The Digital Service Design Standard was only partially implemented in — we’re updating it by asking digital practitioners across government to help.
The Digital Service Design Standard
The Digital Service Design Standard contains 12 principles that support teams across the public sector to design and run high quality, user-centred services.
The principles of the Standard identify best practice ways of working. These help deliver services that are more responsive, accessible, integrated and trustworthy, using the latest technology.
The principles include topics such as:
- identifying users’ needs
- having a clear purpose
- making government services secure
- working collaboratively
- using data responsibility.
Purpose, scope and development of the Standard
How government digitisation is going
We’re doing reasonably well at digitising services. However, these services need to be much more consistent, joined up and better at responding to the needs of different communities.
Digitising government is a team game
For people using government services, the Kiwis Count survey in found:
- 80% were satisfied or very satisfied with their most recent government service experience
- satisfaction was highest among digital-only users (86%), compared with 76% for non-digital users and 74% for mixed-channel users.
Kiwis Count — Public Service Commission
Comparing data with other countries shows that our level of digitisation of key government services is similar to the UK, Australia and Canada.
However, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Digital Government Index ranks us 27th out of 34 countries on 6 dimensions, including ‘digital by design’ and ‘user-driven’.
These dimensions measure governments’ capacity to place user needs at the core of public policies and services.
Digital Government Index — OECD Going Digital Toolkit
Updating the Standard
In early the Government Chief Digital Office (GCDO) conducted research to understand how to improve the Standard. This included:
- a desktop review of our Standard, and comparable overseas standards
- online workshops and a survey that engaged over 100 service designers and digital professionals across 20 government departments — these activities aimed to understand their experiences in delivering digital public services
- testing updated principles.
Proposed principles — Digital Service Design Standard
The research findings will inform the first draft of the updated standard which will be published for consultation in early . Further information will be published on digital.govt.nz.
When the final updated Standard is published, the next phase will be implementation, which includes more supporting guidance, monitoring, and enforcement across all-of-government.
All-of-Government Service Modernisation Roadmap
7 key findings and recommendations
Strategy to update the Standard
1. Engage, update and embed gradually
Use consultation and continual improvement practice to support buy-in and ensure that the Standard remains relevant. Promote, monitor and embed the Standard across government.
Recommendation: Rewrite the Standard using plain language — to help people understand it in preparation for online consultation.
2. Balance incentives
Find a balance between incentives and penalties to help adoption of the Standard. While monitoring and enforcement are important tools to encourage adoption, it’s more critical to provide accompanying resources to support people to apply the Standard.
These could include case studies, reusable digital assets and training that make the Standard applicable to a certain service or organisational context.
Recommendation: Prioritise supportive content for updating the principles and investigate ways to embed the Standard into new GCDO digital investment processes.
Government digital changes to bring big savings — Beehive
Focus areas to strengthen the Standard
3. Buy-in from senior leaders
Digital practitioners felt there was a lack of buy-in from leaders for user-centred ways of working. As a result, our survey results showed that 55% were in favour of the Standard becoming compulsory when creating a new service to encourage greater leadership support.
Recommendation: Position the updated Standard at decision makers, such as senior responsible owners (SROs), as a key audience to support them to make good decisions.
4. Workforce capability and capacity
Research participants identified a limited digital skilled workforce across the public sector, both in formal decision-making and throughout the workforce. Some of this related to the current financially constrained environment but also the relatively small population of New Zealand.
Recommendation: Align the Standard with initiatives that aim to build a digitally capable public service workforce.
Digital capability in the public service workforce
Public Service Census — Public Service Commission
5. Interpreting the Standard
The name of the Standard has led to some confusion about its scope and focus. It’s broader than just ‘digital’ and ‘service design’ and includes ways of working, operations, security and data.
Recommendation: Rename ‘Digital Service Design Standard’ for clarity and include a clear agreed definition of ‘what is a government service’.
6. Integration of Kaupapa Māori (Māori principles and ideas)
Te Tiriti o Waitangi should be further reflected throughout the standard rather than represented in a single principle. It should include areas such as co-designing with communities, data sovereignty and co-governance.
Recommendation: Prioritise engagement with Māori and iwi to articulate a Kaupapa Māori that’s appropriately reflected in the updated Standard.
7. The Standard remains highly valued
Despite low awareness across the public sector, the Standard remains highly valued among the service design community and is still used to advocate for best practice. The principles tested were a refined version of the current principles along with 3 new ones. Most people who responded to our survey said the existing principles are still important.
Recommendation: Keep key principles of the current Standard that are still relevant.
Next steps
The aim is to publish a first full draft of the updated Standard for consultation online in early . Digital practitioners across government will get the opportunity to have their say then. We’ll review and incorporate feedback for publishing .
Contact us
If you’d like to find out more, be kept informed or be involved in the development of the Standard, you can contact the GCDO team at gcdo@dia.govt.nz.
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