{"id":3385,"date":"2024-06-09T16:09:10","date_gmt":"2024-06-09T14:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/verwaltungsgestaltung.de\/notizen\/?p=3385"},"modified":"2024-06-09T17:22:57","modified_gmt":"2024-06-09T15:22:57","slug":"week-110-at-the-digital-service-notes-for-3-7-june-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/verwaltungsgestaltung.de\/notizen\/2024\/06\/09\/week-110-at-the-digital-service-notes-for-3-7-june-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Week #110 at the Digital Service: Notes for 3\u20137 June 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On short notice, Liam Maxwell, former Chief Technology Officer of the UK Government<\/a>, stopped by our office on Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After about 3.5 years in that role, Liam left GDS the same month I joined \u2013 in April 2016. He has spent last few years heading up government transformation at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Besides sharing some UK public sector anecdotes, he talked about his cloud-enabled work with banks in Ukraine, the justice system in Brazil, and Estonia around AI-enabled data processing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like all large global cloud providers, they find it severely challenging to get their foot into the German public sector market. From what I got through the roundtable discussion this week, there\u2019s more for the AWS team to understand about the German public sector\u2019s fears, pain points, and overall culture and mindset. If they don\u2019t understand the deeply engrained concerns, they will find it difficult to land their AWS European Sovereign Cloud<\/a> that\u2019s supposed to arrive next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It will be interesting to observe what happens in that space. We at Digital Service rely on cloud-first-run public services, and the more good offerings there are, the better for users of public services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Talking straight for 3 days<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For 3 evenings in a row, I wrote talks and delivered them the following day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Tuesday morning, I joined \u2018Digitaler Morgen\u2019, an inspirational morning format of the innovation office of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth. I talked about hands-on user-centricity through design. As usual, my slides are up on GitHub<\/a>. The session was not recorded, but if I can find the time, I\u2019ll make a recording and put it on YouTube.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

37 people from across the ministry were in the remote session. After talking for about half an hour, people kept asking questions slowly but steadily. They wanted to hear what barriers to digital public service transformation I see, how much I still learn from user research activities after various years, and how early user-centred design should get involved in policy-making. My answers, in short: Many barriers, but lack of operational quality standards and cross-organisational collaboration are the biggest; user research in every service area is different, and you literally learn entirely new things every day; there is no too-early moment for user-centred design folks to get involved in policy-making or law-writing. All of those were terrific questions, and I enjoyed answering them. I hope to follow up with folks from the ministry on the topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Wednesday, over lunchtime, I followed an invitation from Google Germany\u2019s Works Council to deliver an inspirational talk. They had an offsite where folks from their Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich offices got together to reflect on their efforts. They invited colleagues from Meta\u2019s and Spotify\u2019s Works Councils as guest speakers\u2014and me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I delivered an abridged version of our \u2018The long slog of public service design<\/a>\u2019 talk. I trimmed, contextualised, and retitled it: \u201cThinking and acting in different timeframes: How to keep going when striving for systemic change<\/a>\u201d. The feedback was positive and almost overwhelming. Their stream of questions and general praise for our work would not end. I told them when opening, we wrote the original talk for designers of slow-moving services and people transforming public services, and they\u2019ll have to do some context translation. That was easier than I thought. I received a few more friendly messages afterwards and was overall happy that our content seemed relevant and valuable to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Thursday, I joined a session of the Service Standard sounding board. There, I gave an overview of the implementation of the Service Standard in the United Kingdom. I did a bit of digging for that. Apart from countless UK government blog posts, Vicky\u2019s post \u2018A brief history of the Service Standard<\/a>\u2019, Matt\u2019s writeup \u2018What we can learn from the history of the service standard<\/a>\u2019 and James\u2019 overview \u2018Setting the standard: A short history of the Government Service Standard<\/a>\u2019 were most helpful for retracing what happened when and in what sequence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

@vickytnz.bsky.social, you have no idea how grateful I am still for your #ServiceStandard history post! I\u2019m just digging through it once again.\n\nThank you so much for putting this together!\n\nwww.vickyteinaki.com\/blog\/a-brief…

[image or embed]<\/a><\/p>— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com<\/a>) Jun 6, 2024 at 0:40<\/a><\/blockquote>