Mind the GaaP: UK.gov needs to get a grip on digital

It looks neat - but it doesn't darn well work

That emphasis on the online experience – rather than on how the services themselves could use technology to improve – put GDS in a publishing role from the offset, noted the source.

He said: “It focused too much on the online delivery of services – the same web-centred vision of earlier attempts such as UKonline and direct.gov – rather than the redesign of government processes to improve services regardless of their delivery channel. Consequently GDS has spent too much time and effort on building a website, repeating what had been done several times before, but forgetting all the complex bits like website support for businesses, intermediaries and others.”

GDS later adopted the idea of having a shared infrastructure across government – rebranded as “government as a platform”. Concrete details of the strategy have yet to emerge, following the body being awarded £450m in November last year.

But despite only recently being adopted by GDS, the "GaaP” isn’t new either – having appeared as far back as 2003 by former chief exec of the Cabinet Office’s e-Delivery team Alan Mather, and cropping up again in a paper designed to inform Tory IT policy in 2006, titled Better for Less. (PDF)

The reason the idea did not take off previously was due to lack of uptake on the customer side, said one source:d igno “As soon as someone wants to become a customer, they don’t want the vanilla offer, they want something special for you, because they have lots of other special requirements and systems that GaaP needs to deliver into. It's a 10-20 year problem and is especially hard to pull off in a cash constrained environment.”

To say this is an old idea of course is not to say it is a bad one. But all the evidence so far suggests lessons have not been learned from the past. A previous draft strategy by the GDS on how it intends to re-use government IT infrastructure was described by one insider as “a very wordy document that manages to say very little."

There are already many good reasons to shake up government IT. Yet, as systems will have to be extracted from 40 years of EU policy and the further possibility of Scotland and even Northern Ireland leaving the UK, redesign will be a necessity.

One source said: “If government had any sense they'd use this as an opportunity to reboot properly and work out how you'd design things if you were building a modern state. Given the extent of change that's going to be needed, it's probably easier to do that than to try to pick apart and rebuild the spaghetti of systems in place.”

It would be a shame if government misses that opportunity. Again. ®