TL;DR
After some successful experimentation earlier in the year, the Service Innovation team at the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) have the green light to move forward with our work in supporting a more integrated approach to service delivery across the New Zealand Government, largely on the back of our Government as a Platform (GaaP) work. For more details about GaaP, see our earlier blog posts.
We are really excited to be forming a core team of service designers, technical ninjas, data and analysis experts, and strategic experts to drive service innovation exemplars and support service delivery teams across government. Our broad work program is outlined below, and we invite you to join our mailing list or follow our blog posts to keep up-to-date, and to visit us if you are in town at our OpenLab events each Friday from 4pm at the Todd Building, 95 Customhouse Quay.
LabPlus: What's Next?
Goals
The goals of the Service Integration Work Program (LabPlus) are to:
- provide design, development, reference implementations of customer-facing all of government (AoG) digital transformation through tangible experimentation and iteration;
- discovery and prototyping of new reusable components to either fold back into agencies, AoG services or to close down initiatives that are not required;
- support the accelerated implementation of life event services through hands-on support, collaborative co-design and co-development with agencies;
- support growth of an ecosystem of services built on government components;
- transition meaningful outcomes to operational teams (gov and non-gov);
- reduce the barriers to building better services for service delivery teams in agencies.
Benefits realisation
At a basic level, we intend to capture and measurements benefits by:
- recording costs avoided by teams, agencies or AoG when engaged in distinct pieces of work or as a result of reusable components developed;
- measure benefits/value for users and industry, on a per initiatives basis;
- measure of efficiencies realised by service delivery teams participating in LabPlus;
- systemic measure of changes to the system (requires an evidence layer);
- economic or social Improvements for the community (users, industry, etc); and
- we can also measure actual reuse of APIs, code and content by govt and non-govt.
Work Program
Our work program is in five basic parts:
- Service delivery for life events and proactive entitlements, working with agencies to develop user-centred effective services (digital but also supporting non-digital) through collaborative co-design, co-discovery, co-prototyping and co-development of new services.
- Reusable components that support and facilitate faster and easier service delivery in government, with a focus on making reusable components openly available to support non-government (NGO) service providers to build on the back of government data, content, transactions services and business rules, all available programmatically (usually by APIs). These reusable components will be designed and developed in the public eye and we ill reach out as much as possible to co-design with service delivery teams as well as NGO service providers.
- 3rd party reuse exemplars are where we identify and support on an ongoing basis, third parties (for profit and non-profit), that are naturally motivated to build on top of government components, like a human services register or programmable rules about service entitlement.
- An extended Service Innovation Toolkit will deliver the guidance, reference examples, resource sharing, tool sharing and other support mechanisms to support government service delivery teams.
- Evidence and value realisation work will ensure we build both the service analytics evidence base to inform and monitor the effectiveness of new digital services, while also tracking the value created from our work for people, government and the broader sector.
If you'd like to stay across our work as it progresses, again please join our mailing list or join us in person at our weekly OpenLab events for a catch up and to help us shape the future of government services! Several of our team is on Twitter, so you can tweet @NZLifeEvents or @PiaWaugh.
Now that we are out of experimentation phase, and into a longer-term work program, please let us know about yourself or your agency, organisation or community if you think we should be engaging with you more as we move forward. Many thanks to all those who have been in touch. We are looking forward to more cross sector and civil society engagement and collaboration :)
