concept is that something that we call reference data that people might know with different names, like master data or code list or typologies etc. So there are multiple names of, for those.   But essentially the idea from this is that there are lists of items or entities that people refer to all the time. So we think there are datasets, for example, many datasets contain address information. So the idea is, so there is only one valid list of all the addresses in the country. So if we will have a reference set of addresses that everybody can refer to, then it will be easier to link datasets amongst themselves that are talking about those addresses, right?   And you can make the same case for other types of things, like the standard classifications or lists of businesses or things like that, which government departments refer to all the time to do their work, but that there is not one version of the truth for the whole government just because we didn't get to do that yet together.    And I think that is basically the foundations of making sure that we can link data sets across government more easily. And of course, part of that as Rosalie was mentioning is that you need to have a unique identifier for each one of these addresses or these entities. Right. So this is definitely something that we need to look at as part of the standardising data, but reference data as a whole is, as I said, a key piece of the puzzle to standardise data across government.   The other thing that Rosalie mentioned there is data types. So obviously if we are sharing data across departments, which is of a specific type, for example, a date. So if we maintain different standards for dates, so we record the data for different ways for dates, then when we get data from other departments, then we have to transform that into a format that we can use internally. And that transformation, maybe dates doesn't sound very complex, but you have to do this for more complex data - types of data. Then it becomes quite time consuming.    So if we get to manage to standardise data types and then departments are able to adopt this. Again, we are not only helping them on their work, they have to do for themselves so they don't have to think about what to use. So we provide guidance of what data type standards they can use. But also when we get to share data, then we already have the same format that we are using internally. So it's much easier to process.   Vanessa Schneider:  The term metadata has cropped a few times now. Can you explain what kind of data that is please?   Tomas Sanchez:  So when people ask me, what metadata is, I always think about, you know, everybody knows libraries. People have used libraries. You go to the library, you have a lot of books in a lot of shelves, and you have to find the book that you are looking for. So the books themselves are the content, are the data. Right. But we need to find a way of finding things efficiently. If we had every book indexed in a different way and we stored different type of information for each book, it would be very difficult to do it.   But as we all have been in libraries, we know that you have a catalogue where you go and then you have the title of the book and the author of the book you can search for either you can search for date or you can search for other thing. So that information that we are storing about the book, which is the content, that's what is metadata, so it’s information about the data itself. Right. So. So all the data centre are not books is exactly the same thing. We have to find a consistent way of describing the data so that we can catalogue it better.   Vanessa Schneider:  Rosalie, would you mind explaining to the listeners what an API is? I hear that's a challenging question.    Rosalie Marshall:  It is a challenging question just because everyone has a different answer. So an API is just another one of our lovely acronyms that we have in government. It stands for application programming interface, so, and that kinda tells you what it is, it’s the interface for your application. APIs come up in talking about data exchange.    The way I guess you can kind of start to understand it, I think I started to understand it when someone talked to me about an API being like a restaurant menu. It tells you what’s on, what you can have, from an application. So, you know, if your, an API will talk about all the different features within an application that you need to be aware of in order to interact with that.    Vanessa Schneider:I understand that you're also expecting to set standards for memorandums of understandings, also known as MoUs. Can you please explain a bit more about what that means?    Rosalie Marshall: So in terms of the MoUs, so they are, you know, those and data-sharing agreements are formed within the public sector when data exchange is being passed from one entity to another. And the difficulty with the landscape at the moment is that the MoUs and data-sharing agreements take lots of different forms, cover lots of different areas.    And it's quite a big undertaking when forming these because legal teams often need to be involved. And there's obviously a lot to think about when we're working on a data-sharing agreement.   So it's just really bringing standards to this area so that we can improve efficiency in data-sharing and make it easier for those who want to consume data, particularly on local authorities I think. You know there’s, local authorities are not a big API developers at the moment, but they consume a huge amount of government data from all, all over government and loads of departments. So for them, it's a big undertaking when it comes to MoUs. So actually kind of simplifying the process and all, all conforming to a certain standard and template is a good way forward. So that's something that we're starting to look at.   Vanessa Schneider:  So, you've touched on a couple of topics, such as the identifiers and transparency, and it seems like ethics are quite an important component of that. I know that in 2018 there was a Data Ethics Framework that was published.    Rosalie Marshall:  The Data Ethics Framework is not a piece that’s happening in the Data Standards Authority. But it's obviously something that we need to be aware of and tapped into.   We are updating a number of different pieces of guidance, for example, at the moment, we're redrafting Point 10 of the Technology Code of Practice, which relates to data. And, you know, we're also updating the government API standards. And so we're working on new guidance and standards as part of the DSA.    And obviously something that we need to be aware of when doing that is the Data Ethics Framework, which is a framework that sets out principles for how data should be shared in the public sector and really builds on the Civil Service Code in some ways, so it builds on the idea of managing data with integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. So it's just, I mean, there's probably other people who can give you better summaries. But, yeah, it's important to be aware of when writing any guidance on data.   Vanessa Schneider: I was just wondering, Rosalie, if you knew of a success that government has had where we've started standardising data.    Rosalie Marshall: Yes. So there are a number of different successes that we could point to. I mean, there's I think, the API standards were one area that has been very successful in terms of setting central government standards and having other departments follow them. So the API standards were launched in 2018 and have been iterated with the API and data exchange community. But we know that a lot of departments are following these standards and are building their API strategies around them.    The reason why it's important to follow the API standards are for consistency in terms of API development, but also in terms of better data flow because of following the data standards that exist. You know, we refer to the ISO date standard, for example, in the API standards.    It also ensures that APIs are developed securely, that transfer can happen in the right way. And that versioning again, is clear. So, as I said, there are benefits.   There's also benefits in terms of findability for following these standards, in terms of people moving around development teams and having the right skills, knowing what skills you need for API development.    So that's one example of where we've been successful in setting government standards relating to data centrally.    There's also examples of government using data where it's a positive experience. And I think that's really around moving to the delivery of whole services. So rather than a citizen having to interact with one department for a particular service, they can just think about interacting with the service and you know, the numbers of departments that help support that service isn't something they need to know about.    So, for example, one of the services that has been on the transformation towards being a whole service is that of the Blue Badge scheme, which is managed by the Department for Transport [DfT] and is a scheme that gives those with disabilities access to restricted parking areas.    So, you know, previously local authorities had to kind of manage the eligibility for this scheme. And, you know, they would have many applications, some that wouldn't be successful. I think they received kind of, around 2,500 applications a month that they had to deal with. But, and then there were obviously lots of different data exchanges that happened with the Department for Transport and local councils, before a Blue Badge could be given to the applicant.   But now a Blue Badge user goes to GOV.UK to have their eligibility confirmed. And then an API seamlessly links the customer back to the local council’s case management system for the application process. Once approved, another API links back to the central system, to store the record, and then at this point, the Blue Badge is produced and sent to the customer centrally by DfT. So it's a lot of a smoother system.    And I guess what's next is integration through APIs with some of the other departments that are involved in Blue Badges like DWP [Department for Work and Pensions], which has to produce the letter of eligibility. A citizen needs that to upload onto GOV.UK and like the Passport Office, where you need to provide a picture of you and proof of your identity. So, you know, there's still a way to go on a service like that, but it shows the direction in which, you know, where government services are heading.    Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you, Rosalie. Tomas, I was wondering what kind of challenges do you foresee in establishing data standards across government? I assume with the ONS you interface with a lot of departments providing data. Do you have any idea?   Tomas Sanchez:  So indeed, we do interface with a lot of departments. Obviously doing this at ONS’s scale, and doing this at a government scale is quite a different thing.   But I think definitely the area that's probably going to be a challenge is the governance in the sense that we put guidelines of how people, how other departments can approach standardisation, but making sure that people actually or departments actually follow the system, that is is, it is a different thing. Right?   So obviously, how to approach this is a delicate thing. Obviously, departments want to continue doing their job without having interference in terms of how they have to do their job.    But we in central government believe that doing this, following certain standards is in the end more beneficial for the government as a whole. And we need to try to put something in there to make sure that these guidelines are adopted. So how exactly to do that? How to incentivise departments to actually do this? I think it's going to be quite a tough challenge.    Vanessa Schneider:  Would that kind of enforcement lie with the DSA or is it something that can be incentivised in another way do you think?   Tomas Sanchez: I wouldn't like to call it enforcement, incentivising is, is a better word. I think there are different ways of doing it. You think about GDS is already doing this with the IT and digital in different ways. Probably the best way of approaching it is using the existing mechanisms and include the data standardisation within those. So hopefully we can exist, we can reuse existing things without having to add new layers of complexity to how certain things are incentivised.    Vanessa Schneider:  I can tell that you're both very passionate about data and making sure that government has usable data and is able to share data with each other to make it services better for citizens. I was wondering, where does that come from?   Rosalie Marshall: Personally, like, you know, you'd have lots of circumstances in your life. And I guess some people have more interactions with the state than others. You know, depending on your health, you know, whether you have kids.   And I guess, like, I've probably had a fair amount. So it comes from just understanding that frustration of another organisation having data about me that might not be accurate or that, or them not having it at all. And I'm wondering why that is. You know, I've had 2 kids on the NHS system. It was frustrating to me, for example, that the hospital didn't have any of the records that I’d had my first child with. And there was no way to get those records. So I then started creating my own records and holding all the data myself.    And there's so many examples that I've gone through. And I'm sure you know, there's so many people in this boat and it's just wanting to fix things and wanting to make data work for the end user.    But also, as a civil servant, I see silos and it's sometimes frustrating when you realise that, you know, through no fault of an individual, because this is just as we know, this is the system that needs improving, it's not one organisation or individual. We just need to fix this. So, so if we can create standards that everyone can use and that's why we're focusing on international, on open standards, because those are the ones that can cross boundaries and that, you know, it's not just going to be working in one department, but it will help join up both central and local and the wider public sector.    Vanessa Schneider:  Thank you. Tomas, is there maybe a service that you hope you are able to change through the standardisation of data?   Tomas Sanchez:  So I think data is such at the core of everything that not only government, but every organisation in this country does, that having a right way of standardising the data and making the data clear so everybody can understand it better will basically, virtually benefit, not just the organisations themselves that are doing the services, but also the users of those services.   And if we think about government and we see government as an organisation which provides services to the users based on data that actually government collects from the users themselves. Then you need to have some opportunity to enhance that service. And that's exactly what we want to do.   Vanessa Schneider:  Rosalie, any thoughts?    Rosalie Marshall: I think, you know, yeah, I would agree with Tomas. I think there’s a lot of priority areas that that need improvement, for example, social care. You know, I talked about delivering whole services for users and things like the Blue Badge scheme, which is, which I see as very important.    But there's also, you know, bringing, you know, the social care, those departments that are involved there and allowing them to share data to help those who are vulnerable. There's also a lot, you know, in terms of the environment where, you know, sharing data between the energy sector and you know Ofgem and some of the big energy companies, there's a huge amount there that we could do with improved data standards as well.    So I think there's so many things that we can make better in public life with data if it's done right. And so, yeah, just I mean, I can’t pick one area really.    Vanessa Schneider:  That was unfair of me. I'll give you that. You mentioned it earlier, there was a way for listeners to get involved, if I'm not mistaken. Could you please remind us what that opportunity was?    Rosalie Marshall: There’s quite a lot of ways people can get in touch. There's a number of workshops that are coming up that we'd really like cross-government engagement on and attendance.    So we've got an API catalogue workshop for the API community. We also have a metadata workshop coming up on the 2nd October for those who are working in metadata and we're planning to blog a lot more about the work that we're doing. So we invite people to comment on those blogs and get in touch if they want to talk to us. We're also looking at having an open repo on GitHub to help share some of our work and invite feedback on that as well. So, yeah, we're hoping to make it really easy to contact us. And we do have an email address as well that people can write to, which is data-standards-authority@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk. So that’s also open to everyone to use.   Vanessa Schneider:  Thanks, Rosalie. It's not the easiest one to spell out, but we'll make sure to include it in our show notes.    I really appreciate you giving me your time so that we could record this episode. Thank you so much to all of our guests for coming on today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. The transcripts are available on Podbean.   Goodbye.    Tomas Sanchez:  Thank you, bye.    Rosalie Marshall Thanks so much for having us. Bye.  

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We take a deep-dive into GOV.UK Notify and hear from teams at Defra, the Canadian Digital Service and NHS Business Services Authority about how they use it. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Laura Stevens:  Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a Creative Content Producer at GDS. And like last month’s episode, this one will also be recorded via Hangouts as we’re all remote working now.    So today we’re going to be talking about GOV.UK Notify. This is the government’s messaging tool which allows teams across the public sector to send out text messages, letters and emails to their users - cheaply and easily.   It sent its first notification in May 2016, and this month GOV.UK Notify reached a milestone and has sent out one billion messages.    Notify gets critical information to people that need it. It’s used by local councils, health organisations, central government departments, fire services and many other public sector bodies. And it’s used for a diverse range of services including flood alerts, blue badge notifications, doctor appointment reminders and informing prison wardens of their rotas, to name a few.    So to tell me more is Pete Herlihy, so please could you introduce yourself, what you do here at GDS and your role on Notify.    Pete Herlihy:  Yes, I can Laura. So yeah, I’m Pete, I work on the Notify Team, I help them out. I’m a Product Manager. I’ve been at GDS since the beginning, I haven’t, I haven’t made parole just yet.   I’ve worked a lot on a number of platforms in GDS, so publishing platform, GOV.UK, register to vote, petitions and more recently, when I say more recently, my, my latest gig is on Notify, which we’ve been doing now for just over 4 years. And we started with literally 2 people and we’re now 11, and yeah my role on that is just to help and support that team to deliver what is GOV.UK Notify.   Laura Stevens And why was Notify set up 4 years ago?   Pete Herlihy:  Well there’s a story there. So Notify was one of the solutions that came out of something called the ‘Enabling Strategy’, which was a piece of work GDS did. The, the reality behind that piece of work was we needed to figure out as an organisation what we could do to help the rest of government do what they do.   And so there was a bunch of stuff going on, we looked at various different kind of common problems across government that we wanted to solve, and, and that was kind of where the whole Government as a Platform programme emerged during that time. And one of the problems we wanted to solve was keeping people informed. And we, we learned very quickly that we probably didn’t need a status tracking application, but what we needed was a notifications platform. And the reckon was, which we did soon validate very quickly, was that if we could kind of just tell people what we knew as soon as we knew it, we didn’t have to wait for them to get anxious enough to jump on a website and look and you know, sign in and see where the thing was at. So it might have saved, or it would have solved our problems with regards to you know the cost of running contact centres and all that avoidable contact, but it wouldn’t really have helped our citizens or end users as much. And so we, we fairly early on validated that and pivoted from a status tracking application to a notifications application.    Laura Stevens:  And can you talk about some of the service teams that use it, like who uses it and what do they use it for?     Pete Herlihy:  Well we have now, what’s the number, around 2 and a half thousand service teams now using it, which is a lot. I think - when we started, someone, there was an external consultancy that did a little bit of work for us and they thought there might be 80 services that would use it. And, we were like OK cool, that’s a good number to aim at. But, it’s a completely different profile actually from what we’ve envisaged.    We thought at the start they’ll be a bunch of really big services using it and that will be like where the bulk comes from and then we kind of quickly learned that there was a really really long tail of smaller service teams that, and many we didn’t recognise as being a service, necessarily when we started who are really going to get the most benefit out of it. So the big teams might save money, and they’ll get a better product but they probably would have done something anyway. Whereas the rest of them just maybe wouldn’t enter the space of digital comms in this way - so they benefit massively from Notify.    So the types of teams, you list, you ran through a bunch at the start there. So, we do have nearly as many service teams in local government using it, as we do in central government. And an increasing number in the NHS as well. Obviously events of this year have seen massive surges in uptake from all of those sectors.    For example of things we’re doing a bunch of messaging for the COVID services, all the support and advice the NHS is providing to the extremely vulnerable, that’s all going through Notify. All your test results are going through Notify as well. We’ve got a huge amount of business continuity messaging, so accounts all telling the staff where and when they need to go to do work or changes-changes to opening hours or that sort of thing.  We do passport applications, progress updates, flood alerts, global travel alerts, I mean there are, every service is slightly different and that’s kind of the point. So yeah 2 and half thousand of them, 650 organisations I think across the public sector and there’s still a lot more out there who hopefully one day will be using Notify.   Laura Stevens:  And also was reading on GOV.UK, there was a press release put out which said that Notify is on track to save taxpayers an average of £35 million a year over the next 5 years. When you, it started, did you think you’d be making those sort of savings, yeah, to the taxpayer?    Pete Herlihy:  We were hopeful. We knew that the return on investment for something like Notify was massive because you know, a text message that cost you 1 and a half pence versus a phone call that costs you £5. That doesn’t take many many phone calls to be avoided to make a good case.    And, I remember doing a presentation at GDS Sprint 16, Sprint 16, the orange one. It was very orange. And one of the slides on that was 1 in 4 calls to government is someone just asking for an update. It costs a lot of money to run a contact centre and the government deals with literally tens of millions of phone calls a year. So if we can knock out a quarter of those by investing in a small team doing notifications, then there’s going to be some massive savings.    Laura Stevens:  And I thought as well as hearing from you about, from the sort of product point of view, we also wanted to hear from one of the users. So we interviewed Silvia Grant who’s the Lead User Researcher at the Environment Agency, who works on the flood warning service which uses Notify.    Silvia Grant:  So my name is Silvia Grant, I’m a Senior User Researcher for DEFRA [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs]. And I work on an Environment Agency project called ‘The Flood Warning System’. We’re replacing that currently and the new project name is called ‘The Next Warning System’, so we’ve deliberately dropped the flood from that.   Laura Stevens: And what, can you explain a bit more about that service? What does it do?    Silvia Grant: Yes, so the Environment Agency has been sending out flood warnings since 1996. It’s a category 1 responder and has the responsibility for issuing these messages to the citizens and people who are at risk of flooding. So what the system does is we send out these texts, these emails, we have this information on GOV.UK, and it’s all about warning people that flooding in the area is likely or is happening.   Laura Stevens: And how does that system use GOV.UK Notify?    Silvia Grant: So at the moment we have over 500,000 user accounts registered to our service, and we use Notify to send letters and texts. And we send them letters to tell them when they’ve first registered that we update their account details, changes to the service, that sort of thing. And obviously also for our texts.     Laura Stevens: And how does that translate into the amount of notifications being sent to the people? And obviously this must change year on year depending on the flooding and depending on the weather and everything.   Silvia Grant: Yeah. Well so since we’ve moved across to Notify in December 2018, we’ve sent over 4 and a half million texts and close to 10,000 letters. So those are big numbers for us.    Laura Stevens:  How does having Notify help you get the information to the people that need to hear it?    Silvia Grant: Well first of all it’s it’s quicker - so it’s simpler and quicker and cheaper for us to use Notify. So we can send, in in terms of letters for instance, we can send them daily rather than weekly. We have much more freedom around content changes, we can test those changes. So it’s it’s saving us a lot of that admin time, and cost as well.    And because it’s a very stressful scenario for our users, it’s quite again, high emotion, high stress, high impact scenario that we send these letters and these texts in, it, it’s, it’s very important for us to get it right and to, you know for the process to be as slick as possible. And I think Notify really helps us do that.   Laura Stevens:  So this is a really important service because there are, there’s 2.6 million properties at risk of flooding. So what sort of information is being sent out through Notify?    Silvia Grant: Yeah, that’s right. So in England the estimate is between 1 in 5, 1 in 6 homes in England are at risk of flooding. And obviously that figure is growing because of climate change and a number of other factors.    So it’s, in some cases when we issue severe flood warnings, those are warnings where there is danger to life. So those can be very serious. But overall the flood warning service aims to save lives and livelihoods. So yes overall quite a high impact service.    Laura Stevens: And how much would this, do you have an estimate on how much it’s saving money-wise for the Environment Agency?    Silvia Grant: Yeah so just got the figure off the team and it’s saved, in the last 2 years that we’ve been using it, approximately saved the taxpayer at least £150,000. So that’s letters, texts, running costs, everything.   Laura Stevens: But as you’re saying you’re working on like a high impact service that has to get out messages quickly and which has a, yeah an impact, a big impact on people’s lives. Does having something like Notify in place sort of allow you to then have the space to do other things? Because you know that that’s there, that’s just gonna work, and you can then focus on other thi-parts of this quite emotional and high impact service.    Silvia Grant: Yeah definitely. So it’s, it’s quite a long, for our users it’s quite a stressful time receiving those alerts or those warnings, and when they pick those up we, we need to make sure that they arrive instantly, that they say the right things and using a central government platform makes sure that we have that extra accountability that we really need for sending these out.    And yes as well that that has given us a lot more space for actually focussing on things like the content of the message.   So it’s been overall a positive under all spheres. So it’s easy to use, it’s intuitive, it’s reliable, it’s transparent. So if ever there is an issue with it, we are notified instantly. And again the Notify Team has been really responsive with feedback, so whenever we have had requests or issues, there’s been a fantastic service on their part.   Laura Stevens: How do you plan to use Notify in the future, in your product?   Silvia Grant: So as our system gets replaced, the Flood Warning System into what we call the ‘Next Warning System’, we anticipate to use Notify even more. So we’re planning to send confirmation codes to users who sign up to the service on their mobiles. So that is, is a step forward in terms of security for us and it’s again, a cheaper journey and for the user, it’s it’s a 2-step journey rather than a 4- or 5-step. We’ve been testing that with the user and it’s, it’s a very positive response.    Laura Stevens:  Yeah, is that, is that how you imagined Notify would be being used?    Pete Herlihy:  I don’t think we clocked Notify being used to protect life necessarily when we started out.    But we did get, or start working with the Environment Agency fairly early on, so, so, which was great, because what that meant was we had this use case that we could point out internally to say that look this is really crucial. This, this isn’t just about getting a passport update quicker or these kinds of things. This, this is literally a life-saving message and that, that allowed us to focus the right kind of energies on our resilience and make sure we got what we needed. Because we can’t not be there right like if we’re sending these-this kind of message. We have been working with them for a while, they’re a great team, they blog a lot about what they’re doing which is fantastic and very cool.   Laura Stevens:  Was there anything else in the clip that particularly stood out to you?   Pete Herlihy:  Yeah I think there’s 2 things. So one is letters. Because I think people think of text messages and emails and forget letters is a thing for Notify. Don’t forget but it’s less well understood. And when we started, back in 2016, when we started out, we were letters is probably a thing just because we need to offer a full palette of comms option and for some people they need a letter, or they prefer a letter, or digitally excluded, whatever it might be, they have legitimate reasons, some of them are legally required for example.    And we only, and we kind of stumbled over letters, well not stumbled over, we confirmed our letters when we were doing our, these tours of the application processing. Tours sounds really grand doesn’t it? But we’d sit with a team and one of the things they would do is they would finish preparing an application receipt or confirmation of decision or whatever it was going to be. And then they’d press print and they’d select the printer and they’d walk over, join a queue and someone would yell out ‘stop printing I need to put in the letterhead paper’ you know and they’d, and we were like oh this must be very expensive, and then goes from a printer, they’re folding it up into an envelope, the envelope goes into a tray, someone comes round in the afternoon with a trolley and picks them all up and we thought ‘woah there’s got to be a better way of doing letters’.   And that was real early confirmation that if we could make it easy for teams to do letters we could save, help them save, huge amounts of money and time. The amount of time people were just standing around waiting for the printers and things like this, so if that could just be a click it’s like great. And they could do lots more good things with their time.    So that was one thing that was really interesting.    The second is around the real time content changes. So one of the problems I guess we were trying to solve was often these things are like hard-coded and you need a developer and you need to pay a change request fee to your external supplier to update a typo even in a letter or change a URL in an email or something like that.    And we really wanted, not only make it easier to do that in real time but also to allow the interface to be used by like a content designer or a comms person, so they could be involved in shaping the messages themselves in real time. Not just preparing it in a word doc that goes round for sign off by committee, and then is handed over to a development team to implement.    So we, we really tried to bring those roles into the team. And you know we were hearing horror stories of people paying tens of thousands just to change a few letters, or including extra things because they couldn’t change a letter saying so please ignore this section, these kind of horror stories you hear about. So that was one of the important bits for us to get real time content changes in an accessible way into Notify and I’m glad to hear they’re using it well as well.    Laura Stevens:  We also have a clip from the Canadian Digital Service which is Canada’s version of GDS. Notify is obviously used across the UK in the public sector but how has Notify also been used around the world?   Pete Herlihy:  So we’ve worked with a number of teams actually around the world - some we’ve shared patterns with, others we’ve shared our open source code with. And we, as of today I think there are 2 Notify’s being used in anger, one in Australia through the DTA, the Digital Transformation Agency, it’s basically the, the Aussie version of GDS. They were the first, they forked the Notify code maybe about a year and a half, 2 years ago now. And they’re now running that for the Australian government. They’ve you know, taken the code, they then iterate on top of it to add things that are unique and special to them.     The Canadian Digital Service are also running a version of Notify. And that’s growing quickly, it’s grown quicker than we did when we started, so yay for them. But those are the 2 that are being used at government level.   Have to say there’s a lot of people who just pick stuff up from blogs or from Twitter or whatever, rather than any kind of formal introductions to the product. Yeah so it’s a great product, very proud that others have picked up the codebase and are running with it, we continue to work with those teams. Speak to teams like Code for America who are doing great stuff in the States. We’ve had a few all team web catch ups with the Canadian Team, and the Americans to show and tell really about what they’re doing, enhancements they’ve made, things they’d like to contribute back. So we’ve got a good little community going on, which is fantastic.    Laura Stevens:  Yeah, a very nice international community. And we’re going to hear from Bryan Willey, who’s a Product Manager of Notify at the Canadian Digital Service.   Bryan Willey: So my name is Bryan Willey, I’m a Product Manager here at CDS, the Canadian Digital Service. And I am the Product Manager for Notify, a piece of software, an open source software, we took from GOV.UK.    Sorry is that my cat or your cat?    Laura Stevens: I don’t have a cat, so it’s not my cat.   Bryan Willey:  She’s miaowing outside the door. Sorry about that.    Laura Stevens: And yeah would it be fair to say for UK listeners, the Canadian Digital Service is Canada’s version or the equivalent of GDS over there?   Bryan Willey: Yes absolutely. I mean it basically has similar initials. Yeah, so the Canadian Digital Service was made with both GDS and the American 18F Group in mind.    Laura Stevens: And could you describe what the product you manage is, Notify?   Bryan Willey: So Notify is a email platform. Well we’re using predominantly as an email platform, it also does SMS. I know that yours does letters but we’re not there yet. We’re predominantly using it for email and it helps the Canadian government sort of send email messages from a centralised location to the public. Something that the Canadian government’s only been able to do with Outlook servers and traditional email servers before.   Notify allows us to have this cloud-at-cost system that can deploy emails very quickly to anyone who wants to use the service, whether that’s an API integration to connect up to automatically reply when somebody submits an application, or if it’s a newsletter that goes out that people sign up for. And it’s been very helpful in sort of building any of those systems because in the past, we’ve had to go procure an individual cloud email vendor for each solution we built.   Notify allows us to centralise all that, procure, secure and say yeah, this one thing is now what we use for email. And so we don’t have to go through the process of procuring it every time, and that’s been exceedingly helpful.   Laura Stevens: And how’s it going? Because I see, I looked on your dashboard and now 22 services are using Notify and more than 740,000 notifications have been sent.   Bryan Willey: Yeah. Well we think it’s going pretty well. The growth has been faster than we had expected. The current crisis has something to do with that. It’s definitely upped our volume more than it would have been.   Out of the 22 live services, it’s a mix of how much they’re getting used; some are small, more prototype-y services that do things like password reset emails. Whereas some of our more recent ones include a subscription newsletter for Health Canada to combat COVID-19 misinformation.    Laura Stevens: So I saw your blog post on the CDS blog from November 2019, and in it you said ‘this, meaning your Notify tool, isn’t something we built entirely from scratch. Using open source code from the hugely successful GOV.UK Notify service, created by the GDS in the UK, our team is adapting it to fit within our context, in English and French - both of Canada’s official languages’.    So I wanted to talk about like, what were the user needs for Canada and how was that similar to the user need over here, and yeah how were you able to adapt, what had been done over here?   Bryan Willey: Yeah. So much in the same way I imagine GDS discovered this problem, we had a lot of government services that were communicating with people by mail and phone and the people would rather just get an email, you know. Then they don’t have to sit around and wait for a phone call. And when we were building services early in CDS, we discovered this and we’d be setting up email for each of these services. So after doing this 2, 3 times, CDS said ‘we should really just make this so we can have it every time’.    Because we’re not, also not the only ones looking for this. The government of Canada is moving towards more cloud-first strategy and as such they’ve identified the needs for email notifications in a bunch of services. So we forked not just GOV.UK Notify, the DTA [Digital Transformation Agency] in Australia also had a copy of Notify that they had modified a bit from yours. And we looked at both of those and evaluated them, and we forked GDS Notify because we wanted to be able to get your upstream security changes and stuff and pull them down into our repo [repository]. And the Australian one was merged into a big mono-repo which gave us less flexibility with the code.   So forking the GDS one was a great idea to sort of prototype it and see what we had to work with because this was already a solution to the problem we’d found. And we then had to, we liked it so we modified it to Canada. Some of the first things we did was of course update SMS to Canadian phone numbers, add timezone support in, so that the logs and stuff functions across more than one timezone. We had to pull apart the whole UI [user interface] and translate it into French because Canada has 2 official languages. And so it’s been a bit of an overhaul for that, and that’s been a lot of our major work.   And we also had to sort of modify the branding system bit. Because again, 2 official languages means 2 official government brands, one in English and one in en français. So we’ve had to sort of modify the templating system. We’re working on that a bit more now to expand it for both official language use cases.   And so it’s, it’s just been a lot of tweaks here and there to the system and and re-you know changing the UI to look more like Canada.ca than GOV.UK.   Laura Stevens: And by having this already in place, what has it allowed you to do? Has it allowed you to move quicker, has it saved you hassle? How has it affected your work and your plan with the product?   Bryan Willey: It definitely saved us hassle because we’d have to set that all up from scratch on our own. The email problem, the notification problem, wasn’t going to go away. And these Canadian departments were going to solve it and were solving it by their own means - they were building up their own Outlooks servers and using email stuff. You know that wasn’t taking advantage of cloud-at-cost like Notify did.    So having the software that you’d spent 3 years building and already putting a lot of the settings and permissions and access and security and tech in place, really saved us the time having to go through that on our own.   Laura Stevens: And also I wanted to ask, so when I’ll be playing this, this edited clip back, I’ll be with Pete. And I wondered if you had anything you wanted to say to him, any questions or any requests as the Lead Product Manager for Notify?   Bryan Willey: Thanks for all your help, I guess. You know. I..it’s working great for us so I don’t know if there’s anything we need or any help specifically from Pete. The software is pretty complete in its solution for email and SMS, and so thanks for all your hard work Pete.    Laura Stevens: So was there anything in there that you were surprised by or that you hadn’t realised?   Pete Herlihy:  So I’d knew, I’d seen actually most of that we’ve shared with the team so. The one that I didn’t clock was the branding, and the dual language branding - I hadn’t even thought about that one. So we, we may, we may steal that back. Obviously there’s more than one official language in the UK as well so.    That’s really great to hear that.   There was an interesting point though around the use of Notify, either by an API or not, so again that was one of our really early reckons when we started Notify, was that not everyone’s got a development team or development capacity or is high enough a priority in their organisation to get the focus. And so we couldn’t just make something that only worked, worked for API and so everything you can do in Notify, you can do via the web interface as well.    And the other bit I guess that is maybe even overlooked a bit, is that you get like 3 years worth of software development or whatever, but you also get 3 years worth of research. And we’ve, we’ve done a lot. You know we’ve always had a dedicated user researcher in the team, we’ve always done a huge amount of user research, which you have to d-, for something you’re aspiring to make completely self-service, you have to do the user research, otherwise it’s just never going to be.    And so we’ve done loads with like developers, with finance people, with product teams - all the different types of people we see wanting to use Notify. I think what you get when you fork code or, or you know even just take the patterns that another team has, has, derived is you just save yourself years of user research. And again, at that point you can then focus on what are the, the like the niche research requirements around working en francais as he says or whatever else it might be. So that, along with kind of the blogging that goes along the way that shows some of the thinking that goes into the product and some of the decisions that are taken, I mean all of it just shows how, how sensible it is to be doing this stuff in the open.    Laura Stevens:  Yeah, for sure. And I think that, talking about doing stuff in the open and blogging, leads me on quite nicely to my next part, because I wanted to talk about Notify’s most recent work on coronavirus, which you referenced at the top of the podcast. And 2 of our colleagues, Miriam Raynes and Mark Buckley wrote a blog post about how Government as a Platform, or GaaP services, as a whole are helping with the COVID-19 response.    But to talk specifically about Notify, they, in the blog post it’s talking about this huge increase in numbers, like 2 million SMS messages were sent using Notify on a single day in March compared to the daily average of 150,000. I’ve also got a figure here of daily messages up as much as 600%, as high as 8.6 million a day.    So what services are using Notify to help with the government’s coronavirus response?   Pete Herlihy:  Yeah, there, so the, the increase in communication is obviously massive and needs to be. And one of the biggest users of Notify is the GOV.UK email service, and they, they do all of the email for people who subscribe to any content that the government publishes - so travel alerts for example, if you want to know can I take a flight to Namibia, here’s the guidance, or if there’s hurricanes coming through the Caribbean and these countries are affected, then I need to like push out information to say don’t go to these places, or whatever it might be. And those alerts are, you know, again potentially protecting people, life and property - they’re like really important. And there’s been a huge amount of travel advice and alerts being given, as, as you can imagine. So that’s been one of the biggest users.    We’ve also seen, I mentioned earlier, like a huge amount of business continuity stuff. And we put a blog post out recently as well, just reminding I guess more than anything, that all of the public sector could use Notify to provide emergency staff updates for changes to working patterns et cetera. as a result of COVID-19. So there’s definitely been a big uptick there.   And then I think, from, from the health perspective there’s, I’ll just say NHS because there’s like various bits of the NHS that are working like ridiculously hard and fast to spin out new services really quickly, and these services are like just incredibly crucial right now.   So the extremely vulnerable service, this is one where the government said if you are you know, in this extreme risk category you should stay at home for 12 weeks, and they’ve been texting this group of people.   There’s all the stuff around testing and results for testing, ordering home test kits, all these sorts of things. So there’s the very specific COVID response type stuff and that is, there is a significant volume of that that’s still ongoing.    There is business as usual to some degree actually still going on. So people are you know, people are still having to renew passports or whatever it might be. Whilst the volumes are down, they’re still happening. So we don’t stop all the other messaging and just focus on this, we’ve, we’ve got all that to do as well, and this is, this is all additional, it’s all on top.    It all came very quickly as well. You know this wasn’t a gradual ramp up over weeks and weeks to 5,6,700%, it was, it was almost overnight. And yeah, it’s been a huge task to, to keep the platform stable. We had one outage as a result of this on St Patrick’s Day. Which obviously we were massively disappointed at, like our resilience is like one of our, you know, one of the things we pride ourselves most on but we just couldn’t prepare for that kind of instantaneous ramp up. So we, we fixed that very quickly and you know Notify itself has been very stable since.   But we’re still continuing on the basis of what we’re seeing now, we’re going to call that the new normal and then we need to add again capacity, 2 or 3 times that again. So there’s still a lot of work to be done, the team still working incredibly hard as they have been ever since, well always, but particularly since, since lock-in began.    Laura Stevens:  And I believe I’m right in saying as well the 1 billionth message was also a coronavirus one - that was for a notification sent by the coronavirus home testing service.   Pete Herlihy:  Yes, it was, that was quite opportune. It’s a good example of the type, the primary type of messaging that’s going on with Notify at the moment.    And you know those levels are still high, I think we had like 7 and a half million again on Friday, so we’re not getting any quieter. We’re, and we have to plan that we’re not going to. And if we do get quieter then ok, that’s fine but we, we can’t sort of take our foot off at the moment.   Laura Stevens:  As you mentioned one of the organisations using Notify a lot at the moment is the NHS and the various teams within the NHS. And we’ve got a clip from Darren Curry, who’s the Chief Digital Officer at the NHS Business Services Authority, about how and why his team are using Notify.    Darren Curry: Hello I’m Darren Curry, the Chief Digital Officer for the NHS Business Services Authority [NHSBSA], which is an organisation which processes a lot of nationwide transactions on behalf of the NHS, so both public-facing and towards other clinical-facing services.    Laura Stevens: And you’re quite a long standing member of NHSBSA, aren’t you?   Darren Curry: Yes, I am. So I’ve been at NHS Business Services Authority for roughly 17 years, 17, 18 years now. Believe it or not, I joined originally as a Data Entry Officer back in the day, whilst I was doing my university degree, for pocket money effectively, or beer money. And it paid for me through, through university and I have enjoyed it so much and progressed in the organisation to now be Chief Digital Officer so it’s, it’s been a good place to work.    Laura Stevens: And I know that the NHS Business Services Authority has been doing lots of things in response to coronavirus but what I’d like to talk to you about today is what you’ve used GOV.UK Notify for.     Darren Curry: Yeah. So we use GOV.UK Notify on a number of our live services as we stand now. So we, we issue exemption certificates, so prepayment certificates for prescription forms, maternity exemptions, which we now issue digitally - so, so we already use Notify for those services in our, our normal processing.    We, we first started around coronavirus with Notify on a, what was a relatively small service, for informing individuals who were returning into the UK or who were being advised to isolate, so to provide advice during the 7 days isolation period.    And since then our support has grown in the services. So we then utilised the Notify service to support provisioning information to patients who were identified as high risk should they contract coronavirus. So there, there’s individuals who have been asked to shield during the outbreak in order to reduce the chances of them contracting the virus. So we, we text messaged all of those individuals over a 7-so we issued them with 7 texts messages, so one per day, providing advice and guidance on, on what to do during their shielding period.    That, that service has grown as, as more people who’ve been identified as being vulnerable, so working with GP practices and NHS England and NHS Digital to identify more individuals who, who may be vulnerable should they contract coronavirus. That, that has grown and we’ve issued more text messages and information to those individuals.    We’ve used Notify to provide test results for coronavirus, working with NHS Digital and other partners. We’ve used Notify to also provide advice and information for individuals who go through the 111 service in providing text messages and also emails for those services.   Adding it all together, over the last 4 weeks, we’ve issued around about 17 million text messages via Notify through the services that we are, we are delivering, so.    It’s, it’s scaling and it’s growing very quickly.    Laura Stevens: And so this is, the, the information you’re getting out there is obviously like, it’s really important it’s right, it’s really important that it gets to the right people, it’s an emotional service like, people are scared, like your users are concerned. So-why did you pick Notify to use this on, on these particular services?    Darren Curry: Yeah. So, So I mean Notify brings a lot of benefits. I, I think should also say that we, we, in terms of building those messages as well, we worked with colleagues in behavioural insights teams within government, Public Health England, NHSX, content designers, on all of those, and getting the content right was, was critical for these services.    But you’re absolutely right, the infrastructure to send those services, those, those messages needed to be kind of stable and dependable. And, Notify does that, so it’s, it is national infrastructure that we can, can leverage all of the benefits of that having already been built as a government platform that we can consume, to, to use as a service really quickly, securely and safely and knowing that, that those messages will, will be passed. There’s lots of benefits that the Notify service has, has brought us.     So if, frankly if we were having to do this without the Notify service, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. So that we, we would have been dependent upon trad-more traditional legacy contact methods, such as post, to individuals to inform them on, on this scale. We would had to build a, a technology solution to meet this need - we clearly didn’t have to do that, we could leverage something that was already built for this purpose.    And, and this is the benefit of government as a platform that we can consume, you know, the first service we set up with Peter was done within an hour. We, we were able to from, from the request to us being then able to actually push text messages, it took less than an hour to, to go from A to B on that. And you know, without Notify we would have been looking at days, and, and in this situation of a, of a national pandemic, then time’s obviously absolutely critical you know, for people to be able to act upon the advice which has been provided - it’s, it’s, it’s genuinely critical.    Yeah, so, so Notify brings all of those benefits - secure, platform, scalable, to be able to deliver those messages. Yeah.    Laura Stevens: Can you tell me about some of the responses to these SMSs?   Darren Curry: Yeah. For the shielded patients list and the text messages we sent the first cohort when we sent those, we enabled individuals to reply. And some, and we did some analysis on the replies to, to those messages and some of, some of the messages indicated, well some of the replies that we received indicated the difference that the service was really having.    So you know the, the replies from people thanking, just saying thank you for informing us and like, they, they would follow the guidance and the maybe hadn't realised that they were in that high risk category beforehand. In this instance you know, we sent it out and we were able to see some of the replies and know that as a result of that action that was taken by sending that message out to an individual, there was an action that that individual was then going to take. And that action potentially, more than potentially, more than likely will result in a reduced risk of that individual being taken ill, and consequences of that.    So yeah, it, it really does bring home that and highlight the importance of some of these services and how they all join together.    Laura Stevens: So, NHS Business Services Authority is obviously doing a lot of work, you’re working also with other organisations across government as well, aren’t you?   Darren Curry: Yeah, so we, we are working alongside our partner organisations including so NHS England, NHS Improvement, NHSX, Department of Health and Social Care directly, Public Health England, the Behavioural Insights Team, GDS also and NHS Digital, have all, we’ve all collaborated and come together across on multiple different services that we are doing. So it’s been a real collaborative effort across the whole of the government family to get these services up and running.   Laura Stevens: And had you, did you find you had to, ‘cause obviously it’s for use in like health services but it’s also used like in central government departments, it’s used by local authorities, it’s used in prison services, used by fire services. Like did you find you had to adapt it at all to the health context or was it all sort of ready to go for you?    Darren Curry: The great, one of the many great things about Notify is it works just out of the box. So from my development teams in the [NHS] Business Service Authority, it’s a, it’s a really easy integration point. So whether we’re integrating using an API to push the, the messaging or whether we're doing batch uploads of CSVs [comma-separated values files] or spreadsheets or whatever, it works for, for all of those things.    I think the, the other thing as well to mention is, is that you know Notify, it’s a trusted service. So we were able to work with the National Cyber Security Centre [NCSC] as well to, to ensure working with the Notify Team and NCSC, to ensure that the messages we were sending were protected numbers. So it was you know again, just adding that, that security to the whole service when you’re doing critical services for people, that we can make sure that they’re trusted and they are known and protected.    Laura Stevens: If I’m playing this clip back to Pete, is there anything you want to ask him or anything you want the team to develop next?    Darren Curry: I, you know what, it’s a, it’s a really tough question because the, the Notify Team, it’s, it’s a fantastic service. And I think rather than asking Pete to develop anything else, I think my encouragement to Pete and the team is to take that time to reflect on the things that this service has enabled in a time of a national crisis and the things that him and the team have been able to enable, are awesome. And it’s easy to forget that. And 17 million messages to people who needed support, that would not have been achieved, will have genuinely saved lives and protected people.   Pete Herlihy:  Wow. That’s awesome. Seeing the value that has to them and understanding that you know, without Notify being in place, that stuff just could not happen or you know wouldn’t have been remotely as effective as, you know I maybe hadn’t quite appreciated the, the extent of that.   So yeah, that’s pretty mind blowing.    Laura Stevens: Yeah. Yeah I think what Darren says well is articulate how this technology tool but how it translates to in people’s lives.   Pete Herhily:  Yeah, makes it, it makes it very real, for sure. I, I think, I think, you know we’ve talked a bit in the past about how we can’t afford not to have these platforms in place, and, and that was before a global pandemic right? But, and it’s not you know, Notify’s not the only platform in town - we’ve got publishing, you know identity, payments - so but we need them, we can’t afford to not have them. Yeah, now more than ever I guess.   I just want my team to hear that.    Laura Stevens:  So thank you so much for Pete for coming on today.    Pete Herlihy:  Welcome.    Laura Stevens:  And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms, and the transcript’s available on PodBean.

The GOV.UK Pay Team explain how the government’s payment service works, and hear from those who use it across the public sector. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Laura Stevens:   Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I'm a Creative Content Producer here at GDS.   For this month's episode, we're going to be taking a look at GOV.UK Pay. GOV.UK Pay is the government's payment platform, letting service teams across the public sector take payments quickly and securely.   It's hit a few milestones this year as it's now used in more than 400 services in around 150 organisations. These services include applying for a Blue Badge, sending money to someone in prison and further afield in many British embassies around the world as part of the apply for an emergency travel document service.    And since it started in 2015, GOV.UK Pay has processed more than 10 million payments to the total value of more than £537 million. And today, we're going to hear from users of GOV.UK Pay from central and local government, and we're also talking to Miriam and Steve from the GOV.UK Pay Team to hear about the product, its features and where it's going next.   So welcome, Miriam and Steve. Please could you both introduce yourselves and what you do on GOV.UK Pay. Miriam, first, please.   Miriam Raines:  Hi, I'm Miriam Raines. I am a Product Manager on GOV.UK Pay.   Steve Messer:  And hello, I'm Steve Messer. I'm also a Product Manager on GOV.UK Pay.    Laura Stevens:  I gave a brief introduction to GOV.UK Pay at the start, but I was hoping that you could both maybe explain a bit more about what it is and how it helps service teams across the public sector. So could you describe a bit more about the product, please?   Steve Messer:  So the GOV.UK Pay is like a part of the Government as a Platform programme. And the basic idea behind that is that service teams across government and local government have to do a bunch of the same stuff in order to move users through transactional services. So loads of people have to pay for things inside of a service, people have to apply for things, they have to receive emails - that kind of stuff.   And there was an idea a while ago to turn those common problems and solve them with like components, common components. And that's where the products from Government as a Platform come from.   Miriam Raines:  And there's sort of 2 parts to Pay: there's the bit that the paying user would see and they're one of our key groups of users. So these are the payment pages that will ask for your card details and give you sort of helpful guidance and helpful error messages, make it really easy to pay, they're really accessible, they're designed in line with the Service Standard and Design System and they're intended to be really easy to use and we're really regularly user testing those to give a sort of consistent, trusted, experienced for users who are paying online across the public sector.   And then there's the other part of Pay, which is for our other group of users, which is sort of public sector workers. So that is civil servants in central government and arm’s length bodies, it is police teams, it's finance people or digital teams in local government or the NHS. And this allows you to set up and manage your services, to take payments to really easily see what money you've had come in and make, issue refunds and track cases and applications and transactions.    Again, very much designed to be as simple to use as possible. We don't want to make this something that needs like a whole lot of training. We want to be really intuitive.    Laura Stevens: Ok, so how does GOV.UK Pay work with a service?   Miriam Raines:  So you can plug Pay into your service. So if you've already got an existing online service, you-your users are on that service, they're paying for their licence, they're paying for, they're, they're making their application. At the point in which they're ready to pay, they're transferred over to Pay, it should look really seamless for that user, and it doesn't feel like jolting that they're going somewhere unexpected. That user can then really easily pay and is redirected back to that service. So that's when we do it in a sort of fully automated, integrated way.   And we've also got options for teams that don't have digital services to really be able to take payments online instead of taking payments via a cheque or expecting someone to call up and pay over the phone, which we know can be time consuming, it could be quite expensive to handle those, you're much more restricted on the hours that you're able to manage those payments. So we've got those 2, those 2 options for different users.    Laura Stevens:  And can you describe some of the services it's been used in?    Miriam Raines:  Yeah, we've got sort of a whole range of services. We've got some really big central government services right through to, so you mentioned, ours, we're open to local government, to NHS and police forces as well. So at sort of big central government level, we work with DVLA, we work with the Passport Office, so if you're making a digital application for passport, you'd be paying on GOV.UK Pay. We work some national services like Blue Badge. So we support a, lots of local authorities to handle Blue Badge payments. Right down to some really like small services that don't see a lot of transactions: we can have like yacht racing certificates. If you want to pay for an image of Field Marshal Montgomery at the National Archives, you can pay for that using Pay. It's quite, quite a variety. It's absolutely fascinating seeing all the things that government handles money for.  Laura Stevens:  So you mentioned there how some of the people who use it are from health and also from local government and central government, and I’ve got here as a brief history, we started off in 2015 with central government departments, then opened up to local government in 2017 and then in 2018 the health sector started using GOV.UK Pay.    But I also wanted to talk about some of the successes that have happened this year, 'cause this year has been a big year for GOV.UK Pay. I see from Steve's weeknotes - every week there seems to be a new headline. So I just wondered if you could just take me through some of the highlights from this year in GOV.UK Pay.   Steve Messer:  Yep. So I think it was a couple of weeks ago, so maybe mid-October when we had our 400th service go live, which was a good milestone. I think compared to last year, there were, I think there was something around about 100 live services. So we've seen a massive increase over the last 12 months, which is fantastic. It's good to see that the product is being used and talked about, but you know, it does mean that we have to work a bit harder now. So many more needs coming up, but that's fine, that's what we're here for.    I think we've also just before then, so I think it was around about September, we passed a milestone in the value of payments that we've taken and we've now taken well over £500 million from users and passed that on to government departments. So you know half a billion pounds moving through the product is quite a big milestone because you know, a lot of people on the team remember when the first quid went through.   But it's also it's, it's, it's exciting to see the benefits that it can generate as well. So in our economic model, we know that it can save service teams, tens of thousands of pounds in procurement costs and the time that's associated with that.    Miriam Raines:  I think we've also seen, we've able to sort of respond quickly when teams have needed to get set up with services that related to sort of COVID support. You know we are one small part of that massive thing that those services are handling, but if we can make just even the payments bit of it that bit easier and take that burden off the team when they've got all these other things to work on and get people set up really quickly, that's felt really valuable.   Steve Messer:  There was another episode just after the lockdown got lifted as well where like, no-one was applying for fishing licences because everyone was inside obviously. And then all of a sudden the, the, the break of the stay at home order was announced and people could go fishing again. And the number of fishing licence applications went from 0 to up to something like 2,000 per minute or something like that, within an hour. And it was just, it was fascinating to watch the dashboard just go, 'bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep' and you know things start happening. It was, it was a very cool.    Laura Stevens: And yes Steve, you actually set that up very nicely as well, because we're now going to hear from the Environment Agency and they are talking about fishing, so you've clearly got some friends over there. ----- Haroon Tariq:  I’m Haroon Tariq. I'm the Delivery Manager for the I Want to Fish Team, who are responsible for digital service that enables anglers to purchase fishing licences and submit catch returns.     Laura Stevens:  Can you tell me a bit more about what the service provides?     Haroon Tariq:  So the I Want to Fish Team looks after the service, which allows anglers to buy fishing licences which are legally required by law and also to submit catch returns, which basically means that if you go fishing for salmon and sea trout fishing, then we need to know where you fished, where you've caught, et cetera. So that's what I help look after.     Laura Stevens:  And so I wanted to just give our listeners some context for this service for anyone who doesn't regularly fish, and because the numbers involved are quite big, aren't they? I've got here a million licences are purchased a year.   Haroon Tariq:  That's right, yeah, so so about kind of a million licences get purchased a year. I mean, just to give some context, in England alone, angling is worth 1.4 billion and supports at least 27,000 jobs. Angling is increasingly being used to address mental and physical health, social inclusion, which are key issues in society, especially pertinent in recent times with the COVID-19 pandemic.    Laura Stevens:  And can you describe what the licence is? Is it something that's on your phone? Is it a physical licence or how does that work?    Haroon Tariq:  So the licence is basically provided via you get an email confirmation and you will typically get a paper card with that licence as well. And that is something that we're looking to review going forward, so watch this space! But at the moment, it's a legal requirement. If you get caught fishing in England or Wales and you don't have a fishing licence, then it is a prosecutable offence. So it is very important that anglers do have a fishing licence.    Laura Stevens:  And how does GOV.UK Pay work with this service?   Haroon Tariq:  So GOV.UK Pay is our kind of payment services platform. So we use it to process online card payments for fishing licences. We are one of the larger volume services that use Pay. So we process between 2 to 5000 transactions per day.   Laura Stevens:  And you mentioned it earlier, and also from my research you mentioned about how more people are fishing now with coronavirus with the lockdown when it lifted over summer.   So from my research, I’ve seen that when lockdown lifted in summer, there was a huge increase in people who wanted to fish, 6x in fact an increase with a peak of 1,575 applications per hour after the ease of restrictions, when there had been no higher than 252 applications per hour in the previous 30 days. So how did GOV.UK Pay help you process these?   Haroon Tariq:  So when lockdown restrictions eased, licences sales are shot through the roof and the service suitably with the additional load of anglers purchasing licences over a short period of time. This is made really easy due to the close collaboration between our internal teams at I Want to Fish and the GOV.UK Pay teams, making enhancements to service to cope with the surge in demand for fishing licences.    GOV.UK Pay was very good in working with us to understand in terms of the potential spike in peak of kind of people buying fishing licences. So effectively, we made the systems even more resilient than they already were. So they are very resilient anyway, just to kind of try and support that additional surge in demand.    And I'm pleased to report that it did work really well. As you've quoted in some of your figures there, sales figures for fishing licences kind of hit the roof when Boris did kinda ease exercise restrictions back at the beginning of the summer. So, yes, it was very well kind of work together and it worked well for us.   Laura Stevens:  And so what features does the Environment Agency make use of GOV.UK Pay in both now with coronavirus, but also all the time?    Haroon Tariq:  So I think one of the key benefits of working with GOV.UK Pay as a kind of payment services provider is that it allows us to benefit from platform enhancement. So what I mean by that is as the platform evolves and iterates, then we can kind of gain benefit from that.    So one of those examples is the recent card masking feature, which basically masks the card payment details when they’re entered. One of the other features that kind of is out of the box that we use is the transaction reporting, so we can review kind of transaction volumes and look to kind of forecast any potential peaks, such as you've mentioned, in light of Covid and exercise restrictions being eased.   One of the other features that I quite like is that if there are any production instances that occur on the service, we have the access to a live issue monitoring alert system, which allows us to track what those are, keep abreast of any updates and help us kind of predict any volumes going forward.      Laura Stevens:  And looking forward with the future of your service, how can GOV.UK Pay help you with that?    Haroon Tariq:  So we've got lots of exciting stuff coming up on the service for us, on I Want to Fish, which you'll have to wait and see. But GOV.UK Pay is our kind of payment platform provider as it kind of continues to try and add enhancements on the service. We will look to kind of gain the benefit from those as we move forward.    So I've already mentioned about the card masking feature. I'm sure there will be other benefits such as this that will look to glean and take forward. So I think that's one of the key things for us, is having a payment service provider that can iterate and move forward and kind of give us the benefit without us having to kind of spend time and research and money in that area. So with the GOV.UK Pay Team, it's very good. We've worked well together and look forward to working for in the future.     Laura Stevens:  And I'll be playing this back to the GOV.UK Pay Team during the podcast, is there anything you'd want to say to them? Anything, any requests you want to put in for any of these new features?    Haroon Tariq:  Firstly to say thank you, we've kind of created a really good partnership with all the people that we work with, with the team and very much going to continue the good work. We've got some exciting stuff coming up. We're looking at different payment methods, which we're going to be working with GOV.UK Pay going forward on. So watch this space, but for now thank you.  ---------- Steve Messer:  That's just really nice - it's so lov-lovely to hear. That was wonderful.    Miriam Raines:  One, one thing I thought was really good and really interesting to hear about that sort of idea of partnership. I think we really do try and work very closely in partnership with our services. We sort of regularly talking to services about how they're finding it, you know what's working well, what's not working well, and really involve all of our users in shaping that future roadmap. So when we're talking about releasing new features and make sure that functionality is available, and really just sort of like upgrades that get sort of passed through to the teams without them having to do any sort of additional work - all of those things that we build in our roadmap are really based on these conversations with users that come out of the, the feedback we get from them and trying to understand their needs and expand the way that Pay can support that.    Steve Messer:  Yeah, that's, that's the cool thing, really, and that's, I think that's one of the reasons I get up in the morning as a Product Manager, is that the job is never done. There's always more to be doing. So whilst we've created a product which allows government to take card payments pretty easily and simply and then manage those, there's always going to be some other problem around the corner that people need solved. And as you hear from Haroon there, they're sort of looking at other payment methods in the future. Things that were interesting to explore with people and looking at the moment.   Laura Stevens:  And Miriam, to quote your words back at you, you along with Mark Buckley, blogged about the use of GaaP products with Coronavirus, and in there you said “some services needed to stop taking cheques or reduce reliance on call centres as offices close and call centres have fewer staff. GOV.UK Pay has been able to help these services start taking payments within a day and keep important services running.” So what I wanted to do is I want to play a clip from Home Office who, like the Environment Agency, are a long established user of GOV.UK Pay to hear about their journey with GOV.UK Pay.  ------ Lisa Lowton: Yeah, so it's Lisa Lowton. I'm from the Home Office and I am the Head Functional Lead for our ERP solution - and the ERP solution being the Enterprise Resource Planning Tool that we, we look after all of our HR and finance activities.   Laura Stevens:  Lisa, I know you've worked in the Civil Service for quite a long time, particularly in finance and project work, could you just give us a brief description of your career?    Lisa Lowton:  Yeah, sure. So my career started, I was an accountant in the private sector and decided I wanted to change. And an advert came up to work in the Home Office as an Immigration Caseworker - so that's where I started.   Done a number of years as an Operational Caseworker and then moved into the project space. And that slowly moved me then back into finance and looking at ERP [Enterprise resource planning] systems again.    Laura Stevens:  And as well as obviously being in the Civil Service for while, you've also been involved with GOV.UK Pay for a while I believe since its inception back in 2015 with, under Till Wirth at the time, the then Product Manager. So can you tell me how you used the GOV.UK Pay over the years?   Lisa Lowton:  Yeah sure. So, yeah, I met Till 5 years ago it was, at a Civil Service conference down in London, when we were allowed to travel at that point. So, so Till and I met when he was doing a stall and he was talking through payments and, and how things were going to be done in one place for government, and, and I kind of really enjoyed speaking with Till and I was quite interested.    It was literally by chance that about 4 or 5 months later, where I was working at the time, the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), decided to look at developing a product in-house and that would mean an element of payments that would be taken - so straightaway Till came to mind. So that literally was the-the start of the journey really.    So that was the DBS Basic Disclosure Service and they use all 3 of the GDS products - so Verify, Notify and Pay. So we were the first ones to go live with that. And it took around 2 years and it went live in January ‘18. And Gov.Pay was obviously a key element of that. So it was really nice to see from inception, them conversations in Civil Service Live to then actually it rolling out into that service - so that was where it started.    Laura Stevens:  And more recently, I know coronavirus has, like for many of us, pretty much all of us, have forced you to change some of the way you take payments on services. So can you explain a bit more about this service and how GOV.UK Pay has helped you with that shift?    Lisa Lowton:  So we were looking at the, the pay portal to move all our invoice payments to. So, so currently our card payments were, are taken through another provider, and they're kind of a shared service centre as such, and, and card payments are actually took through manual card terminals, which was, obviously means the-the agents having to obviously be in the office at the time, and also the number of issues that the guys faced with their manual card terminals including lack of, lack of Wi-Fi, that type of thing was-was also an issue.    So we were already looking to move the service to Pay. It was just by chance that COVID came along and meant that there was a real risk that the, the guys in Wales potentially might not be able to be in the office, which meant that we would, we would then have a bit of a gap as to how we would take payments for invoices that needed to be paid over that period, and who, who, people prefer to pay by card as well. So so that was the opportunity that we had.    And therefore we-we had a conversation with your development team as to look how we could use a payment link in that situation. We put it through our internal governance - our DDaT [Digital, Data and Technology] governance - who were really supportive of us in-in getting this up and running. And it took around about 5 weeks and we managed to, to get it up and running to be able to provide that as, as a backup service should, should the team in Newport not be able to be in the office.   Laura Stevens:  And you mentioned payment links there, and I know this is a feature that's been really helpful to you. Could you explain a bit more about what a payment link is and how it helped you?    Lisa Lowton:  Yes, sure. So as I spoke about before the, the COVID response was how, how are we able to give customers the way to make a payment without having to, to call the call centre for example, or where the call centre can't take that payment.   So the payment link was,was really handy so that we were able to put on, counter the IVR - so the telephone solution, where we can say, you know, we can't take a payment right now so if you go to this GOV.UK and, and provide that information, and also we've put it on a number of, or we are about to put it on a number of potentially e-ma, at the bottom of emails that, that go out from the shared service centre, as well as the, the kind of the longer term view of putting it on the back of an invoice, and also on some of the, the penalties, which is also where we need to add that payment linked to as well.     So just on the payment linked functionality - really easy to set up, very quick. Obviously the, we had some thinking internally as to how we make sure people provide the right information, because at this point, weren't quite sure how, how the data would come in. And so, so that was really easy to set up. And there was, you know, we did some internal reviews and to be able to make the changes like we did so quickly, I think there was absolutely astonishment because normally when you make changes on any type of, of portal, it normally takes a number of weeks, a number of months, and normal has a pound sign on it.    And that wasn't the case. It was all, it was all at our fingertips and we were able to change it there and then in the sessions that we were having with the internal business colleagues as well. So that, that was really good.     So we've been going for 5 months now, and again, this is not been advertised anywhere specific, this was only set-up for the, for people who weren't able to make a payment when they called up - to date we've had just under £200,000 of, kind of, revenue coming in. So which is great, which, which has come through a portal that would never existed 5 months ago.   So, so we've got to remember kind of you know, some of our customers you know don't want to, don't want to pay, you know some of these are penalties, and, you know, like any, anything like that, you, you potentially do struggle to, to get the income in. But it does show either how easy the solution is and how people are, the usability of it is really good. Because therefore, you know, we've got that promise to pay and you know, over 90%, which is, which is superb.    Laura Stevens: And what other features have you used?   Lisa Lowton: I guess one of the advantages of going to GOV.Pay was that obviously as the payments industry develops, GOV.Pay are absolutely there at, at the frontend of this. And a recent example, well maybe not that recent but you know, 12 months ago when Apple and Google Pay we're, we're very much kind of hot on the heels of, of how people want to pay. That was something that, as part of where I spoke about before the Disclosure and Barring Service, Basic Service, that's something that we wanted to use. Again it gives people the opportunity to you know, more, more opportunity to pay through however they want to pay.   I was really surprised, I don’t know why I was surprised, it was just a really good example of the where you guys had built the technology, and all I did was click a switch and that was it. And then my customers were then able to pay by Apple and Google Pay. And, and that for me was a real key benefit because it was something similar that we were looking at in another area of the service, which potentially would have cost that organisation quite a lot of money. So that is, that is something that I'll always remember that first kind of, I suppose it's an enhancement as such, of how that work was done you know, in GDS and we were all able to benefit from it. And that's something that I want to kind of make sure that people are aware of these types of things and the benefits of moving to GOV.UK Pay.    Laura Stevens:  And when I'm playing this clip back to the GOV.UK Pay Team, is there anything you'd want to say to them, or any requests you have or anything else?    Lisa Lowton:  Ooh..so, so firstly it is a massive thank you. And I guess it's, it's just what I suppose, you know, when I think about how, how can we make this service better, we've got to get the word out there. So things like this podcast, you know other, other advertisements that we can do, that I can do as a department to try and sell this service will only help longer term, and will also mean that you know the guys back in the GDS office, or in the, or in their living room or wherever they are now, understand that the important job that they do for central government.    It's very easy for people in the back office not to understand the impact of, of the front line. And I can give you an example really, a quite recent example of conversations that we're having with our colleagues at the border who want to be able to make sure they've got access to see information 24 hours a day, you know, our operation does not close down in the Home Office, it absolutely stays open 24 hours a day.    And we are now working with them and using the Pay, using the Pay portal to provide them some information to which they, they're over the moon with. We're still early days. But just, you know, just for me to hear these guys tell me the impact of having this information 24 hours a day was, was quite emotional if, if I'm being honest, and sometimes people like ourselves and people in GDS might not see that front end impact, but it absolutely does, it does make a difference. And we need to make sure that we always keep that in mind - is that why we're doing it.     --------   Miriam Raines:  I'm pretty happy to hear Lisa's happy. Lisa's been such a great advocate for Pay, and you know, as she said we've been working with her you know, for the last 5 years through various, through her various jobs that have taken her to different parts of central government. As Pay has grown and changed and been thinking about the new things that we can offer, and hopefully you know, sounds like she's had some benefits from, from using us and from the things we've been able to add, but we've also gained hugely from like getting her insight into what it is like to be a finance person in central government. Like how, how can that work better, what are the problems they've got, what are the things that we can help with to make that easier. So she's been really great with her time sort of sharing that information with us.    Steve Messer:  So that's one of the things that really excites me, is thinking about these different scenarios that people are in when they do need to pay government. So they might be on their way to work, on the bus using their phone, and they don't really want to like have the hassle of sort of going through a government service really. They have to do it. But knowing that they can just like coming along to GOV.UK, go to a service, fill in a form, use Pay to pay us, and then get on with the rest of their life quickly, simply and easily, I think is the value of what we do.   I sort of did actually wonder what are the different devices you can use to pay government on? Because not everyone has access to the latest smartphone or a laptop or a computer or that sort of thing. So I had a bit of a play using some devices that might be more common that are a bit easier to get hold of, like a really old Kindle. So it's nice to know that you know anyone, no matter their digital access or requirements, they should be able to just pay government and get on with their life.   Laura Stevens:  Any other devices or just the Kindle? I know we've had, we've heard before that GOV.UK's been accessed by a PlayStation, services have been used on that as well.    Steve Messer:  Yeah, PlayStations, games consoles, I've used it on a TV as well, that's like quite common. People have smart TVs but might not have a smartphone. So you can use it on that. I don't know what else I've tried it on. That's it - I need to try it on the very first Web browser and see if it works on there, I'm hoping it does. That's a bit of time travelling if you do that, it's quite fun.   Laura Stevens:  And yes, and before we hear from our final clip, which is from Surrey County Council, I wanted to talk about local government. And I wanted to talk about the collaborative project with local authorities and the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government or MHCLG. Could you tell me a bit more about that, what it was and what you found out about it?    Miriam Raines:  So, yeah, MHCLG had set up the Local Digital Collaboration Unit and GDS has been working very closely with them to support that. They had a fund that local authorities could apply for to help solve common problems. And so local authorities could form groups, partnerships with other local authorities looking at the same problem, apply for money to investigate that either at sort of a discovery level or sort of alpha level if they'd already done some work on this in the past.    And there were a group of local authorities led by North East Lincolnshire that included a few other local authorities of different sizes and different sort of geographic places around the country, who wanted to look at how they could make GOV.UK Pay easier to use and make it more sort of widespread within local government. They saw there was an opportunity there, but they wanted to understand you know, why wasn’t it necessarily being used more, how could they check that it was meeting the needs of local government as well as central government and sort of understanding the case for using Pay. So we worked with them January 2019. And it was really, really interesting.   We travelled round to lots of different local authorities. We watched finance teams and caseworkers sort of doing their jobs, what the tools they were using at the moment. Try to understand what the current payment platforms that they use, what were sort of good things about that, what were the pain points around that, how Pay might be able to address it now with the functionality we had at the time and what things you might need to do to enhance Pay. So again, basing our future roadmap entirely on the feedback that we've got from users, making it much easier to use and thinking about some specific issues for local, for local government as well. And I think it's been really beneficial so we've been able to do some of the changes that we looked at.    Steve Messer:  Yeah, that would be great actually, if everyone could go to our website and look at the roadmap and just let us know if something's not on there or definitely let us know if something's on there and you're excited about it. This kind of feedback is what helps us make Pay and make it work for people.   Laura Stevens:  And now we're going to hear from a local government user from Surrey County Council.  ------- David Farquharson:  So my name's David Farqharson and I work at Surrey County Council and I'm a Developer who works in our integration team, which is a team that is specifically concerned with system integration. And part of that integration is the online payment solution.   Laura Stevens: Could you tell me how you came across GOV.UK Pay?   David Farquharson: Yes. So my first exposure to GOV.UK Pay was when we implemented our Blue Badge scheme. And as part of that, there's a payment that has to be made.    We implemented a government solution as part of the end-to-end system, incorporated the GOV.UK Pay platform for online payments and the GOV.UK Notify for the messages and notifications. So that was my first exposure to it.    And as we implemented it, I was quite impressed by what it was offering. And so decided to do an assessment of whether it would be a solution that we could look at for the whole council online payment strategy.    Laura Stevens:  So yes, Surrey came across GOV.UK Pay through the Blue Badge. I also wanted to ask about how GOV.UK Pay helped Surrey County Council during coronavirus. On a blog post on the GDS Blog there was a quote from Surrey County Council talking about a service that was set up in one day using GOV.UK Pay.    David Farquharson:  Yes. I mean, we had a particular example where we needed to take for COVID-19, we needed to take payments for a crisis fund. So it was a sort of fund set up where people could donate money to help people that were in immediate problems due to the COVID-19 issue. And as a result, we needed to get something up as quick as possible, to start taking that money. And so we used the payment links function that is provided by GOV.UK Pay, which is extremely quick way of getting up a payment page and taking those payments online. So that was the particular one that we were probably talking about.    But since COVID-19, we've already set up a number of additional live services, some using the payment links and some using more sort of in-depth integration.    Laura Stevens: And so what features does GOV.UK Pay have that make it helpful to you as somebody working in local government?    David Farquharson:  The GOV.UK Pay platform underpinned fully by the accessible rest APIs [application programming interfaces], which enable developers and local authorities like ourselves to build custom add-ons and to access data and information from the system and embed it in some of our external applications. And also allows us to do things like journaling for our ledger, by accessing the APIs. And the documentation of support for developers is excellent - it's accessible on the website so if anyone went to your website and looked, there's a documentation section and it's excellent on the APIs and how to use them. In fact, on the whole on the whole admin site and how to integrate it, it's very good for that. And the support both online from the call logging system and telephone supports has also been very good and responsive to our needs.    We've also actually been in personal discussion with some developers from your team, and they're very willing to speak to us and listen to our requirements. And we've actually, in conjunction with them, requested some additions and amendments that they have actually now developed and put live.    Another major advantage is how quickly it is to set up a test service on the admin site, it literally takes minutes. You can start, your developers can start carrying out some initial developments and proof of concepts very quickly. So we were able to do that. And it fits in with an agile development approach as well. So you can quickly get something out very quickly, show your, your customers so they immediately get an idea of what it is they're going to be getting.    We've touched on the payment feature, but again, that's a very nice feature. If you are looking at taking online payments that you don't need to integrate with another system and are fairly simple in their nature, you can set that up literally in a day, you could have something up and have a new URL that you can put out for people to take to make online payments.    We also found that each service set up, so we at Surrey, we've got 50 plus payment services that take online payments and that's growing all the time as well. So each one of these we call a different service. So they could be completely different things from highways to education to music tuition. So a lot of different services involved. And each of those is set up as a separate service in the GOV.UK Pay admin site. And you can then control the security and the access to those services. If you will use the admin site and using the admin site for your users, you can control the use of security so that they only see the service they're responsible for. And so in the council where we've got a very disparate level of services and of users, that's was very useful to us.   So, I mean, that's just an example of the advantages. But that’s why we’ve changed our whole strategy, which is to move over to the GOV.UK Pay platform.   Laura Stevens:  If GOV.UK Pay didn't exist, how would that have impacted your work at Surrey?   David Farquharson: We possibly would have had to have built a similar thing ourselves.    So it's probably saved us a lot of our own in-house development work, but would also have been specific to Surrey County Council and one of the things we're looking at with this is the hope that this might lead to more of a standardised local government approach as well. We've been in talks to local authorities because then we can share our experiences. We can look for joint improvements rather than working independently and developing separate solutions. And I think there is a benefit in terms of costs going forward for local authorities to do that.    Laura Stevens:  If any of our listeners are from local government and want to know a bit more, how would they get in touch with you?   David Farquharson:  If anyone wanted to follow up on any of the comments I've made or ask us how at Surrey we've approached some of these issues, I'll be more than happy to talk about that. I think the easiest would be to contact me on my work email address, which is david.farquharson, which I better spell F for Freddie a r q u h a r s o n. S for sugar, s o n. At Surreycc.gov.uk [david.farquharson@surreycc.gov.uk]    So just drop me an email and I'll either get back in the email or I can contact the person that's I’d be more than happy to do it. ---------   Miriam Raines:  Surrey have been such good supporters of, of Pay and we've, it's good to hear they were saying we've worked really closely with them: we've done like a couple of really useful research sessions with them. And yes, as you mentioned, we were able to release some changes pretty recently based on feedback that they'd given us. And yeah, that's really, it's just really positive.    Laura Stevens:  And would you say there, where, what David was talking about the sort of experience of GOV.UK Pay - is that typical for a local government user of GOV.UK Pay?   Miriam Raines:  Yeah. So it's actually interesting, we've got some local government users who do sort of split everything out so they've got a different service in Pay for every different type of transaction and then they can really carefully manage the nuances sort of each of those services and who's got access to it - and in some ways that can make sort of, if it works for their process, it can make finance and reconciliation easier. And that was one of the things that we were doing research with Surrey about.    There are other teams where they just have one service in Pay, and they run absolutely every single thing through it. They've got other ways of handling reconciliation and they like to sort of just, keep, keep it quite simple with their sort of interaction with with Pay. So it will depend on how teams use it.   Laura Stevens:  I was thinking about how GOV.UK Pay will develop next. So we've talked a lot about the various features since it's launched and there seems like there's been lots of things added and has adapted with different users, different features. So what are you thinking about looking forward in the, in your roadmap? What's, what's on the horizon?    Steve Messer:  So there's quite a few things, because the payments industry has changed quite a lot since the internet came along. You know it's not only online payments that have been enabled. Some exciting - if I can say that, regulation, exciting regulation, does it exist? Yes - exciting regulation went through in 2017 I think, which is open banking regulation. And this, what this does is it sort of opens up the way that you can transact with services by using your bank account.   Previously it would have been like quite expensive to build these kinds of things, but now there is a way for any kind of online service to integrate with an open banking solution and then provide information from your bank account to that service. And also to, to send money as well. So there’s quite exciting opportunities there where for people who don't have access to a card maybe could pay by bank account, which in most scenarios is quicker and might be simpler for them.   I think we also want to be looking at how we can make it cheaper for government services to use GOV.UK Pay. We are pretty competitive and we work with the market rather than against the market, which means that you know services can save a lot of money. But again, there are ways that we can really reduce these transaction costs and make it quicker and easier for service teams to convince their governance to start using Pay.    Miriam Raines:  And sort of related to that, we've also been working very closely with Government Finance Function and Government Shared Services. So we're looking at what their aims and ambitions are for sort of better efficiency or sort of automation in those processes in government. And then we looking at how Pay can sort of support that, how we can be the vehicle to enable them to roll out these new sort of finance standards or data standards and make it easier to have that sort of that same technology used and reused across, across government. So that's really, that's really interesting - and Lisa has been very helpful in that. She's been very involved from Home Office as well.    Laura Stevens:  And I guess out of all those plans, what excites you both the most coming up in the next few months to work on GOV.UK Pay?   Steve Messer:  I'm quite excited about so, we do offer a Welsh language service for our services. And so if you're a Welsh language speaker, you can go from start to finish with a completely Welsh journey until Pay sends you an email confirming your payment - that's the only bit we haven't done yet. So I'm quite excited to work on that because it means I get to use the people I live with as a test group because they all speak Welsh. It might make the Christmas dinner quite interesting.   Miriam Raines:  Steve's learning Welsh, so Steve can practice too.    Steve Messer:  Yeah, I can show myself up in how poor I am at my Welsh.   Miriam Raines:  I think we've been thinking about, I don't know if I'm allowed to get excited about invoicing, but I think I might be excited about invoicing. One of the things that Lisa was talking about in her service was they're using Pay for invoices. And definitely we have teams that are using Pay in that way, they might be using our API integration, more likely they're using that payment links functionality. But there's a lot of ways that we could probably make that better and tailor it a bit more to how people share invoices, receive invoices, want to check the invoices have been paid.   So I think there's some work there that we can do because that can be quite expensive to handle in government, it can be quite manual, it can be a bit awkward for users: lot of time they might have to make, you know call up and pay over the phone or something. So we're looking at how we could do that. So that's pretty something we might look at in the, in the New Year.    Laura Stevens:  Fab. And if I've been listening and I want to find out more or I want to get in touch with you, how is best to do so?    Steve Messer:  So probably go to our website, which is payments.service.gov.uk. There you'll be able to find information on what Pay is, how to get started, our roadmap that shows you what we're working on now, next and things that we're exploring. It also has a page that can allow you to get in touch with us. You can contact the support team or get in touch with us to tell us about anything you're excited about.    Laura Stevens:  So yes, thank you both and thank you to all our guests for coming on the podcast today. This is actually my last episode as I'm moving onto a new role in GDS so it's been great to leave on a, such a great product. And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean. So thank you again both.    Miriam Raines:  Thanks, Laura.    Steve Messer:  Thank you. That was great.

A year on from launching the GDS podcast, senior creative writers Angus Montgomery and Sarah Stewart talk about their jobs. The pair discuss their career paths and the role of writers in government and how clear writing can help people to do their jobs better. The transcript for the episode follows: ------------ Angus Montgomery: Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Angus Montgomery and I’m a Senior Writer at GDS. And for this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by my colleague Sarah Stewart.    Sarah Stewart: Hello. I’m also a Senior Writer at GDS.    Angus Montgomery: So our voices might sound quite familiar because both Sarah and I, with our colleague Laura, have been on all the episodes of the GDS podcasts that we’ve done so far and as part of those episodes, we’ve been interviewing people across GDS and across government about their work and talking about the things that they do to help transform government and to build digital services and to make things better for users.    And, we realised that we’re nearly a year into this podcast now, I think this is our 11th episode, and we haven’t actually properly introduced ourselves and talk about what we do, and how our work contributes to digital transformation across government and helps everyone in GDS and across government do their jobs better. So that’s what we intend to do with this podcast.   Sarah Stewart: And we’re also going to be sharing our top tips for clear writing, which we’ve put together over the past 3 years of working at GDS, so we’ll be sharing those with you as well.   Angus Montgomery: Yeah, so Sarah and I, just as a bit of background, we’re both Creative Writers at the Government Digital Service. We both joined on the same day. Can you remember what day that was? Testing you.    Sarah Stewart: It was May 23rd.    Angus Montgomery: I thought it was the 22nd.    Sarah Stewart: Strong start.    Angus Montgomery: Sarah’s memory is better than mine. May 23rd 2016. And we work as part of a team called the Creative Team in GDS.    And we’re in a team that also has people like filmmakers, production experts, graphic designers, Graham Higgins, who’s also in the room with us, who is doing the production of this podcast and is one of our filmmakers, and audio production and all sorts of other amazing things as well.   And our role, the role of our team, is to help everyone in GDS, from Director General down throughout the organisation of all parts talk about their work, communicate their work and explain what it’s doing to help government work better and to make things better for users.   Sarah Stewart: Don’t sell us short, Angus. We also write at a ministerial level as well. So it’s from Minister down.   Angus Montgomery: So, yeah what we want to do with this podcast as Sarah has already talked about, is explain a bit about our jobs and what we’re here to do, talk a bit about writing and communication and why it’s important and to give our ten top tips, pieces of guidance, principles, whatever it is that you want to call them about how to write and communicate more clearly.    So that’s what we’re going to do. But before we kick that off...Sarah, can you tell me a little bit about what your background is and how you came to work at GDS?   Sarah Stewart: Well I don’t know how far we should go back - but at school, the only 2 things that I thought I was good at and enjoyed were English and rounders. And there’s not much you can do with rounders, so I pursued English. I read English at university, came down to London, did my postgrad down here. Became a journalist. Hated every second of it. I was a business journalist and it was a generally terrible experience for me. Although I did pick up some useful things, like always carry a notebook and pen with you, which I still do to this day.    Angus Montgomery: How’s your shorthand?   Sarah Stewart: It is non-existent. And also about libel as well, that was an important lesson.   Angus Montgomery: Oh yeah, that’s very important.   Sarah Stewart: And then I was lucky enough to get a job working at Shelter, which is a housing and homelessness charity and they also campaign for better housing rights and conditions. And I was a Content Writer and Producer there, so I launched their advice Youtube channel, I edited their advice on their website, I launched their advice sound clips, and I edited their blog as well, of case studies.   And then after a couple of years, I found out about the job at GDS.   Angus Montgomery: What attracted you to GDS?   Sarah Stewart: Funny story actually, I had never heard of GDS before applying. I was at Shelter and someone that I worked with left the job advert on my desk with a post-it that said ‘this is the kind of job you can go for in a few years time’ and I thought ‘Screw that, I'll apply for it now.’    It wasn’t really my ambition to work in government, but it kind of worked out well. I really enjoy what we do now. But you did know about GDS before you joined.   Angus Montgomery: I did. So my background was similar in the sense that I was a journalist, I hadn’t worked doing anything else actually, I’d been a journalist my entire career   Sarah Stewart: And you liked it?   Angus Montgomery: Uh, yeah. I mean like...Liked is not a strong word.   Sarah Stewart:...liked it more than I did? Did you cry in the loos everyday like I did?   Angus Montgomery: No, that’s really unpleasant and horrible. I’m sorry that you went through that. But there might have been some loo crying at certain stages. I think the thing about journalism, as you sort of implied, is that when it’s good, it’s really fun and it is a great industry to work in.    And you can do lots of different things, and lots of exciting things and meet lots of interesting people. It is really really tough. And when it’s bad, it is very very unpleasant and a difficult environment to work in.    So I was working for a website called Design Week, which covers the UK design industry. Around the time I became editor was around the time that GDS was setting up and launching and getting a really big profile. And was winning awards like a D&AD black pencil and the design of the year awards, so obviously it was a really really big design story. And I got to know some of the design team in GDS, and I was you know obviously, while that was happening, an observer of what was happening, I was reading all the blog posts, I was looking at all the posters and all the other communication that it was putting out    Sarah Stewart: Oh my god, you’re really putting me to shame.   Angus Montgomery: But GDS was a really big story, it looked really interesting to me, was hugely appealing in the sense that of, something similar to what you said, this was an organisation that was serving the whole nation.    And an organisation that was very clearly there to do something good. It was there to help government work better for users and for everyone, for civil servants and everyone. Being involved in something like that was really really appealing, and remains really really appealing, it’s why I still come to work everyday.   Before we get onto the kind of, the writing aspect and the top tips, the kind of the educational part of this podcast, what is it that you enjoy most about working at GDS and what do you find most satisfying?   Sarah Stewart: That’s a good question. I’m lucky to say that they are quite a few things that I enjoy. I like the fact that when I write, and that can be if I’m drafting a speech or writing a presentation or helping someone edit a policy document or write a ministerial forward, that I’m actually doing something that’s important to the idea of democracy, because in order for people to make good decisions, they need to know what the facts are. And I like that I can ask the difficult questions that get to the facts, I like that I can challenge people and say ‘no, you need to include more detail’, I can say ‘you should leave this out because it’s maybe not the right time to come out and say this particular thing.’   I love the feeling when someone, maybe this is a bit self-indulgent, but when someone is delivering a speech that I’ve written, it’s like the best feeling in the world, because I’m naturally introverted and I know that these words aren’t my words, but when a joke goes down really well and the audience laughs or when you, you know, when the key message has been hit and people understand it and an action is taken, that’s massively rewarding.    But there’s... I get so much pleasure from just the act of writing. I mean when I’m not doing it at GDS, I’m doing it in my spare time. There’s just something really satisfying, I guess like mathematicians, when they do a sum correctly or they workout a formula and it and it all works out wonderfully well, it’s writing a sentence that flows beautifully and is truthful and you know, moves people to do something or to consider something in a different way.    So I don’t think there’s really one part that I don’t enjoy. I mean I hate meetings, but doesn’t everyone? What, how about you?   Angus Montgomery: I think something similar. Although I’m kind of less wedded in a weird way to the craft of writing. I mean writing, it’s not something that I don’t enjoy but I kind of, I don’t get a huge amount of pleasure in a sense from, like constructing a sentence or the kind of technical aspects of it. But the thing I enjoy most is, I really like the idea that writing is structured thinking.    So when you write something down, you need to be really clear and it needs to be really structured and it needs to make sense. And so the thing I get most satisfaction from is, when you’re working with someone to help them explain a difficult concept that can exist maybe only in their own head, and they’re explaining it in a way that they can’t fully articulate, you’re just about understanding it.  And there’s that breakthrough moment when you write something down and you show it to them and they go ‘yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to say!’     Sarah Stewart: Yeah.   Angus Montgomery: ‘That makes total sense, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do’. That to me is the really satisfying part of this, is like getting. And I suppose corollary to that is the fact that we work with really intelligent, really nice people as well, but really super intelligent people that are really driven and really focussed on what they’re doing, and have these really complex things going on in their heads.   And maybe because they are so close to that work, the aren’t always capable or don’t always find it easy to communicate as clearly as possible. And that’s really our role is to go in there and say, ‘right, let me inside your head, let me inside all those really deep technical details and All the different things that you’re thinking about. And I will help you communicate this clearly’.    Sarah Stewart: Yeah.   Angus Montgomery: And like that to me is the really satisfying part, it’s like being the bridge between this really intelligent person who has a really complicated idea, and the person who needs to understand that.   At the risk of asking I suppose a cliched question, tell me about your day-to-day, and what it is that you actually do, and what it is that we do and what we write and produce?   Sarah Stewart: Yeah, so we write a whole host of things. So there’s obviously the kind of straightforward written content, so blog posts, press articles, op-eds. I tend to...   Angus Montgomery: What’s an op-ed?   Sarah Stewart: Oh sorry. Good question. It’s, well actually I was, I…   Angus Montgomery: I don’t know the answer to this actually, which is why I…   Sarah Stewart: It’s either…So there are some people who think it’s an opinion editorial. So someone just speaking about a subject that they know. Other people think that it means ‘opposite the editorial page’ But basically what we take it to mean, and what I’m doing I think, is writing an opinion piece so…   Angus Montgomery: For a newspaper or magazine.   Sarah Stewart: Yeah for a newspaper or a magazine. And so I’ll be writing on behalf of somebody, I don’t think it’s any secret to say that you know in government, there are speech writers and there are other...people like us exist in order to kind of help Senior Civil Servants communicate.    So, I tend to specialise in speeches but we also write presentations for people across GDS, we might be writing forewords for strategy papers, we might be editing, you know, policy documents, but that’s a very small part of what we do I think. And we also write scripts for animations and films and do things like podcasts.   Angus Montgomery: So we wanted to give you ten principles that help us communicate clearly, and that we think you might benefit from as well. And some of them are you know, things that might seem obvious and some of them may be are a bit more left field. But they are all things that we kind of, help us to our day-to-day jobs.    So without further ado, Sarah do you want to give us point one and tell us a little bit about it?   Sarah Stewart: OK so my first principle is: Establish ‘The Point’. Before you write anything, whether it’s a speech, a blog post, a presentation, a love letter – establish what the point of your writing is. And ‘The Point’ comprises two parts – and I’m thinking of trademarking this actually, it’s: What you want you want to say and why it needs to be said. We’ll come onto audience in just a second.    So once you’ve established what the point is, write it on a post-it note, stick it at the top of your doc. It will be your guiding star. It will keep you relevant, it will keep you focused and if you can’t figure out what the point is, don’t write. Don’t agree to do the speech. Don’t agree to do the presentation. The chances are you’ll come up with the point at a future date, but if you’re really struggling to establish what it is that you want to say and the reason for saying it, just don’t do it. You’ll waste people’s time and wasting people’s time is a sin.    Angus Montgomery: Point three of the point, I think. You’ve got what you want to say and why you want to say it but also who you want to say it to.The audience, as you mentioned,  is an important thing. You have to assume that the thing you’re saying is interesting to someone or to a group of people, and then you have to work out who that group of people is. Knowing that will help you work out the best way of communicating your message. It might be that the thing you want to say or write is best done as a blog post, or it might best done as a film, or best done presentation or it might be better to draw it as a picture and create a poster of it. Knowing the what, the why and who you’re trying to tell it to, will help you shape your message and the way you’re communicating your message.    My first point so number 2 of our principles is, ‘write it like you’d say it’. So I mentioned earlier about a big part of our role, or the main part of our role is to help organisations, this organisation, communicate in a human voice.   To me a human voice is the voice that you would use to describe something to a friend when you’re you know, having lunch or at the pub or at the park or whatever. Like if this is that thing about like, if you’re trying to describe a really difficult technical concept, then think about how you would explain it to a friend or to your mum or to you know, son or daughter or whatever it might be.   And then write down the way that you would do that. So it shouldn’t be really that much difference between the written word and the spoken word. Although obviously you’ll have far fewer sort of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and all those sorts of things.   But like a human voice written on page should sound like speech to me. So when you read something, it should sound like someone is saying it to you, someone is speaking to you in the way that, in a sort of slightly informal, kind of suppose, kind of friendly tone of voice but in a way that’s understandable and relatable.   And that really helps you to, I think, get away from what can be a quite, there can be a formality about the written word, and I think that this is again, why some people find writing quite a sort of scary prospect, is it can feel like you have to use the longest most complex, most impressive words possible.    And actually you really don’t. You need to use the shortest, clearest, simplest words possible just as you would if you were trying to explain something verbally really clearly. So write it like you’d say it, and the way, a thing that can help you to do that is, as you’re writing something down, read it out.   Does it make sense if you say it out loud? Does it make sense if you say it in your head? Does that article that you’ve written sound like something you would naturally say? If it does, then you’re broadly along the right lines I think.   Sarah Stewart: That’s a good tip. And it neatly links it my next point, which is ‘don’t try and sound clever’.   Essentially what you want to be is clear and concise and don’t over do it. Don’t try and impress anyone because you are probably doing something that is impressive. You probably have all the vocabulary you need to express it clearly. Leave it there.    This reminds me of a good quote by the investor Charlie Munger. He said ‘if you want to be thought of as a good guy, be a good guy.’ So if you want to come across as smart, then be smart and explain what you’re doing. But don’t go out there having an agenda that you have to come across as something. It’s inauthentic.    You see it, particularly in academic writing. People who are so in that world become - it’s almost impossible to cut through what they’re saying. For example, my friend sent me the abstract of his book and his opening sentence was 58 words long with no punctuation. I could individually pick out what every single word meant, I knew the meaning of each word but in the syntax, in that sentence, I had no idea what was going on. And I was trying to give positive feedback and I said look I’m really sorry, I don’t know what it is you’re trying to say and he said: ‘Oh, well, it’s written for academics’ - well, presumably at some point you want other people to read it!    Angus Montgomery: Sometimes in this organisation as well, people say ‘oh it’s written for Senior Civil Servants’ or it’s written for a particular audience or it’s written someone whose a specialist, but they are people too. When you’re a senior civil servant, you don’t suddenly become this person who communicates in a really arcane fashion or understands things in a really complex fashion. You’re also a person who needs to understand things really, really quickly, so being able to write things down and explain things in a clear and accessible fashion is appropriate for any reader, regardless of who they are.    Sarah Stewart: Yeah, actually there’s a really good discussion if you want some further reading or further listening. It’s Stephen Pinker in conversation with Ian McEwan on academic writing and the importance of clear writing. So after you’ve listened to this podcast, do give it a watch it’s on YouTube.    Angus Montgomery: Which leads nicely, these are segueing quite nicely together I think, to my point or my next point. Which is something that we say quite a lot at GDS, which is ‘show the thing’. And by that we mean if you’re talking about something or you’re trying to tell someone about a product or a service or a thing, just show it.   Explain how it works, say what it is, don’t use metaphors, don’t try to dress it up, don’t try to make it sound like it’s doing things that it isn’t. Just explain what it does.   Because as you’ve just said, if the thing that you’ve built or the thing that you’re trying to describe is valuable and worth talking about, then all you need to do is explain it clearly and it will do the work for you.    You don’t need to dress it up, you don’t need to put marketing on it, you don’t need to you know make it sound like it’s the incredible next you know, use loads of adjectives like ‘stunning’ and ‘life changing’. You just need to show it and if it’s a worthwhile thing then the reader will understand that and accept that and will be on board with it.   So show the thing, talk about it as clearly as possible, say what it does, and that’s all you need to do. That’s basically it.   Sarah Stewart: I’ve come up with an original next principle, Angus. Burn! Which is about feedback and welcoming feedback and a sub point of this, is the message: you are not your writing.    So the other day, some kids came in for work experience. Can I call them kids? Some students came in for work experience and I spoke to them about my job and writing more generally. And a question they asked was ‘what do you do when someone gives you really bad feedback about your writing?’ I think the most important and first thing that you should learn and it’s the most difficult thing that writers have to come to terms with is: you are not your writing.    Yes, it has come out of your head and through your hands and is informed by the experiences you’ve had, but once it leaves you, it is a separate entity. And once you have that disconnect, that it is a separate entity, you stop being precious about it and you start thinking about the work and the work is the most important thing.    So, when someone says to you ‘this is a really confusing piece of writing’ or ‘this is a really confusing essay ‘ or ‘this is a muddled blog post’, they are not saying ‘you are a terrible person.’ They are not saying ‘you’re an imbecile’ or ‘you are a failure as a writer’. They are saying ‘this is muddled’ ‘this is confusing’. It doesn't feel good to be criticised or to have negative feedback, but it’s a gift. It’s an opportunity for you to...   Angus Montgomery: Feedback is a gift   Sarah Stewart: It really is. I was thinking about the best advice I was ever given as a writer which was being told, when I was a journalist, which is probably why I hated it so much, that I was a rubbish writer. So I think I needed to hear that things weren’t very good or I would have been writing, you know, like a crazy woman for the rest of my life. You need feedback, you need to welcome that in. Because it’s always about the work, it’s never really about you, and it’s never even about you when you’re writing memoir or yoru autobiography, it’s still a separate thing.   Angus Montgomery: That leads, leads very neatly into my next point.   Which is another GDSism, something that we say quite a lot at GDS which is, ‘the team is the editor’.   And before I got into this, because it’s a common thing we say at GDS, I should probably give a shoutout to some of the original Creative Team and Creative Writers at GDS, who you know we’re standing on the shoulders of giants and all that stuff, a lot of certainly my ways of working and thinking have come from these people.   So people like Giles Turnbull, Ella Fitzsimmons, Matt Sheret, Amy McNichol and this is the thing I used to hear a lot from them, ‘the team is the editor’ and that means, to pick up on exactly your point, we’re not doing this writing on our own, like we are the writer kind of in charge ultimately of the document or the piece of writing that will go out but we’re working in collaboration with a lot of other people.   So we could be working in collaboration with the person who has developed the idea or product or service or whatever it is that we’re trying to communicate. We’ll be working with a comms specialist who will be thinking about what’s the best way to best place to publish this.    You might be working with someone who edits the blog. And we’re working with the rest of our team as well because we’re not working in isolation. Pretty much everything that I write, I share with you and I think vice versa.    And you have to, you’re nothing without an editor. A writer is nothing without a good editor. No book that you have read and no newspaper article that you’ve read and no film that you’ve seen and no commercial you’ve seen on TV is just a result of a single writer...   Sarah Stewart: That’s so…   Angus Montgomery: ...with their vision.   Sarah Stewart: Yeah, that’s so true. And I think that’s why people get so put off writing as well because they seem, people think of writers as, like, strange creatures inspired that they you know, get hit on the head by muse and are able to write perfect prose.   But it goes through loads and loads and loads of editing to get that kind of pure, perfect sentence.    Angus Montgomery: So ‘the team is the editor’ and the editor is the unsung hero of writing as well. They are the person in the background that is making all these things work. The reason people give feedback isn’t because they want to undermine you or attack you, it’s because they want to make the work better. And you have to welcome that and find that as well. As a writer it’s really important not to isolate yourself and do it on your own, and plough away and...   Sarah Stewart: It is nerve-wracking to share your work and you do have to be aware of when, for example, say I’m writing a speech, it’s not unusual to have twenty people in the document all feeding in their ideas and you have to be able to distinguish: what is a ‘showstopper’ so a fact that needs to go in or something that has to come out because it’s incorrect, what’s personal opinion and what’s style. And if you have a really clear idea of that, there does come a point where you can say, ‘Actually, no, I’ve taken in everything I need to take in and I’m happy with the piece now.’   Just to add to that, sharing with the team and the team is the editor, of all things I’ve written and shared with you or shared with the team, I’ve never had a case where it’s been made worse by a suggestion, the work has always improved.   Angus Montgomery: If the person who is giving you feedback understands what this piece of writing is trying to do and that person is sort of vaguely competent, then they will give you useful constructive feedback.    Sarah Stewart: I feel like maybe we’re rambling on this or maybe I’m rambling on this, but In terms of feedback givers, it’s very easy to criticise someone. It’s very easy to say ‘this isn’t good’. It takes intelligence to say what’s not quite working about it. So when you are giving feedback to someone, really consider, first of all, of course, their feelings because you don’t want to come across as, well you don’t want to be an awful person, but what’s useful for them to know about this. And we’ve got some fantastic posters around the office on how to give feedback effectively. So just make sure that if you’re required to give feedback, you’re doing it in an intelligent, kind way.   Angus Montgomery: In a constructive fashion.   Sarah Stewart: Yes, better.    Angus Montgomery: and your next point?   Sarah Stewart:... is to ‘read’. Reading is as important as writing. If you want to be a really good writer, you have to read lots and you should read good things. You know like the classics like Nabokov, James Joyce and Jane Austen. Yes of course you should read them because they’re fantastic, and it’s a pleasure to read a good writer.    But also, just  don’t be too much of a snob about it.Read a Mills and Boon book, read Fifty Shades of Grey, and again no shade on E.L James because she’s a multi-millionaire doing what she loves.   Angus Montgomery: It takes skill to write that stuff surely.   Sarah Stewart: Yeah. In particular I would say read poetry. Not only because I think it’s super cool, poetry can teach you a lot about conveying complex ideas in a very short space of time and you know, we’re you know kids of the digital age, we don’t have a very long attention span so understanding how to kind of compress ideas is very important.   But poetry can teach you a lot about the music of a sentence. And especially for speech writing, it’s particularly important. A poem can teach you about the sound of words, the meter, how a piece scans, it’s called scansion. So there’s no alchemy to writing really well, it is just about practicing writing and reading.    Angus Montgomery: Any poem in particular or poet in particular?   Sarah Stewart: Well...good question. I would recommend the Confessional poets, so like Sylvia Plath. But actually, do you know what? Any American poet from the 1950s onwards because American poetry in particular, they have a way of, I say ‘they’ in a very general sense, I would recommend the Confessional School and the New York School in particular  – – as you’ve asked – because they just say it how it is.    And also the Beat poets as well, although they can talk a lot in abstraction, you can learn a lot by their directness.   Angus Montgomery: Yeah.    Sarah Stewart: So yeah. Ginsberg, Kerouac.   Angus Montgomery: Yeah.   Sarah Stewart: Frank O'Hara.   Angus Montgomery: Very minimal viable words.    My next principle, next tip, is quite a practical one. And it’s something that might not work for everyone, but I find really really helpful, which is to never start with a blank page.   So if you’re writing something, the scariest thing is when you kind of open up a Word doc or a Google doc or have a physical sheet of blank paper in front of you, and you’re like ‘oh my god, what do I do with this now?’ like ‘I need to turn this from this blank sheet into a speech or an article or a blog post or a presentation or whatever it might be.    And that blankness is the most terrifying part of this and starting is the most terrifying part of any project and writing is no different. So the way that I deal with that is when I have a blank page in front of me, I immediately go to Google or other search engines are available obviously, and or previous pieces that I’ve done that are similar, copy paste and just throw as much text as I can on to that page, that even if it’s only tangentially similar, gives me something to work from.   So that I’m not starting from scratch, so that I have something to bounce ideas off of or something re-work or something that guides me in the right direction, and also takes away that fear of you know, just having a totally blank page in front of you.   Sarah Stewart: I do that all the time actually. If I’m writing a speech for example, I always write ‘good morning or good afternoon everyone’. And then if anyone asks me if I’ve made any progress, I can at least say I’ve made a start!   Angus Montgomery: Yeah exactly. The vital start is there.    Sarah Stewart: Yeah. It’s psychologically important to have something down on paper.    Angus Montgomery: Yeah.    Sarah Stewart: You’re right.   Angus Montgomery: So I think it’s that, it’s that starting and then sort of flowing, flowing from there basically.    Sarah Stewart: Yeah.   Angus Montgomery: And what’s your next principle?   Sarah Stewart: So my next principle I’ve entitled, ‘enough is enough’. So just don’t overdo it. Just write enough, and enough doesn’t mean writing an epic poem nor does it mean writing a haiku. Sorry, there are a lot of poetry allusions in this – but it means writing enough to get the job done.    And the poet Frank O’Hara had a lovely quote about, you should read it, it’s called...it’s in a piece of writing that he called Personism: A Manifesto. And he describes writing and how effective writing is wearing a piece of clothing so it fits you perfectly, so it does exactly the job that it’s meant to do.    Angus Montgomery: It’s showing the thing.   Sarah Stewart: And you might ‘show the thing’...it’s a very confusing analogy.    Angus Montgomery: It’s a very confusing mixing, we’re mixing several metaphors here to prove a point.   Sarah Stewart: Yeah.   Angus Montgomery: But yeah. And bringing me, without really a segue in this one, but bringing us nicely nevertheless to the final point which is, ‘stay human’.   And this is not necessarily a writing point, this is something obviously that we should be all doing all the time in whatever work we do, but the reason I’m talking about it, and we’ve touched on this several times, writing isn’t something that we just do in isolation on our own    Writing our, the writing that we do is helping one person, one human being, convey a message to another person, another human being or a group of them. And the people in that process are really really important, like the written word is important, but the people in that process are the most important parts.   So just when we’re dealing with people, we always try to be as nice and humble and listen as much as we can and advice and guide and all those sorts of things. But just try and do it nicely because it can be a stressful situation for people.  So thank you Sarah.   Sarah Stewart: Thank you Angus. This has been nice, hasn’t it?   Angus Montgomery: This has been nice.   Sarah Stewart: So that brings us to the end of our 10 principles. This podcast will be embedded into a blog post, which will be published on the GDS blog. Please leave your comments for clear writing and any advice that you have for others.   Angus Montgomery: Thank you for listening to the latest episode of the GDS podcast. We hope you enjoyed it and if you want to listen to previous episodes that we’ve done or what to subscribe for the future, then please just do to wherever it is that you download your podcasts from and hit the subscribe button.   And we hope to have you as a listener again soon.    Sarah Stewart: Farewell.   

The GOV.UK Platform as a Service team provides insight into how the service works and how it helps public sector organisations to host digital services. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider:  Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today we will be talking about GOV.UK Platform as a Service. GDS has a reputation for creating best in class digital products and services for government, and GOV.UK Platform as a Service - or GOV.UK PaaS for short - is one of them.    GOV.UK PaaS helps public sector organisations to secure and swiftly host their digital services without worrying about infrastructure. It’s currently used by 131 organisations, runs 1,652 applications and recently celebrated passing its live service assessment, providing a joined-up experience across channels.    Joining me are Clare Barnett and Mark Buckley. Thank you for being here. Would you mind introducing yourselves to the listeners?   Clare Barnett:  Yeah. Hi, everyone, I'm Clare. I'm a Senior Researcher on GOV.UK PaaS. And my role involves spending most of my time with users of GOV.UK PaaS, understanding what they need from our platform, understanding how current features work and what we can do to improve them, and also understanding how we might need to develop the product in the future to help meet needs that we're not currently catering for.    Vanessa Schneider:  Great, thanks, Clare. Mark?   Mark Buckley:  Hiya, I'm Mark Buckley, I'm Product Manager on GOV.UK PaaS. And that means that a lot of the user needs and things that Clare identifies and other folks on the team, I help to prioritise in order to iterate and hopefully make that product better.    Vanessa Schneider:  Great. So both of you mentioned GOV.UK PaaS and I also gave an introduction at the top of the episode but I’m sure [laughs] our listeners would value hearing from an expert what GOV.UK PaaS actually is.    Mark Buckley:  So GOV.UK Platform as a Service - or as we abbreviate it to PaaS as it's quite the mouthful - is a cloud hosting platform essentially, where service teams around government and public sector can use us to host their applications and digital services in the cloud. So whether that's a service living on GOV.UK like the Teaching Service or a simple informational website such as technical documentation or something like that, they can host their app, those applications on our platform.   The platform side of it, and is doing this sort of hard work of connecting and running the infrastructure that underpins the World Wide Web. So is akin to the plumbing in a house. So, yeah, we take care of that so the service teams don't have to.    Vanessa Schneider:  Great, thanks Mark.    Clare, as a user researcher, can you tell us why should people use PaaS? Does that come up maybe in your work?    Clare Barnett:  Yeah, it absolutely does. And, you know, I'm talking close all the time and I'm always hearing: one of the things that we hear is how we can improve the product. But we're always hearing the good stuff as well and why people use us. And I mean, essentially PaaS is there to help teams avoid unnecessary overheads.   So it means that they don't have to run the infrastructure themselves and they don't need to have Web Ops capability in-house, which means they can focus their time and budget on running their service. And what we hear from our users is that using GOV.UK PaaS, it means that they can avoid procurement blockers, it's much easier to-to use us than it is other commercial services because they don't have to go through long procurement processes.   We also offer a great developer experience, which we've spent a lot of time developing and improving over the years. And we're trusted - we hear from a lot of users that the fact that PaaS is developed by the public sector for the public sector is a really good thing for our users. It helps avoid lock-in with expensive suppliers and it feels much more collaborative as well. And overall, we're offering teams much better value for money than, than some of the commercial providers out there.   Vanessa Schneider:  Do you ever have people coming in thinking they know what PaaS is and you've got to clear up a couple of misconceptions?    Clare Barnett:  I mean, I think we have people who maybe think they can use PaaS in a slightly different way to the way that they, they do. But I mean, I would say some of the common misconceptions are that: it's only for developers. And actually that's not true at all. We do have a number of designers using GOV.UK PaaS to host their prototypes. So yes, we-we do have some misconceptions, but we're able to clear those up quite easily.    Mark Buckley: Yeah, I-I suppose more often than not, we get misconceptions the other way, as in they don't know what PaaS is or aren't clear on sort of the benefits or the purpose for us.   A lot of teams we hear from: 'oh, well, it's only for, available for central government. It's made for central government by central government'. But that's not the case. We've done a lot of work over the years in opening up those contracts and focussing on the-the needs of not just central government, but the wider public sector. So we have teams and services from the devolved administrations, Northern Ireland Assembly use like pretty extensively, local authorities use us, NHS use us, College of Policing use us there - so we have representation from right across the public sector.   And I suppose another kind of misconception   is that GOV.UK PaaS is only suitable for very simple services, such as, as I mentioned earlier, sort of a static website or something like that. But again, that's not true. We have quite we're a, we're a very flexible and powerful platform actually. And some of the services that folks might know: so the Document Checking Service is running on GOV.UK PaaS and GOV.UK Notify, which is, over, certainly over COVID, has become pretty much the UK's notification platform that also runs on GOV.UK PaaS. So we-we have the kind of full spectrum of services living quite happily and running reliably on GOV.UK PaaS.   Vanessa Schneider:  I imagine that listeners know maybe of the word cloud, cloud hosting - because we do have a sizeable audience in the Digital, Data and Technology space. I'm sure they also know that there's commercial providers in this instance. So what motivated government to create this tool rather than just relying on external providers?   Mark Buckley:  GOV.UK PaaS, yeah, is not the only Platform as a Service offering or cloud hosting offering that is available to public sector. Indeed, there is a somewhat confusing overlap with G-Cloud where you could procure different types of cloud hosting provider potentially. But we as a GOV.UK PaaS is a Platform as a Service which when it comes to cloud hosting and that type of thing, is different from Infrastructure as a Service, which is generally what private sector infrastructure providers would provide.    And if services or teams decide to use that, they will have to stitch together and do all of that kind of plumbing themselves because there's sort of more raw materials. And in-in doing that, will have to hire and recruit significant web operations capability. Because we are a platform, we've done all that, built it once with the needs of government at its heart. So to-to fit with the-the kind of M.O. of the rest of the government as a platform products. So GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay and our ourselves: we built it once so that it can be reused and across the public sector, so that there isn't that same duplication of effort. And cloud infrastructure and hosting is not a simple kind of area and takes a lot of investment. So it's, you know, the, that we've provided or invested a lot in that is beneficial hopefully to other service teams.   Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, definitely build once, use many, it's a favourite phrase in-in our organisation.    Right. So obviously, you are working on the product itself. I was wondering if you maybe in user research, hear about the kind of challenges people have been able to overcome thanks to GOV.UK PaaS or whether you've got a particular case that you'd consider a success story.   Clare Barnett:  Yeah. So we-we hear a lot of the time that teams are able to move a lot faster when they are using GOV.UK PaaS. So they're able to deploy faster. Just generally it kind of helps their internal processes. We take away a lot of the work that otherwise they might have to do themselves.    So some research that we did recently around users evaluating PaaS for use. One user actually said to us: ‘largely all of the effort is offloaded onto ourselves’. So they see the value for money in that the-the service doesn't really feel like very expensive at all. You know we're taking away a lot of the work that-that users would actually have to do in their teams, that's being placed on us.   On top of that, the support that we offer is really comprehensive. So whereas if a team was using a commercial competitor of ours, they might be paying quite hefty sums to have a support model in place. With GOV.UK PaaS, they get all of that included and they get access to 24/7 support. So it-it really is-it's the speed at which people are able to operate and the fact that they can reduce their team size, they don't have to have web ops capability. And the fact that overall that these things combine to help them save money and get bet-better value for money in the long term.   Vanessa Schneider:  If someone is curious to find out more, maybe take their own time and to look at information, where can they go?   Clare Barnett: Yeah, so if you'd like to find out more about PaaS and how it works, then you can go to our website, which is cloud.service.gov.uk for more information. If you're already using PaaS, then you can contact our support channel, and again, if you go to cloud.service.gov.uk, you'll see a support thing in the top right hand corner of the page.    Vanessa Schneider:  So obviously we've heard brilliant things about PaaS now, but don’t just trust us seeing as we are the organisation [laughs] that developed GOV.UK PaaS. We’ve actually chatted with some tenants. So first off we will be hearing from Himal Mandalia.    [VOX POP STARTS] Himal Mandalia:  Hi I'm Himal. So I've joined GDS recently as Head of Technology for GOV.UK. I've been working around government digital for about the last 6 years. Working at the Ministry of Justice Digital and the Department of Education.   So I've just joined about a month ago, but over the last few months since last year, there's been some experimentation running, some trials around GOV.UK Accounts.   As part of the trial, the first step was to-to offer an account along with the Brexit Transition Checker. So as a user, as a citizen, you-you go through a journey, you get to some answers that you might want, but then you may want personalised notifications when some of that content changes and you may want a return journey, you may want to come back and, and see, see what you selected previously.   Now, that's not being hosted along with the sort of main GOV.UK stack. GOV.UK is quite a large, complex service made up of many, many applications which are hosted on an infrastructure platform that's fairly manually set up and we are shifting over to something that will meet our evolving and quite sophisticated needs.   But for the experiment particularly the-the Accounts prototype - GOV.UK PaaS was the obvious thing to use for that. You know, just get it in there. You can deploy to it easily. You can tear it down. You can spin up additional things. And, you know, in my role as Head of Technology, I'm quite comfortable with advocating PaaS for any additional things like that. And as we, as we, as we go about re-platforming a lot of those components for GOV.UK, I definitely want to keep PaaS on the table as an option for some of those services that are very modular, that can just be, be stood up and, and then run very easily.    Vanessa Schneider:  Do you mind sharing what you think the advantage is of hosting on GOV.UK PaaS versus other solutions?   Himal Mandalia:  What things don't you want to have to worry about? What things are just, you know, what's termed the undifferentiated heavy lifting. It's really the same for many of these use cases, and you just want it to happen magically. You don't want to have to think about it. You don't want anyone doing it. And a lot of that is that that site reliability engineering, the the infrastructure engineering required to create the environment in which your application lives. And you and this is where, this is where PaaS comes in because that's all set up for you. A developer can just issue a few commands and create an environment, and launch the app.    I was describing this to some non-technical stakeholders and leadership in DfE a year or 2 ago, there was some confusion around, you know, why would we want PaaS when we have a cloud platform already? And I said, well, it's like having access to a-a really, really high quality construction site. So you've got your space to-to build your roads and your houses and you've got these amazing construction tools, but you need a level of specialism. You need actual-actual architects. You need people that can lay, can lay the electricity, wires under the road. You need to do a lot of stuff to build a few houses, but you have complete control in how you set, in how you set that up.   PaaS is much more like moving into a, moving, moving into a flat that's just ready, and all you need to do is worry about the furnishings, what you're going to put in there. And that was a very sort of loose sort of metaphor that I kept sort of pushing the boundaries on, and it broke a few times. But it's, it's, it's pretty much that: it's that, it's that thing, your application just needs somewhere to live. You just want to take care of that furnishing layer of it, not have to worry about the wiring up the walls for any electrics.    You know, organisationally you need a range of options. You do need the very low level infrastructure offering for-for the things that are very differentiated. And you need to have a very customised infrastructure build. But you also need those things that remove all of that heavy lifting and just let teams put apps out there.   And I think I've encountered in some places a very one dimensional view of what cloud means. It's, it's, it's basically a case of a one size fits all solutions, which is, which is not really the nuanced view that's needed. A nuanced view is ensuring you have the capabilities across the spectrum to handle all of your use cases. And some will be very IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service. But PaaS should definitely be there. And I think the, I think, I think the zenith of something like that is fully self-serve PaaS, which is, which is where we are with GOV.UK PaaS. It's, it's, it's great. And we just need to keep iterating it, improving it.   [VOX POP ENDS]   Vanessa Schneider:  I was wondering if anything particular stuck out to you or maybe we can discuss what it is about people working with PaaS that you all go to building and construction metaphors [laughs]?   Mark Buckley:  Yeah, well, thanks to Himal for speaking so eloquently and positively about GOV.UK PaaS.   A couple of things sort of jumped out at me that it'd be really good to sort of reiterate. And one of those is: Himal mentioning it's not a, there's not a, it's, it's not a one-dimensional, one-size-fits-all when it comes to PaaS. There's absolutely no reason why services and departments can't use things in addition to PaaS, or as well as PaaS.   So Himal mentioned where there are those really sort of complex or specialised differentiated services. Then absolutely GOV.UK PaaS probably isn't the platform for-for them. But there are also vast swathes of services and applications across government that are quite typical, sort of 3-tier applications as they're kind of known in development terms. So there might be a presentation layer and a data layer and application layer all mixing together. They work really well on GOV.UK Paas, and that essentially is probably the majority of the services that run on GOV.UK, for instance, or not on GOV.UK but are part of that.   So if you're searching for a teacher vacancy as kind of said before or looking for your energy performance certificate at MHCLG [Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government], these are all services that run really well on GOV.UK PaaS and take that stress or drama away from Developers and Web Ops Engineers so they can concentrate on other things.   Clare Barnett:  I was just going to add to that - that's something that kind of stood out for me was when Himal talked about wanting to use GOV.UK PaaS for other applications that they're looking to standup on GOV.UK as well. Because we hear that from a lot of users of the platform that once they've used it once, quite often they become advocates for GOV.UK PaaS.   You know they are selling it within their own organisations and wanting to use GOV.UK PaaS for as many things as they can and as many services suitable for. And basically end up with a really strong community of users who are really good at sharing with each other and, and, and sharing the patterns that they use and the way that they do things with, with other users to help them understand how they might be able to use the platform for their specific needs, which is, which is really great. And yeah, and it's nice for us to know that, you know, once someone used us once, actually they want to use us again.    Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, I'm, I'm really enjoying hearing all the positive news about it, and it must be really nice to have that sort of unintended consequence of people becoming these evangelists essentially and also supporting each other when it comes to the use of it.   So next we’ll be hearing from Colin Saliceti and his experience using GOV.UK PaaS at Department for Education.    [VOX POP STARTS]   Colin Saliceti:  Hi, my name is Colin Saliceti and I work for the Department for Education in the Teacher Services area. Teacher Services is a big area in the Department of Education [DfE], and our goal is to get excellent teachers for every child. My job title is actually Lead Infrastructure Engineer and me and my colleague, we take care of the cloud infrastructure for all the services that are developed in Teacher Services.    Vanessa Schneider:  So Colin, thanks for introducing yourself. You work in Teacher Services, I was wondering, how does that relate to PaaS?    Colin Saliceti:  In Teacher Services, we create and develop a number of services for, mainly for teachers and their careers. So we have a number of service teams which do a lot of development. So we need to provide them with the best tools to deploy their services and make it available for the, the public. And PaaS is a very good tool for that. We have different options. But we have experimented with one service which was teaching vacancies earlier, and this proved a massive success. And then next, we expanded to more and more services.    For example, Get Into Teaching, which is our main information website for teachers. That's where they can get information about the career, they can get in touch with an advisor, they can subscribe to events, and they can actually start the process to get them to-to become a teacher.   And it ties well with another service that's also on PaaS, called Find Teacher Training. So the future candidates can find a-a teacher training. So this is a very important website that the providers of training all across England advertise their courses and the candidates can apply for them through the website.   And we also have another one, which is Register Trainee Teacher - which is also on PaaS; it's not live yet, but it's almost there - where we can actually track all the, the trainees and see at which stage they are in-in their training and follow them in the beginning of their career. So there's quite a number of different services and it's just growing.     Vanessa Schneider:  So our next question is what the advantage is of hosting on PaaS versus other solutions, would you mind explaining what the benefit of it is?    Colin Saliceti:  The first thing is because it's easy compared to different platforms.    It's not easy because it's simple. It's easy because t-the platform packages a lot of features, but the way to use it, the interface to use it is, it's-it's quite easy for us. So we don't actually need a highly skilled specialist, at least in the beginning, to get on board with PaaS. So a Service Team with developers, they can manage themselves to deploy to-to PaaS without any assistance, at least in the first stages.   It's very important that it's a very flexible platform. And we can deploy the production website, but we can deploy many test websites if we need to, and we can deploy a new one for, to test something in particular, and then we can destroy it because we don't need it again and we don't need to pay for it again. So that, this flexibility is very important. And it also makes it very cost effective because we only pay for what we use and when we don't need it, we can scale down or just delete it.     Vanessa Schneider:  I was wondering if you have a user story that relates to the service that shows why it was a good idea to go with PaaS.    Colin Saliceti:  I got a very good example in the, actually, in the other part of the department.   After Teaching Vacancies, which was the-the first, it became obvious that PaaS was a good choice and some of other teams adopted it as well in, in DfE. So you may have heard of the laptops that we delivered to all the schools and for the disadvantaged kids who, to help them do the homeschooling. And so this was done thanks to a programme called Get Help with Tech. This was built very quickly and it was built on PaaS from day one. And PaaS proved that there was very important because we were able to build very quickly and iterate very quickly until we got the service right and we're able to deliver to all the schools in England.    Vanessa Schneider:  So I was wondering if I was a member of a different government department or a different team, how would you convince me to use GOV.UK PaaS?   Colin Saliceti:  First of all, the reasons I already explained: that it's easy to use and the, the learning curve is very easy. This flexibility is amazing as well, and that's really cost effective.   It's also very important that it's provided by government, it's not a separate commercial platform, it is actually provided by GDS. So all the security assurance has already been done and it's assured up to different levels of confidentiality. So you don't actually, in your department, you don't actually need to do that work again because it was already done by GDS.   And another thing is that because it's supported by GDS and we have an amazing relationship with them and we get an excellent support for them, from them, from the people who build and actually run the platform, and we have direct contact with them. And they're also here 24/7 in case of an issue. Which, so it's a great experience to run things on PaaS.    [VOX POP ENDS]   Vanessa Schneider:  So that was Colin. I also want to hasten to add, he was very concerned with appearing impartial because he did work at GDS previously on PaaS. Just wanted to make sure that he was completely representing DfE only.   Mark Buckley:  And that's the impartial version? Well, that's, that's good to hear. [chair squeaks]   Vanessa Schneider:  I think your chair just laughed.   Mark Buckley:  Yeah, potentially.    No, we've been working with DfE and Colin for, for a long time, but it's, it's great that Colin is still enjoying the benefits of our platform.   Vanessa Schneider:  Anything stand out otherwise? I was wondering, he mentioned, for instance, the really good support that you provide and I think, Clare, you mentioned that as well, coming out in your user research interviews.    Clare Barnett:  Yeah, that comes up a-alot when we talk to our users, because it's part of what makes PaaS so cost-effective for people, but it's also it-it means that people feel reassured that they're going to get the help and support. They get you know, responses. There's a really quick turnaround time for, for responses.   And we offer it not just through our support platform, called Zendesk, but we'll say through Slack. So there-there's multiple channels that people can use to get that support. And they will always be speaking to somebody from the team, as Colin said, who is well-versed in the platform, very experienced. And often the team will pair on them if they're trying to troubleshoot or problem-solve something and-and often help them fix problems that are not actually a PaaS problem. It might be that there's a problem with their, their code their end and quite often the PaaS team help identify that. So there's a lot of added value in that support package for our users.   Vanessa Schneider:  That seems to chime a lot as well with what Colin is talking about in terms of it being a really good test environment, in terms of being able to try things out, see if they work or not. Is that a common kind of use case across government?   Mark Buckley:  Yeah it's, but...we-we support services and applications running from everything from discoveries and alphas. As Colin was kind of mentioning, sort quick prototypes to check the viability. As Clare mentioned earlier, designers using it to test out and iterate sort of content and things like that. So you've got that at, at the start of the journey, but also all the way up to running mature products and services that teams do iterate on and improve those as well after going live, as it were.   It’s, in a sort of roundabout, roundabout way both Colin and Himal mentioned that things like Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, and requiring real expertise and specialists. And quite often in government and early on in those services when they're getting up and running, will rely on suppliers and external parties to come in, maybe contractors, to come in and build things. And if they're built with incredibly specialist skills, then that becomes really difficult to maintain in the long term when the build team might have moved on to other projects for instance.   Having a platform like GOV.UK PaaS enables services to only need to recruit and employ Developers that they need and not the additional specialists and some, that kind of thing so that they can quickly iterate and test things out and not be at risk of not being able to support what they're doing over the long term. So, yeah, it's, what Colin said kind of brings a tear to the eye, right, in terms of being able to quickly build those things on a supported platform that can then enable support to folks in lockdown that really need help with education and homeschool.    Vanessa Schneider:  We always love it when our services have that direct impact, I think it's a lot more relatable to people to say I've got my kid a refurbished laptop, rather than saying that now you can get your document checked, because obviously Document Checking Service is much more a business-to-business kind of environment, isn't it?   So we've heard from some of the people who are using GOV.UK PaaS about why they like it, and about how your team develops it, but I think it's time now to share some GOV.UK PaaS fast facts with our listeners. As a starter for 10, can you tell me whether there's maybe a record for how fast a service was stood up via GOV.UK PaaS?   Mark Buckley:  You know, even though we are, from a development point of view, you can do a cf push and your application is running in minutes, in terms of actual real life bonafide services, the Shielded Vulnerable People Service as part of the support for people shielding and to get them support during coronavirus, the, there was a first kind of pull request on that service at 4pm on a Thursday, and the service itself went live when the Prime Minister a-announced it on, on the Monday.   So you know, within the space of 4 days, you've got something stood up and running on PaaS that, and the first care packages, or support packages, delivered to people within a week kind of thing. Which, yeah, at-at the beginning when, you know it seems like a long time ago now, was this was almost, almost almost a year ago, it was like indispensable to have GOV.UK PaaS and the other common platforms as well, GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay as ways to very quickly, cheaply and easily stand up new services. So 4 days to support the Vulnerable People Service was a really nice thing to do. I don't know if it's a record, but it's a good, good story.   Vanessa Schneider: If you want to hear more about how this service was stood up, you can listen to our February episode of the podcast.    Clearly GOV.UK PaaS has had an important part to play in the UK government response to coronavirus but what other services do you host that you think listeners might be surprised by?    Mark Buckley:  It's not only GOV.UK designed system services and things like that, as, as mentioned, NHS, local authorities, various kinds of things are hosted. I think the probably most unusual service that is hosted on GOV.UK PaaS is called Cosmic Bazaar - and not bizarre as in unusual, although it is unusual, Bazaar as is in markets or souk [laughs] I suppose - which is a forecasting platform for economists to hone their, yeah forecasting and evaluation skills as part of the Cabinet Office. So that was an unusual one to be posed with.    Vanessa Schneider:  Clare, I'm thinking that across all of these various services that are being set up on PaaS, the user research element of it is probably still going to remain consistent even as the applications vary across the 'bazaar' to the mundane. Is that right?   Clare Barnett:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes, we have a really wide variety of services, but within that we have a kind of core set of different types of users - they fit into you know, a certain user type that we see. Which means that we can build the product around those user types rather than building and designing the product around very kind of specific niche services.    Vanessa Schneider:  So my final question is just about whether you've known about any other governments taking advantage of our research here. For instance Notify, we've been quite grateful and flattered where the Australian government, the Canadian government, the Department for Veteran Affairs in America, they've used the GitHub basically forked it and made their own variations of it. I was wondering, have you heard about that being the case maybe for PaaS?   Mark Buckley:  We actually have a bit of a kind of community ourselves with other, other 'PaaS's' from around the world. So our PaaS, GOV.UK PaaS, is built upon a technology called Cloud Foundry, which is the abstraction layer I suppose away from the raw infrastructure that Colin and others have talked about. And as well as ourselves, also the Australian government and the American government, Cloud.Gov, use Cloud Foundry as well. So there's been quite a lot of sharing between our teams. So 18F was the kind of equivalent of GDS in America. We have quite frequent contact with them. We have shared our repos, we've used some of their repos. So yeah, that's a lovely global community of Cloud Foundry and PaaS users.   Vanessa Schneider:  That’s so great. Like I know we do a lot of international work but it’s, it’s really quite heartening to see that what, you know that we’re collaborating internationally in something that’s so important. What a lovely note to end on right?   So yeah, thank you so much to all of our guests for coming on today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. The transcripts are available on PodBean.    Goodbye.    Mark Buckley:  Bye.    Clare Barnett:  Bye.

Tom Read, CEO of GDS, sits down to chat about his first few months and what’s next, taking us through the GDS strategy for 2021 to 2024. Do you enjoy the GDS Podcast? Help us to make it even better by completing our short, anonymous survey. The transcript for the episode follows: -------------   Vanessa Schneider:  Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today I'm joined by the Chief Executive Officer for GDS, and that's Tom Read.    Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. I know that you joined GDS back in February, which in these times feels like an eternity. But could you please introduce yourself and what do you do to our listeners?    Tom Read:  Sure. And thank you for having me. So I'm Tom. I'm the Director General and Chief Executive of the Government Digital Service. As you said, I've been here just over 3 months now. So effectively my job is to set the strategy for the Government Digital Service, work out how it aligns with ministerial priorities, how much money we've got, what we're currently working on, and then keep out of people's way as much as possible and let people get on with delivery. That's sort of what I'm here for, I think.    Vanessa Schneider:  OK, I hear it's not your first rodeo at GDS: do you mind sharing how this experience is different?    Tom Read:  Yeah. So I was, I was at GDS from for about 2 years in 2013 to 2015. Back then, I mean, everything was quite different. I worked in Liam Maxwell's area, which was the sort of, the more, the tech area than the digital area, and I was brought in to run a technology transformation programme in the Cabinet Office itself, plus DCMS [Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport]. It was great fun, really good fun.    How is it different? I don't know. It's... GDS back then was was smaller, much more sort of a scrappy start-up. It had this sort of triumvirate of real heavy hitters in Mike Bracken and Liam Maxwell and the Minister, Francis Maude, now Lord Maude. And so it had a really, it sort of felt very much on the bleeding edge and it was very much going out and trying to push down some doors to get people to-to let it exist and let it really make a difference. I think a lot of that spirit is still, still here in GDS. But there's a little thing I've written in-in our new strategy, which is we're not in start-up mode anymore. And I think that's it's quite important to recognise, we-we've, we've done that phase and now we're sort of maturing a little bit. So it's slightly different. But the spirit is the same.    So after 2015, I basically I did 2 years of just like super intense work, like it was just, you know, really, really fun. So much fun but incredibly tiring. And I basically sort of said, right, that's, that's it. That's my little tour of duty in government done. And I-I went off and joined a consultancy and about 3 months in working for the consultancy, which was a lovely place, really lovely place, great people. I suddenly thought, ‘ack, I'm not done, actually. I-I-I really miss government already’.    So later that year I applied for a few roles and I was successful in a role as the Chief Technology Officer at the Department for Business, as was. And I'd worked there with amazing people like Emma Stace, Mark O'Neill and other people, it was just - Andrew Greenway - it was, it was a really great team. And we really started to create a digital movement in that weird department because it's like a small policy department with loads of arm's length bodies. And it was good fun and we really got going.    And then there was the machinery of government change. So energy and climate change came in, education went out so universities and things went out to education. And I don't know if any of our listeners have been through machinery of government changes, they're like mergers acquisitions in the private sector. I kind of saw the writing on the wall. I thought that there isn't space for, for 3 directors in what was to become BEIS [Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy].    And so I started to look around government and it happened. There was a vacancy coming up at the Ministry of Justice [MoJ] working for Sir Richard Heaton, who I worked to when I was at GDS, he was the Perm Sec[retary] of the Cabinet Office and one of my all time sort of heroes in government. And so I was sort of managed moved across to MoJ. And that's where I've been for the last 4 and a half years. Up until now, by a long way, the best job I've ever had in my career. It was just this incredible, meaningful work of helping some of the most vulnerable people in society to fix their lives and get an education and get their lives back on track. It was brilliant. So yeah, I've been, I've been in a few departments.    Vanessa Schneider:  Well, they tend to say, don't meet your heroes, but it seems to have worked out really well for you. I also wanted to give a shout out to Emma Stace because the Department for Education Digital and Technology team has just launched their first podcast episode with Emma in it.    Tom Read:  Oh, awesome. Oh, well, fantastic. Well, listen to that one. She'll be amazing.    Vanessa Schneider:  [laughs] But also listen to us!   Tom Read:  Obviously listen to us!   Vanessa Schneider:  So it's clear to me, just listening to you that you're passionate about digital government, always coming back to it as well and looking at your resume in general. But I was wondering why that was. What is the power of digital?    Tom Read:  What is the power of digital? That's a really good question. So the thing that's unique about digital teams in government, but also outside government, is we just have a relentless focus on users and how they work. And I know a lot of bits of government do that as well - it would be a bit insulting to policymakers to suggest we're the only people who do that.    But any bit of digital design, whether you're working for a supermarket or a retailer or a bank or government, you have to design around how users use things because otherwise they don't use them. And then you're wasting everyone's time, right? In government, I think we've used digital, now more the word data, user needs, these sort of things, kind of as stalking horses, they're, they're ways of expressing designing things around how users work. And I just think that's a great opportunity.    I also think government itself is fascinating because some some bits of government have been around for hundreds of years and some bits have been around for a thousand years. And without being simplistic, some of the processes haven't changed very much in that time. And so you can stick a website over it. But really, you need to look at the whole, you know, policy through to what outcomes you're trying to get, the process, and then digitise that. And I think that's really missing from how we talk about digital in a lot of cases.    Vanessa Schneider:  So, you mentioned obviously that you've been here for 3 months and some people make a big deal out of it - the first 100 days somebody has spent in a new job, especially in a leadership position. Is there anything that you're keen to share that you've learnt in this time, or maybe you found something that surprised you?    Tom Read:  Yeah, I mean, just so much. It's quite weird hearing it's been 3 months actually, because, in the nicest possible way, it feels like a lot longer. And I do mean that in a positive way. I've learnt a lot. There's, there's a lot. GDS is a funny place because everybody's got an opinion about GDS just anywhere in government. And beyond actually, everyone's got an opinion about what's good, what's bad. There's a whole set of people on Twitter who seem to spend most of their lives just commenting on what on what GDS is doing. And it's really peculiar. And so coming in, or sort of back in, but, but into this role from a department has been fascinating.    So it's sort of off the top of my head, a few things I've I've learnt. One is I think the, GDS is just completely full of, like, super intelligent, incredibly civic-minded people who care. And I think, yeah, I don't want to go on a soapbox rant about this, but that's probably the thing that people really miss when they're judging GDS, is just how much people care about, you know, service design and, you know, the underlying technology and content design, accessibility, all these things that really matter. It just, it really infuses everything when you're speaking to people. And there are people who have been here for like 7 or 10 years who just still have the same absolute passion for improving public services, which is amazing. I mean, I've got a short attention span, so a lot of respect for those sort of people.    On the, on the, sort of, the more complex side. I think, the first, we still sort of hark back quite a bit to sort of the first 5 years of, of GDS, which I don't think is uncommon in a sort of quote unquote start-up. You hark back to the early days - I was speaking to a friend who works at Monzo recently. And he was saying everyone still talks about when there were 30 of us and we were trying to build from scratch. We're not like that anymore. So I think, I think a lot of people still look back at where we had all this support and we were crashing down doors and building things. And it was busy and we were on stage a lot. And then there were 5 years of much quieter GDS over the last 5 years - still doing very important work, but taking much more of a collegiate view. And I think one of the things I've been puzzling through over the last 3 months is how do you get the happy balance between those 2? I think maybe we need to get back a little bit into the setting direction and pushing delivery as well as working together.    Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah I mean, I think one of the things that people remember when they hearken back to those good old days is also the mottos that sprung up. There's a lot of stuff that we say at GDS that has spread beyond, that's really been used a lot. For instance, doing the hard work to make it easy for the user. So obviously our ambition is to make dealing with government easier. Where do you think we are in this mission?    Tom Read:  That's not what I thought you were going to ask me. So I think we're at a really interesting point. So thing, things that have been done well over the last 10 years, we talk a lot about the really good services. There are lots of services in government that are better than you would find in the private sector. And I think that the narrative that government's never going to be quite as good as the private sector: I've worked in the private sector. It's just not true.    We're all roughly trying hard, dealing with legacy, dealing with complexity, competing demands, that kind of thing. So there are a bunch of things that have been done just incredibly well. So, you know, the passport service is just an exemplar. There are amazing things in digital tax. There's stuff we were doing at MoJ, there's there's stuff at DWP [Department for Work and Pensions], which is really, you know, pushing the boundary and properly, you know, micro-services, architectured services that will last and stand the test of time.    Equally, I think I think we just declared victory way too early. So it's one of the first things I was sent when I joined GDS was, I was like, we've got a list of the the paper forms in government, you know, the, the services that have never been touched. And I was sent a spreadsheet with with 4,000 lines, and each line is a PDF or a Word doc, that a user has to download, fill in, so they need a printer, then they can fax or post it. So you either need a fax machine - I genuinely don't know how that, how that technology works in the digital age - or you go to the Post Office and I think it's just not good enough.    So I think from that perspective, we've done a lot. We've embedded amazing digital talent across government. GOV.UK is standing firm and is still a really excellent sort of front end of government. But we've got a lot more to do. And I also think we're slightly, we have still been thinking in the context of 10 years ago, where it was a publishing layer and then individual silo transactions, I think we need to move beyond that now. We'll probably talk about that a bit more later. But I think we need to move beyond what was a good idea 10 years ago and iterate - use some of our, use some of our own secret sauce for that.    Vanessa Schneider:  I am so curious. Where did you think I was going to go with that question? [laughs]   Tom Read:  I thought you were going to ask me about some of the mottos [laugh from Vanessa] and whether they still stand up. So, you know, ‘the strategy is delivery’ and you've got on your laptop ‘Make things open. It makes things better.’ In fact, I've got it on mine as well. I-I thought you were going to ask about some of those things.    Vanessa Schneider:  Do, I mean, if you want to riff on that, go for it. [laughs] [laugh from Tom]   Tom Read:  There is a lot to be said for the, the memory that goes with catchy, meaningful slogans like ‘strategy is delivery’. It's great because the strategy was never delivery. Right. The strategy was deliver something quickly and make it so good that once people come to tell you stop doing it, they'll look like idiots because you built something brilliant, fast and cheap. It's not-- the delivery isn't the strategy. Strategy is let's not talk about it. Let's let's deliver something and then we'll have something to show for it, which is great and similar with, you know, the talk about user needs, not government needs. It's still government needs. It's just if you build it around how users work, then the service is cheaper and it'll actually be used online. It's it's sort of proxies for for what we're trying to do. Big fan of that sort of proper marketing.    Vanessa Schneider:  So I was wondering if you wanted to reflect on the mission of GDS now and for the next 3 years in context of the 5 points that you outlined in your blog post?    Tom Read:  Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing we're trying to do is we need to kind of say, what are we really going to focus on? Because it's, I don't just want a shopping list of what we're busy with. It's like what can we uniquely do in GDS? We've got this, like, incredibly privileged position of being in a centre of government. We're reasonably funded at the moment. Good ministerial support. What are we uniquely able to do in that position? Let's let's leave the departments to do, to do what they do.    So we've we've we've come up with with 5 points, as you say, and I'll sort of rattle through them, but sort of explain why I think they matter. So the first and kind of most important one is we have to keep the things that we're already running running. So we, GOV.UK is a obviously fundamental part of what we do. We need it up to date, we need the publishing tools to be modern. We need to be iterating some of the design patterns around finding content, around exploring, sort of navigating content. And we need to re-platform it. It sits on a tech stack in the cloud. But but that's coming out of support. So so keeping things running, it's not always sexy, but it is the most important - if we do nothing else we'll keep GOV.UK running.    The second thing we really want to go to is, focus on is, is kind of what I meant earlier around moving the dial from just doing transactional services. So we want to focus on what we're calling whole, whole services or solving whole problems for users. So an example. And we're not sure which examples we're going to use, right. But an example that that we're looking at at the moment is around having a baby.    So if you if you are a person and you're having a baby, I've made a list here. Things you might need to know about, that government can help you with are: maternity pay, shared leave, maternity allowances, registering the birth, getting child benefits, getting tax credits, finding childminders, getting nursery places. And at the moment, you need to understand all of those things individually. Then you need to apply for each to work out whether you are eligible. It's, well, well-intentioned nonsense. And really what you should be able to do is what you would expect in a commercial transaction where you would go on, you would have your details already stored and it would say you are eligible for these 5 things. One click and we'll sort it out for you.    And I think that's, maybe that's pie in the sky, there's so many reasons why that might not work. But that's what we're going to aim for. So so we're going to go hopefully for, as I said, really early days. And a lot of people have thought about this before. We are not unique in this, but we're going to look at maybe 5 or 10 ideas and try to push them through to delivery and work out: does GDPR stop us doing this, does money stop us doing this? Does the fundamental structure of government and accounting officers accountable to Parliament stop us doing this? I don't know, but we’re gonna have a good crack at it.    Vanessa Schneider:  I think I saw on social media, because that's part of my role as well behind the scenes, that there has been work on that previously by the government, I think it was in the days of Directgov and Business Link, that life services was actually already a concept. So will it be resurfacing that kind of work? Are you going to look back at the old material and see what learnings you've made since?    Tom Read:  Probably, yeah. So Jerry Fishenden, formerly of this parish, blogged about tweeted about it. I think it was before Directgov actually, that that that screenshot. So that was kind of based around life events. So having a baby is one. I think, I think some of them aren't life events. Some of them are whole, just just whole problems, like going abroad isn't really a life event. But you do need to think about what - particularly now - you need to think about passports, COVID[-19], political unrest. You need travel insurance. You need, yeah, vaccinations, you need visas. You know, that's not real life experience. It's more a collection of whole problems to solve one thing, which is the person wants to go abroad and needs government help. So we'll definitely look back on on on on that thinking. There's very little new under the sun. But equally, we haven't done it yet. So we need to, we need to press on and deliver.    Vanessa Schneider:  No it's that agile principle of iteration, isn't it?    Tom Read:  Right, exactly. [laugh from Vanessa]   Vanessa Schneider:  All right. You've obviously mentioned that we're looking at areas that maybe aren't being captured by government departments and also haven't had that attention previously. So I was wondering if there are still opportunities for us to learn from other departments in that area. I know, obviously, like the thing that you were mentioning with the forms, those are sort of those low-usage services, is that right? Will we be leaning on government departments that own those services a little bit or will it be solely in our purview?    Tom Read:  It's a really good question, we cannot do, there are bits that we can do ourselves from the centre, but they are quite limited. I talk to, I keep talking about the getting the balance right between centralisation and working with government departments, things like the long tail of digital forms in government. That's something we can't force people to do. The, we kind of have a two-part strategy here.    So you'll be aware that there's a new bit of Cabinet Office called the Central Digital and Data Office. And basically that's set up to take the the strategy, policy, capability, those sorts of bits, and also the spend controls and like the mandate. And so they will be looking at which departments, which agencies, which bits of government still have a lot to do. And flagging that, being, you know, I don't know, a scorecard or something, but some way of measuring progress.    We're ‘good cop’ in GDS. So our job is to build platforms, continue the work of government, so platforms, so Pay, Notify, we're going to build a way of submitting information in forms. And there may be 3 or 4 others that we're looking at. And the idea is if departments haven't digitised their simple lower transaction services, we'll give them everything that they need to do that, and we'll give them some help if they need some help to do it, and kind of slowly remove all the possible reasons why you wouldn't digitally transform. So we're the, we want to be the oil, the enablers to to help the long tails transform across central government primarily, but but also local government.    Vanessa Schneider:  And if you're interested in any of those products that Tom mentioned, we have a couple of podcast episodes that could be of interest [laughs]. So is there any chance that you can share more about what's happening at GDS right now with that focus?   Tom Read:  So we're in planning stages, is what I'd say. So we've got some some platforms that are really quite mature now, so GOV.UK Notify, I don't have the data with me, but GOV.UK Notify has an awful lot of organisations using it. We're going live with the alert cell broadcast system. And other platforms we're in planning stages. It's really looking at what are the barriers to adoption. And then we're also going to spin up a team to look at what are the next 5, what are the next 5 things that should be done centrally, may have already be done in 5 departments. So can we bring those together and package it and offer it back as a service, or do we have a federated approach to the platforms? We need to look at those different options over the next 3 months.    Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, just to add in, it's been 2.9 billion messages sent since May 2016 when Notify started up. So honestly, hats off.    Tom Read:  It's cool.    Vanessa Schneider:  And a shout out to Pete Herlihy. I hope he's enjoying New Zealand. [laughs]   Tom Read:  I'm sure he is.    Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah. So I was also wondering, I think there might be some work on single sign-on and personalisation. I was just wondering if you wanted to give a sneak preview on those?   Tom Read:  Yeah, sure. So a single sign-on for government and a way of verifying your identity. So fundamental parts of our strategy for the next few years. We've got money this year. We've got a lot of political support for this. The, some of the most brilliant people I've ever worked with anywhere, worked on Verify over the last sort of 6 or 7 years, genuinely, just utterly brilliant technologists, designers and that sort of thing. And, and Verify worked, right. It's branded as like, that didn't work. It worked for millions and millions of people.    Equally, there are some design patterns that that that that haven't quite worked. It didn't work for for certain sets of users in government. And we are now in a position where we take all of that learning and we're going to effectively build a new set of services that allow, as I said, a single sign-on for any services that need them across government and a way of proving your identity to government regardless of your social situation.    I'm really excited about this. I'm genuinely excited about this for a couple of reasons. One is we've got all that learning from Verify that we can pick up on. Secondly, a load of governments around the world have done this now, they've they've they've gone out and built on what we did and they've built their own. Thirdly, we've got proper buy-in from across government, real buy-in from ministers and senior officials in DWP, HMRC [HM Revenue and Customs], Home Office. Everyone's kind of on board for this. They know this is needed and our new sort of, very sort of collaborative approach that we're taking is-is hopefully going to bear fruit.   Vanessa Schneider:  It's great to have those big hitters on board. Those are the services where users will find themselves logging in, in order to access the information that is specific to them, which I think brings us quite neatly onto personalisation, no?    Tom Read:  Sure. Yeah. You'll probably be getting the feel for this, that a lot of what we're talking about is interdependent. These aren't completely sort of separate silos of delivery.    Vanessa Schneider:  Then what is in government, right?    Tom Read:  Well, exactly. So the way to imagine this, we're not simply building a portal, that's first thing to say. I know that’s sort of a bogey word in government and or digital design in general. GOV.UK for a lot of people is just there to get information from. And that's fine. That's fine. For for for other people, for whom government is very important because they don't access it 4 or 5 times a year, they need to go in quite regularly because they need a lot of help from government or they’re going through something quite complex in their lives.    The concept is that you will use single sign-on to log on to a GOV.UK account. And from there, you will be able to access services ideally with one click, as I mentioned previously, you could have one click access to things you're eligible based on what we already know about you, or you can change your data. So the the great mythical beast in government is this thing called Tell Me Once. Right. So we we don't have a single register of citizens in UK government, but we have hundreds of them. We have, you know, our addresses, our names, dates of birth, addresses will be in a lot of databases across government. And if we move, I don't move very often because I'm at that stage in life, young folks move a lot and it's likely that most of those bits of data are wrong across government.    So that's sort of, a by-product of a personalisation is we should be able to update that data and push it out to other parts of government in a really seamless way. And what's really exciting about personalisation, though, is there are, there's so much information on GOV.UK and so many services. You kind of need a Ph.D. in Government Studies to be able to to know how what you're what you're eligible for, what's out there. If you could personalise it by saying, you know, so for me, I'm in my 40s, I have children, I travel sometimes, I earn a certain amount. The amount of information on GOV.UK will shrink right down to, I'm making up numbers here, but 5, 10 per cent of that information and I should only be offered services that are relevant to me.    And I think from that you're doing, you know, that old adage of - it's written on your laptop - doing the hard work to make it simple. We're doing the hard work of trying to get information about a person and yes, shrink down the complexity of government to what, to what is relevant. And equally, we're not going to mandate this, right? That's really, really key to remember. If people don't want to do that, you will be able to go into your GOV.UK account and, you know, show what data we're linking and and de-link it. If you don't want to do even that, you know, you can continue accessing services how they are now and certainly we’ll always have an assisted digital method for people who don't want to or can't access services in the ways I'm describing. But I think personalisation is-is the big, our big play over the next few years. I think it will be transformational for a lot of citizens.    Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah, you mentioned the next few years. Obviously currently you're in post the next 3 years, am, is that right?    Tom Read:  Well, no, that's that's kind of artificial. I think, I'm here forever. Right. So what I've been trying to say to people, I think because GDS has had quite a lot of change at the top, I'm just trying to make it clear that I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. I think if I'm still here in 5 years, you know, maybe somebody should start to say: ‘you should probably freshen up soon’. Equally, I'm certainly not staying less than 3 or 4 years. I mean, we've got a lot to do. I'm already enjoying it.   Vanessa Schneider:  I was going to say, this is this is what you're doing for 2021 to 2024, is that right?    Tom Read:  Yeah. I've, I've, I've tried to-to sort of focus on the current Parliament cycle.    Vanessa Schneider:  Right, but it's a lot. [laughs]   Tom Read:  It's a lot. It's a lot. And we don't do anything. I also didn't, I sort of think it's slightly artificial sometimes to say, you know, here's our 10-year strategy. Who knows what on earth is going to be happening in 10 years in terms of maybe they'll be tech innovations or maybe they'll be - more likely - machinery of government changes or something else. So I want us to focus on, you know, more than a year, less than 5 years. So our Parliamentary cycle, it also slightly secretly sharpens the focus for colleagues in the Treasury and so on for for the upcoming spending review.    Vanessa Schneider:  Very strategic, I see. I know why they hired you. [laugh from Tom] Do you want to dabble in a bit of future casting? What happens beyond, or you know, say we achieve everything that you set out? What can we do after?    Tom Read:  I have absolutely no idea, I don't think. So, I think - what do I think? - The, the, the-I'm sort of stepping into areas of the Central Digital and Data Office here rather than GDS, I think. But.    Vanessa Schneider:  It will influence our work. No doubt.    Tom Read:  We work hand in glove already. It really will influence our work. I mean, things that I'm really interested in long, long-term is the there is still a relatively low digital literacy across senior policymakers and ministers, you know, with some notable exceptions across government. And I think that will change organically. I think that is changing already. But I'd quite like to see, yeah, without wanting to be hyperbolic, I think fundamentally the way we do policymaking, it's not wrong. But it's the way we've done it for a lot of time.    What what what slightly worries me about that way of doing it is 2 things. One is we've never properly stopped and really understood what are the most important policy changes for users, for people out there. You know, really, would this policy change your life or is there something else that we could do for the same amount of money with the same ambition that would change your life more? And I think we need to, the very qualitative, but I think we need to do more of that when we're doing policymaking right at the beginning. That's one.    Two: We tend to use data to prove hypotheses rather than than to suggest policy ideas. Really, I think we should be, you know, the really good work that Alison Pritchard is doing over at the Office for National Statistics around creating a data analytics platform that takes government data from all departments. That that's key because you should be able to look at the data, use, you know, authentic machine learning or similar, or just complex algorithms and say ‘find the connections’ that we don't quite know. What is that group, that for some reason they share a set of character traits or share a set of socio-economic situations? And then later on, they are the people who end up in prison or big users of the NHS or similar. And let's create some policy initiatives from the data. I think that would be spectacular. So anyway, so once we fix, once we've fixed all of the long tail of government and we've made GOV.UK personalised and we've done a digital identity service, we've moved all the legacy technology in the government to the public cloud, we've made everything secure. Yeah, that's where we'll go next, I think.    Vanessa Schneider:  Obviously yeah, that-that's some amazing work to look forward to, I hope. But I think we should finish on the hardest-hitting questions that I have for you today.    And we'll start off with Marmite. Yes or no?    Tom Read:  Uh, yes.    Vanessa Schneider:  Working from home or working on location?    Tom Read:  Both.    Vanessa Schneider:  Jam before cream or cream before jam on a scone?    Tom Read:  Oh, well, my mum lives in Devon, so I'm going to get this the wrong way around and she'll be very upset. But jam and then cream.   Vanessa Schneider:  Ooh, that's the Cornish way.    Tom Read:  Damnit.    Vanessa Schneider:  Early bird or night owl?   Tom Read:  I'm a night owl. I'm not good at morning's.   Vanessa Schneider:  Morning coffee or gin o'clock?   Tom Read:  [laughs] Both! That's healthy isn’t it?   Vanessa Schneider:  We've been stalking your Twitter feed. [laugh from Tom]   Planes, trains or automobiles?    Tom Read:  Well, I'll get in trouble with climate folk won’t I? Look, I really care about it. It's...I really miss travelling. I really miss travelling.    Vanessa Schneider:  You're allowed to say cycling, walking, canoeing.    Tom Read:  Yeah, a bit of that. Bit of, I don't really canoe. I really miss travelling on-on planes. I do live near a flight path and I'm quite enjoying not having planes going over. So I'm a hypocrite like everyone else.    Vanessa Schneider:  Totally understandable. And this is quick fire isn't it.    So Batman or Superman?    Tom Read:  Sup--Batman.    Vanessa Schneider:  All right. All about the journey or the destination?    Tom Read:  [laughs] I don't know!    Vanessa Schneider:  Too, too airy fairy for you, that's OK, no worries.    What about crunchy or smooth peanut butter?    Tom Read:  I don't eat peanuts, so neither.    Vanessa Schneider:  Allergic?    Tom Read:  No, just don't like them.   Vanessa Schneider:  Fair enough. And finally, what do you think of the idea of an office cat? I know this one's hot on people's minds.   Tom Read:  So. I'm a big fan of an office cat. I think we should have an office cat. I don't know if it's practical. We talked about an office dog when I was at MoJ with a, with a little you know, pass on its collar that was quickly squashed by our DGs [Director Generals].   Vanessa Schneider:  Yeah I feel like I've put a cat among the pigeons by mentioning this. So [laughs] [laugh from Tom] there's always, there's always chatter amongst the staff, ‘Oh, can we please have an office cat?’. But unfortunately, because we share this building with other tenants, it's not been, not been an option, apparently, especially with cat allergies. I don't know how they get away with it, with Palmerston and FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office], for instance, you know, there's probably going to be people with cat allergies. But if you can put in a word, the cat people will be very grateful.    Tom Read:  OK, here's my most political statement of this whole interview. I will look into whether we can get an office cat. I think it's a great idea.    Vanessa Schneider:  Oh, fantastic. Well, I've run out of quickfire hard-hitting questions for you.    Thank you so much, Tom, for coming on today and sharing with us what you see as GDS's new mission and how that's going to be achieved. If you want, you can listen to all the episodes at the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on Podbean.    Goodbye.   Tom Read:  Goodbye.   ---------------------- Do you enjoy the GDS Podcast? Help us to make it even better by completing our short, anonymous survey.    

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