Unit 8
How David Eaves teaches Unit 8 (part 2)
The GDS Case
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 8 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. See how parts one, three and four of Unit 8 are taught.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in various contexts. See here how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
Class Overview
This course is about the new competencies public leaders need today - in a digital era. But how are governments shifting their capabilities from the industrial and analogue era to the present day? What can help promote that change and how might a digital era governments be structured differently?
This class looks at the case of the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) - one governments effort to adapt to the shifting expectations of its citizens and employees brought on by the digital era. GDS's effort to digitally transform the UK government highlights the enormous pressure on the public institutions in general and those in the role of a CIO (Chief Information Officer) and IT departments more generally.
The first part of the class seeks to understand the GDS team's vision and the conditions that lead to their creation. In the second part, students will be introduced to a digital maturity model that can be used to both map some key digital era government capabilities and help align key stakeholders around a shared theory of change for maturing said capabilities.
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this lecture students should be able to:
Describe how change happens in large organizations generally
Describe how change usually happens in governments
Understand how to encourage buy-in from key stakeholders
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 This class has a specific focus on Competencies:
Competency 5 - Barriers
Competency 3 - Multidisciplinary
Competency 6 - Openness
See all eight digital era competencies here.
Assigned Reading and Practical Resources
As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class:
Looking at the Maturity Model, how “mature” was GDS at the point of this case study (after it finished gov.uk and was looking at what to do next)?
What strengths and weaknesses does GDS have at this time in its history, and how should Mike Bracken and Tom Loosemore manage them as they think about the next phase of work?
Who are the key stakeholders in the case study, what are their interests and how should Mike and Tom manage them?
Core Reading (Required)
Proposing A Maturity Model for Digital Services (2018), Article by David Eaves and Ben McGuire for the 2018 State of Digital Transformation Report
UK Government Digital Service: Moving Beyond a Website (2017), Case Study from the Harvard Kennedy School written by David Eaves and Daniel Goldberg
Directgov 2010 And Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution (2010), Policy Memo written by Martha Lane Fox
Advanced Reading (Optional)
Power of Information Task Force (2007), Report written by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg
The US Government Isn’t Just Tech-Illiterate. It’s Tech-Incompetent (2017), Article written by Emily Dreyfuss for Wired
Designs on the V.A. (2017), Article written by Allison Arieff for The New York Times
Bringing Child Welfare Agencies Into the 21st Century (2019), Blog post written by Colin Murphy
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 75 minutes
The segments below describe the dynamics of each part of the class. The videos were edited to only display the most relevant parts of each segment:
Segment 1 - The Birth of UK's Government Digital Service - 15'
Purpose of this segment
The purpose of this section is to understand the political context that allowed for the birth of GDS. The goal is to have students better understand the trends and the role of key stakeholders that created the conditions under which the government was prepared to critical re-examine a number of core government capacities and empower a team to re-imagine them at scale.
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion
Instructors should open this session asking students to share hypothesis about what conditions lead to the creation of GDS. The goal here is to get students to identify trends and movements that can create windows of opportunity for change.
In the debrief, instructors should note that significant policy or institutional changes in governments often both draw on deeper trends, and are triggered by sharp precipitating crises.
In the case of UK's GDS the deeper trend were shifting citizen expectations of what government services should look like in a digital era. The rise of private sector online services with both a good user experience and 24 hours a day, seven days a week availability radically reshaped public expectations of accessible.
Also important was a vibrant community of digital technology experts who were critically examining the role of digital technologies and that state. A particularly important part of this community had formalized itself 10 years prior with the founding of the non-profit mySociety which sought to re-imagine how governments could use technology to deliver services.
A more immediate contributing factor was the multi-billion pound healthcare IT debacle that destroyed the public's and the public services' confidence in the established methods of implementing government services in a digital era. This crises also, critically, led to Martha Lane Fox's report in which she advocated for a 'revolution, not evolution' in how the UK government used digital technologies to interact with citizens
Finally, Frances Maude's special political position was also critical. A respected grandee of the conservative party with extensive experience and knowledge of government he was an expert political and administrative operator. In addition, freed of aspirations of being prime minister he was focusing on having impact in his present role and open to using his political capital to take new approaches.
The purpose of this discussion and the points above is to impress upon students that GDS did not appear out of nowhere. Nor was it exclusively the reaction to a specific crisis. These trends, and key stakeholders - and possibly other factors - all played a role in the establishment of GDS and the desire to embed into government the practices and capacities it championed.
Current and future public leaders should note that, as helpful as technology may be, promote big changes takes organizing, making connections and building a network often years in advance. By organizing and creating a community, such leader will be ready to plug into the system and seize the moment when an opportunity opens up. The questions that should always be in mind are: What would we do if we were given the opportunity? Who are the people that share the same values and interests? How to get them involved?
Segment 2 - What is GDS's Mission? - 20'
Purpose of this Segment
In this session David uses the GDS case to push students to contemplate what goals should those that seek to adapt governments to a digital era have? And what strategies should public leaders adopt to displace existing practices from the industrial and analog era with those from the digital era?
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion
The guiding question for this segment is:
What is GDS's mission?
David lets students share ideas. Typically, students raise relevant points but remain too focused on solving a specific problem or service - in the case of GDS the Directgov project. Fixing a website or a single service is not a transformation mission.
For GDS there were several secondary objectives, including:
increase government efficiency
improve UK citizen's experience with government agencies
reduce costs
reduce duplication
promote innovation through focusing on user needs
use agile as a way to breakdown government silos
But most importantly, their main goal was to pave the way for digital era government. Critical (but not exclusive) to this mission is:
importing and adapting the new practices and capacities - made possible by digital technologies and talked about through this course - into government.
creating shared platforms that are used across government ministries as discussed in class 3
Recognizing that digital is more than the traditional IT function and plays a strategic role in government operations
In seeking to pursue this mission, GDS risks being at odds of more traditional approaches. One way GDS seeks to create power to help push its agenda is by positioning itself in a more strategic location inside government. To illustrate this point, David shows how digital differs from IT in the organizational structure:
Traditionally, IT departments have been working in the operations, providing support for other departments. GDS paved to way to a technology department in the cabinet office, shaping and designing decisions and policies across the entire government.
Segment 3 - What Capabilities has GDS Built - 15'
Purpose of this Segment
In the GDS case, GDS was able to achieve a significant success with the launch of GOV.UK. In this section we explore what capabilities - including political support, institutional capacity, delivery capability, skills and hiring, user-centered design and cross-government platforms - GDS enabled them to deliver. To do this David introduces a new tool - the Digital Services Maturity Model - to diagnose how mature a government team is in terms of their digital capabilities and imagine further steps they can achieve as they make progress.
💡 You can read more on the digital services maturity model here, and on how David runs this exercise here. David has worked with and had over 70 digital service teams and government agencies fill out this form. You can read about some of the data from this work here. Note, with this exercise, the goal is less on coming to an accurate answer than on provoking debate about what capabilities an organization has, and what capabilities they should develop to best support their theory of change.
Video of David teaching this segment
Exercise
David proposes the following exercise: students should work in groups, pick two categories of competencies and evaluate GDS's maturity model on them based on the case. The instructor can acknowledge that students are working with limited information from the case. The goal of the exercise is not to come to a 'correct' answer but to enable students to become more familiar with the maturity model and the capabilities so they can apply them to other contexts and organizations.
For this exercise, students were given this template to work on.
In the debrief, facilitators can highlight the two main goals of the maturity model:
To provide a language to talk about a strategic path for digital teams
To be a tool to guide team discussion by finding areas of disagreement and understanding where the team could work together and grow
Segment 4 - What are GDS's Strategies - 15'
Purpose of this Segment
Any actor trying to shift government practices needs to have clarity on both their goal and their strategy. The previous segment helped students understand what digital era capabilities a government unit - like GDS - might have at present. In this next section they will explore what capabilities should they focus on developing or enhancing to best position themselves for success.
Video of David teaching this segment
Exercise and Debrief
Students are given the following task: for 5 minutes, they should imagine they are Tom Loosemore or Mike Bracken in 2015. They have successfully launched GOV.UK and garnered recognition from around the world. As significant as the success is, the GDS team wants to move beyond the website and tackling bigger and deeper challenges. Imagining this, students should first write down where they think GDS should go next.
Tell students that you are giving them 10 prioritization points. David sometimes refer to these points as “Mike Bracken points,” in honor of the UK’s former chief digital officer and co-convener of our event.
These points represent where participants think the organization as a whole should concentrate its efforts in building new capabilities. They represent investment, or where team leaders should allocate their attention.
For the sake of clarity I sometimes ask that participants think about how they would prioritize their efforts over the next 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years. The time period is up to your discretion.
Ask participants to assign these points to where they believe the organization should invest more time building out the capabilities of that row.
Points must be assigned to a row, as shown. Do not assign points to a specific box.
Points can be assigned in increments of 1 to 10, and can be assigned in any configuration as long as the total number of points per row does not exceed 10. Thus, for example, one could assign 2 or 5 or all 10 points to any given row.
In the debrief, several lessons can be highlighted:
Focus: more important than any specific answer is the students thought process. Since teams have finite time and capacity - hence the limit of 10 points - a good allocation usually concentrates all points on only two to four areas.
Team Alignment: In practice, doing this exercise individually and then discussing with colleagues helps verify that a team is aligned arounds its goal and strategy. If your team is allocating its points very differently, this can be an indication of a lack of alignment
Fluency with the capabilities: a core goal of the exercise is to get students familiar with and fluent with digital era capabilities governments need. If, through the exercise, students are explaining the capabilities to one another and exploring their nuances, this is a positive outcome
Segment 5 - Final Remarks - 5'
Purpose of this Segment
As the last segment, the purpose is twofold: to briefly present a new model around levers for building capabilities and to summarize the key messages from this class.
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion
In this segment, David presents a framework he, Lauren Lombardo (Harvard MPP 21') and Tom Loosemore drafted about the levers that digital teams can use to shift practices and behaviors across the government.
Lastly, David closes the class with the key takeaways:
Building communities around a shared vision can both build capacity and enable one to seize opportunity for change
Understanding the capabilities of a digital era government - like those outlined in the Maturity model - can be helpful to both marshal resources and set a strategy
There are multiple strategies for driving digital era capabilities into government
A small team with moderate capabilities can have a significant impact on government services and operations - and scaling new practices across the government is a more significant challenge
Common questions from students faculty could prepare for:
- Why did GDS choose the come in high approach?
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Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.