A good portion of the week I spent on the edge of Europe. It was warm and sunny – and the start of the year I needed.
On my way back, inspired by Olu, I wrote 25 hopes (of different sizes) I have for 2025.
- I hope we can publish the reworked German Service Standard and get some good and sustainable attention for it across the public sector.
- I hope we make a proper good Service Manual for people working on public services in Germany and work on it across organisations collaboratively.
- I hope we can get our updated service quality criteria linked to procurement rules and frameworks—in at least some places—to steer newly commissioned work in the right direction.
- I hope we can expand Service Standard peer reviews to the non-Federal level and suppliers, ideally without ourselves even being involved.
- I hope we can actively collaborate on Service Standard version 2 implementation with various existing communities of practice to make things stick.
- I hope we can establish a cross-public sector blog so more public servants in Germany can join us on the work-in-the-open path.
- I hope that after the general elections in February, there will be a new empowered entity in the Federal government to steer digital public sector transformation.
- I hope that with the new government, Digital Service will get a broadened and deepened remit to do even more transformational work.
- I hope we can change some of the current project and programme funding logic to enable more long-term work.
- I hope we can see and support a previously unseen push for accessibility linked to the Accessibility Reinforcement Act—which we can use as momentum to propel novel activities.
- I hope we get more opportunities for true service design work: end-to-end, back-to-front, and across channels, so we can offer reference points to inspire others.
- I hope we publish the first version of a content design playbook to set a bar for content quality through openly available guidance that others can follow, refer to and build on.
- I hope we can make our approach to discipline governance and leadership visible—so that other public sector organisations can inform their organisational development.
- I hope we at Digital Service get to contribute to a sound, shared design system for Germany’s public sector.
- I hope we can establish stronger ties with other government and public sector units and genuinely collaborate on things.
- I hope we can make our disciplines more robust, procedurally and culturally—with a healthy culture allowing people to work sustainably.
- I hope we get even more opportunities to engage and collaborate with members of the public—to inform our work through co-creation and to rebuild trust in the government.
- I hope we can establish and then improve a version of an accessibility empathy lab.
- I hope we can build on last year’s momentum with our international in-person events and facilitate further global exchange.
- I hope we can help shape the umbrella brand with meaningful examples of good public services that follow the Service Standard.
- I hope we can make our accessibility work even more visible and enhance our tools, processes and approaches through more exchange with others.
- I hope we can have meaningful discussions about measuring the outcomes of our work along with public value-creating metrics.
- I hope we get more opportunities to bring service and policy design together very upstream—through more task force work on more laws in the making and by combining the digital-ready check for policies and the Service Standard for public services.
- I hope to have more EU-level exchanges about public policy and cross-border service transformation.
- I hope we reach many more people with our work and leave a good impression of what government can do.
I can initiate or influence a few of the things mentioned above. Various others I cannot.
I will review these 25 hopes at the end of the year.