Alphagov: a revolutionary approach to government websites
The project to put all government services online will launch on 9 May. We take an exclusive tour of Alphagov
When Martha Lane Fox examined what the government needed to do better online, the title of her report was stark: “Revolution not evolution”. Whether it’s paying taxes or buying tax discs, there is room for improvement. On May 9, the public is to get its first look at what “revolution” means. Lane Fox will surely not be disappointed with the project codenamed “Alphagov”.
The idea is a simple one: rather than going to one website for that tax disc, another for a student loan, another for tax returns, another for passports, people can go to a single website to find everything.
Tom Loosemore, who helped write Lane Fox’s report and is now running the Alphagov project, says that it’s not just the idea of having a single government website that is revolutionary. Perhaps more unusual is that, as the name implies, the work to be released in early May will be unfinished; an “alpha” in the sense software developers use it.
So what will be revealed, initially? The new approach is centred on users searching for answers to questions. If you’ve lost your passport on holiday, for instance, you can search, either via Google or Alphagov itself; the resulting page can automatically locate your computer via its web connection, and point you to a map showing the location of the nearest British embassy. If you need to book a driving test, the same tools can be used to locate you, point you to your nearest test centre and offer a link to book the test. In due course, the whole process could be done from a single page. Similar tools will, hopefully, indicate quickly if you’re entitled to certain benefits, for instance. As Loosemore, a veteran of Ofcom, the BBC and Channel 4, puts it, “You shouldn’t need to know the structure of government to interact with it”.
From a technology standpoint, what the website will do in due course is take vast amounts of government content and make it easier to find. The strength is the simplicity.
“It’s a massive simplification from the view of the citizen and businesses,” says Loosemore. “Plus there’s an awful lot of savings to be made.” The government currently spends approximately £120 million per year on a huge array of websites and different technologies to manage them. Now, Alphagov will be the central repository for the vast majority of information.
Liam Maxwell has worked with the government on a host of digital projects, and runs digital for Windsor and Maidenhead council. “This is, finally, beginning to treat taxpayers like customers,” he says. “It’s the consumerisation of government services and it can’t come soon enough”.
Indeed, this isn’t so much turning around the supertanker as climbing aboard a new boat: in just 12 weeks with a staff of 11, Loosemore is building a new approach. In part, it’s based on using public enthusiasm to apply pressure to sometimes intransigent civil servants who are unwilling to give up fiefdoms. In the main, however, Loosemore says that “there are some really good digital people in government. They’ve simply been frustrated by the IT model and a relative lack of understanding from civil servants and previous ministers.”
An alpha is usually closed to the public. This one will be open, but Loosemore says its aim is simply to set “a direction of travel – any actual usefulness will merely be a helpful, entirely coincidental by-product”.
When the project moves beyond the alpha stage, it will, hopefully, have a much clearer idea of what government should do on the web: “I think government should be doing less online,” says Loosemore. “Of course we need to provide a guide to redundancy. But there may be people out there who are better placed to offer advice on a marketing strategy for a new business, for instance. It’s about less, better”.
Until a formal launch – “it’s a three-year project,” says Loosemore – everything will have caveats. Getting there will be “about political will, but there’s billions of pounds in savings if you can get digital to be the default”. Loosemore acknowledges there will be “some bumpy moments”.
Above all, however, he says, “You have a generation of ministers who know a bad website when they see one; that pressure is only going to get more intense.”
In due course, the Government will have to sort out how to identify the people who need to use its services securely. That is one of the most difficult challenges.
Crucially, Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister, has acknowledged that where systems exist to do that in the private sector, the state should not spend a fortune trying to invent them again. That in itself is revolutionary, too, but Alphagov will not only justify its existence by being useful. It will also admit that government’s relationship with citizens has changed. It can no longer waste their time treating them contemptuously by forcing them to wade through endless, tedious web pages that mostly get in the way of services paid for by the public.
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Thursday 7 April 2011
Alphagov: a revolutionary approach to government websites - Telegraph
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