GDS Gives Digital By Default Progress Report

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has published a blog post about the progress that has been made with the “digital by default” service standard since it went live in April.

From April 2014, all new or redesigned public services have been required to meet the digital by default standard – part of the government’s transformation plan which will see Whitehall offer online services that people prefer to use.

GDS claims that the standard and its assessment process were piloted for a year before they went live to create an effective learning process.

Since the go live date, 27 assessments against the 26 points of digital by default have been run – each service is assessed at alpha, beta and live stages, each with a panel of four or five GDS assessors.

The blog post reveals that the pass rate so far has been 70% and more exemplar services are passing rather than non-exemplars.

It also claims more services pass at alpha stage, rather than beta or live, which GDS says “isn’t a surprise,” because the assessment panels look for more at later stages, whereas the alpha test is just to check whether things are on track.

“Many Struggling In The Same Area”

“There are common areas which are finding a challenge to address in their assessments,” claimed Olivia Neal, GDS service standard head and author of the blog post.

“These include user research and assisted digital. The GDS user research and assisted digital teams are working closely with Departments to support them in building the capability to be able to meet the service standard in these areas,” she added.

According to the blog post, the next step is to development a dashboard on the performance platform to aid service managers to review published assessment reports and identify problems to look out for while developing their services.

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