The next Scottish Government digital strategy

After a long time away, I’m loving living and working in Scotland again. I think Scotland is just the bestest wee nation. Totally not biased.

As a ‘digital nation’ we’re nae bad. In the course of my work I’ve had opportunities to look into some of the best service delivery organisations around the world, and recently I’ve had first-hand experience of using digital services in Scotland. And truth be told–with love–we’ve got a wee ways to go yet.

So with the Scottish Government about due an update of its digital strategy a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶p̶o̶n̶s̶i̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶M̶i̶n̶i̶s̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶l̶, may I be so bold as to offer a partial suggestion of things worthy of their consideration:

1. Merge gov.scot and mygov.scot for 100% better user journeys that link up services to policies to the responsible teams and bosses
2. Dial back on the marketing and put the comms firmly in the service of the services
3. Prioritise the top 25 services where the user journey crosses Scottish Government and local government channels and subject them to a rigorous overhaul that results in a frictionless user experience
4. Set an expectation of continuous improvement of digital services on a scale of days not quarters
5. Mandate that every Scottish Government digital service has a development routemap in the public domain for users to follow and influence
6. Where the UK Government lost its way with service performance tracking in the public domain, the Scottish Government can pick up the gauntlet and steal a march in the transparency and credibility stakes
7. Bring back the Scottish Service Standard necessitating an assessment of each service’s environmental impacts and a plan to improve these year on year toward net zero carbon emissions
8. Start thinking about digital as critical national infrastructure, and launch a sandbox programme for prototyping services based on future civil contingency, devo-max and independence scenarios, while the pressure’s off
9. Dive into the rich register of digital public goods available offering a sound reuse alternative option to build and buy
10. Make a 10x concerted, coordinated and fully funded effort to develop a platform of reusable components and products upon which to run government services
11. Put data registers at the foundation of this platform
12. Extend this platform for use by digital services run by local government and the third sector
13. Having drawn down from the international bank of digital public goods and infrastructure to establish its own platform, Scottish Government should pay back into that bank with things it’s created
14. Invest in staff-led service delivery and operations teams composed of the kinds of technical skill sets that can do fantastic things with data, design, software and infrastructure in-house and with private sector partners
15. Offer a few grand more for each of the digital delivery role starting salaries to avoid jobs being overlooked and people pinched elsewhere
16. Require digital delivery staff to use at least 5 volunteering days to supporting digital services run by civil society organisations
17. Fund a recurring competition amongst further and higher education student groups to prototype multidisciplinary responses to public service challenges, and in the process get some awesome ideas and inspire the next generation of digital delivery talent
18. Pare the governance right back to the quick and have it happen in near real-time step with delivery
19. Ramp up the blogging and coding in the open, accounting not just for intent and launches but sharing the experiments and learning in between that can help keep users engaged and build the collective capability of the public sector
20. Take a bit of time to engage with people and make a digital strategy that is so compelling and deeply rooted in the Scottish context that it would be impossible to Ctrl F + replace ‘Scotland’ for any other nation state’s name

If any of that sounds good, I’d love to learn more from people with an interest in or doing this kind of work in Scotland; people who are interested in a community of practice approach to exploring how technology can be used in the service of better outcomes for people of Scotland. Yaldy!