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Blog posted by: Stephen Foreshew-Cain, 29 June 2016.

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Public Sector Show. It re-visits some of the things I spoke about recently, but ties them together with some new thoughts about the future of GDS and the role we play within government. Here’s what I said.

Today I’m going to spell out what GDS is for.

The role of GDS is transformation, but we believe very strongly that transforming government services means transforming government itself. And that, as all of us across government have been learning over the last few years, goes much deeper than upgrading our technology and redesigning our websites.

During that time, GDS has been thinking very hard about services and how they work. We’ve been trying to understand services as users see them - as whole services, from one end to another.

Users don’t care about the structure of government. They don’t care which department does this or agency does that. They don’t care about your process. They just want to do what they need to do, get stuff done, and get on with their lives. Users have needs - our job in government is to build services that meet those needs.

So government has to think of itself in a different way.

We have to think about ourselves as a single entity, as one whole government.

I’ve said before; the question we should be asking ourselves isn’t “What does my department do?”, but rather: “What services can my department contribute to?”

We need to have a cross-government perspective on everything we do. GDS exists to help tie all that together.

GDS doesn’t claim to know every department’s users or their user needs, but we do claim to be experts in one thing: digital. Our job is to help everyone in government do the right things, in the right ways, to the right standards.

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