The Government Digital Service (GDS) hopes the successful rollout of its £400m digital identity system One Login will restore the UK Government's position as a digital leader in the eyes of the United Nations (UN). revealed the CEO.
The system will be mandatory for use in all government departments, some of which are currently in beta testing, and will offer citizens a more personalized and tailored experience when accessing a wide range of government digital services. It is intended to provide.
Specifically, the One Login system is designed to provide citizens with a single sign-on and digital identity verification portal to access government services and is the successor to the troubled GDS Verify project.
The One Login system is hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which will oversee its development, on the same day details were revealed about a number of system delivery agreements signed by GDS to support its deployment. Two senior technical leaders tasked with the task spoke. His AWS Public Sector Day in London.
Among them was GDS CEO Tom Reid, who spoke to attendees about the organization's work to support GDS's work to provide people with an online gateway to government services through Gov.uk. He talked about his various projects.
The department's current priorities on this front are to reduce page load times and the amount of data consumed in order to enhance the accessibility of the site, so that Gov.uk works better on mobile devices. is to take steps to do so.
“We spend a lot of time making sure we're mobile-first,” he said. “People who use government services frequently tend to use older, cheaper mobile devices with less data.”
user experience
As well as ensuring the accessibility of government services, another top priority for the GDS is to ensure that the public is able to complete any task they seek to perform completely online. It's about providing a consistent user experience.
As an example, Reid pointed out that users sometimes feel anxious and confused when trying to pay for government services online, which leads them to abandon the action and instead try to pay by phone.
“People get very nervous when they're making payments online,” he said. “We've trained them to think, 'Is this a scam?' Is this legal? And our research shows that when the user experience changes, people become more anxious. , I find that they try to pay by phone instead. The user experience needs to be consistent and [it] You need to be consistent so people can maintain that trust. ”
Otherwise, they will default to calling a government call center, which can lead to not only a potentially frustrating experience, but also a potentially costly one for taxpayers. he admits.
But while the GDS has been busy and focused on improving the online user experience for its citizens, Mr Reid admitted that in recent years he had noticed that the UK was “ahead” of other countries in terms of the quality of service it provided. I did. This is something he is keen to correct.
“In 2016, our country was ranked as the world's top digital nation in the United Nations e-government rankings,” he said. “A few years later we dropped to fourth, then seventh, and then at the end of last year we were down to 11th and not even in the top 10 anymore.
“We are being overtaken by countries like the Netherlands and Iceland and the United States, and we need to figure out why. They were very static. The bad news is that everyone else's scores went up. So…we're missing something.”
To figure out what the missing ingredients are, the organization looked to the private sector for inspiration, looking at how people “interact online in their private lives” and looking at how other countries' governments are deploying Reed said he looked at the digital initiatives that the company is currently implementing. .
Reid cited as examples Denmark's efforts to digitize the communication process, which prohibited the government from posting letters to people, and the legal changes forced in Ukraine to allow citizens to save government documents on their smartphones. .
Looking at how other countries are doing it, GDS concluded that the government user experience needs to be more customized and personalized. This is what we aim to achieve through the rollout of One Login and technology partnerships with governments. British account system.
The latter is a single sign-on system billed as a way to provide a more personalized service to users of government websites.
“We don't want to abandon what we're already doing…but we need to start looking to the future [and] How can you start personalizing and tailoring your services to your users? It starts with Gov.uk One Login,” Mr Reid said.
“For many people who constantly interact with government, it is [lack of personalisation] It doesn't work well at all, because every time [you engage], you are treated like a stranger…and it is not tailored to your experience. That's one of the paradigms that we really need to start challenging. ”
online retail hub
One of the user experience models that GDS looks to for inspiration is that offered by the Amazon online retail hub.
“How is Amazon doing? Amazon found out who I was right away,” he said. “I'm logged into a persistent experience. It knows my fulfillment details and recommends products based on who I am and what I've previously purchased.
“It has my bank account details. [and] This works very well for Amazon. This means you can buy something in about 10 seconds without having to remember it. [because] I ended up doing it very often. It works very well for users.
“It's the same with banks and transit, where a lot of people have this very personalized, logged-in assistant, recommendation-based experience in their lives. [but] The government doesn’t have that at the moment,” Reid said. “I think we need to keep thinking about it.”
Go inside One Login
Elsewhere during the keynote, Natalie Jones, Director of Digital Identity at GDS and responsible for overseeing the One Login offering, provided attendees with insight into the inner workings of systems that leverage AWS serverless infrastructure. provided.
“We were, and continue to be, the only major government digital transformation program that is completely serverless,” she said.
The decision to make One Login a serverless system was made before Jones began work on the project, which began about 18 months ago. “I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little nervous when I found out about this when I showed up on the scene… [because] I can't help but wonder if it's that simple and why. [are you] Is there only one person doing it? ”
She also revealed that there was some pushback among some members of the One Login technical team regarding the decision to go serverless, which she said may have come as a surprise to some participants.
“On the other hand, you might think that learning a new skill, putting something on your resume, doing something a little bit cool and cutting edge might be the way to impress developers, but our Many of the engineers were clearly lukewarm about the outlook,'' Jones said.
“They didn't want to let go of their old ways of working and embrace the possibilities. Our junior engineers are much more likely to be early adopters and champions of change than senior technical leaders. We realized that what people really needed was time and space to explore what serverless meant in their own situations and within their teams. .”
Advantages of going serverless
Jones said the benefits of going serverless are clear from a cost-effectiveness, scalability, and resiliency perspective, especially given that some government online services are prone to unexpected peaks in demand. said.
“We are under Martin Lewis.” [Moneysaving Expert] effect [where]More than once, traffic to government services has spiked nearly tenfold after Mr. Martin appeared on TV or radio shows to make these appeals. [people] to see if you are eligible for [government benefit of some kind],” she said.
“It also increases agility and reduces the operational burden on teams because they can focus on writing and deploying code and not worry about managing infrastructure. And lastly, they have very granular control. There is also a security benefit because we at GDS can practice and work out outdoors, but we can also lock down critical elements of the system if necessary.”
Jones said other government technology leaders considering going the serverless route need to be aware of the ripple effects it will have on how the entire project operates.
“It’s not just a choice about infrastructure, it’s actually much more than that,” she said. “The choices you make affect everything from how you write code, how you structure your tests, how you run live services, and in some cases how your team is structured. And I don't think we understood that from the beginning. Masu.
“If you're going to do it, you need to go all in. Some of the things you do are no longer appropriate, so you really need to think about it from the offset.”
technical issues
As an example, Jones said that some developers were used to working in containerized setups, so they wrote code without thinking about how it would run in a serverless environment, so the team initially You mentioned that you encountered a technical problem.
“The end result was slow service response and unacceptable response times for our users,” she said. “You can now provision a pre-warmed Lambda.” [as a workaround for this]But if one of the benefits is that you only use it when you need it, that's essentially the same thing as parking your car and leaving it running in case you want to go somewhere later. It's the same thing. ”
Jones said the team has now overcome these initial issues and has a mature continuous delivery pipeline up and running, delivering more than 200 changes to the One Login production environment each week in a “totally smooth” manner. It can now be expanded.
“This has been a voyage of discovery and we have learned a lot along the way,” she said. “If you're sitting there thinking about taking the leap or thinking about serverless as an answer to some challenge, be brave and go for it.”
