Government Digital Services

What is service design & who uses it?

Service and product design are in the ascendancy, becoming increasingly important within marketing and engineering departments.

Ashley Friedlein makes the claim in his trends for 2016, citing the number of consultancies and systems integrators that have made design acquisitions (see this Wired article for how IBM is beefing up its design creds).

Service design follows naturally from a focus on customer experience (as a central tenet of that dreaded term, digital transformation).

Digital transformation: GDS shows the generation gap is as frustrating as ever

In just a few weeks, the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) has lost its head, its deputy, its strategy man, its chief designer, its head of user research and its delivery and performance chief.

There seems to be a mix of messages coming out of Whitehall – some talk about the plan always being to devolve the central GDS team into newly-prepared departments (a question of tackling transformation at the correct scale) and others seem to suggest a November spending review is curtailing a GDS that is losing an argument with some of its vocal critics.

I don’t know anything about the machinations of governments but in a broader context it’s pertinent to remind ourselves that momentum doesn’t always gather behind transformation projects.