Two recent bits of news caught my eye recently. One was the report by Consumer Focus ‘Does Directgov deliver?’ and the other was the launch of the new Sir Tim Berners-Lee inspired data.gov.uk site.
The report on Directgov argues that Directgov’s emphasis on rationalising Government department websites is to the detriment of delivering effective user-focused, online services i.e. Directgov starts with the content Government has rather that with an understanding what users want. Consumer Focus makes recommendations about the site being more responsive and open to consumers, improving search and navigation based on what users want, etc. The focus of this report is that Directgov does not work very well now, but with the right approach it could be improved.
Conversely, the data.gov.uk site simply makes all sorts of government raw data available for others to do what they like with it – for private or commercial use. Developers produce apps, currently these include things such as obesity maps, finding GPs on your iPhone, Mouseprice a property pricing app based on Land Registry data, and many more.
I appreciate these two projects are not directly comparable – Directgov aims to allow users to undertake transactions (e.g. Car tax applications) and provides a lot of information while data.gov.uk is about data sets. But is it really possible for a government organisation (or for that matter any organisation) to be omnipotent enough to understand what users want and then be able to deliver in a timely manner the vast amount of information that you might want to know from Government?
We have worked with a large rang of public sector organisations for many years and based on that experience my answer is unequivocal – No. Even if they were brilliantly competent, public sector organisations are so constrained by money, politics and their technologies, that it will never happen, and certainly not quickly!
The data.gov.uk site is a brilliant approach that effectively lets the market decide what data is useful to users – the solutions that aren’t valuable to users just fail, the ones that are valuable get used. Perhaps, as well as opening up their datasets, public sector organisations should simply make all their information easy for others to use and repackage as they like – they should supply the content and let others worry about making it easy to find and use. But the idea that a single site with a much content as Directgov can ever be truly user focused seems a bit of a pipe dream.