The Digital Service Design Standard - Measuring Success

The Department of Internal Affairs published the Digital Service Design Standard in July 2018 (https://www.digital.govt.nz/standards-and-guidance/digital-service-design-standard/). The purpose of the standard is to “provide the design thinking for anyone who designs or provides government services.”

This meetup will discuss the Standard, its relevance to public facing services, and how to measure its uptake in government agencies.

This is part of the New Zealand Government’s commitment under the Open Government Partnership Action Plan (Commitment 6) to “develop an assessment model to support implementation of the all-of-government Digital Service Design Standard (the Standard) by public sector agencies” (http://www.ogp.org.nz/assets/Publications/91b28db98b/OGP-National-Action-Plan-2018-2020.pdf)

This meetup is aimed at people outside the public sector. We’re also running a series of workshops for people inside the public sector. If you work in government, please sign up for one of those workshops instead at:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfKgPVf6pPyAvGrVSJfY3lU201GcsRyqy1E6Uct-0KjTRjfoA/viewform

Background:

The standard comprises 12 principles:

1. Identify your users and understand their ongoing needs
2. Be clear about what you are trying to change and why
3. Integrate security and privacy proportionate to risk from the outset
4. Be inclusive, and provide ethical and equitable services
5. Design and resource for the full lifetime of the service
6. Create and empower an interdisciplinary team
7. Work in the open
8. Collaborate widely, reuse and enable reuse by others
9. Design for our unique constitutional and cultural environment
10. Use digital technologies to enhance service delivery
11. Be a good data and information steward
12. Be transparent and accountable to the public

The standard covers NZ Government information and transactional services that are:
· public facing and/or inter-agency
· undertaken by third parties on behalf of government agencies
· new informational or transactional services (designed or redesigned after 30 June 2018)
· reviewing or redesigning existing services.

Information services are typically websites, or mobile applications, that provide information to the public. This information often includes reports, fact sheets and video, while transactional services are any services that lead to a change in the records held by government. Transactional services typically involve an exchange of information, money, licenses or goods.

When the standard was written, there were no specific guidelines about how broadly agencies would be expected to implement it, nor how agencies would be assessed against the standard. The standard does propose a consultation process to set up assessment mechanisms, or ways of measuring how successfully agencies are following the standard.

For this meetup, the central question is:
What would be the most useful, valuable, and practical ways to measure success?

Please do come along and contribute to the conversation.