Information direct to the population

Matthewman: hits are growing

Anyone who has spent time searching for information on government web sites will tell you there must be a better way of doing things.

The information is all over the place, written in different styles, is not co-ordinated, and is sometimes conflicting depending on which departmental site you visit.

An example frequently cited is that of a school leaver. He or she will need information on their options for finding a job, going to university or college, being self employed or making benefit applications.

Traditionally, information on these different options will be split between the sites of three or four different departments.

The premise of Directgov is to make a single portal that citizens use to learn about public services and carry out every transaction they need with the state, regardless of the complications behind the scenes, according to chief technology officer David Matthewman.

“People are often focused on a particular task, whether it is leaving school, renewing their passport, renewing their car tax and so on. We want to draw people’s attention to anything that may be relevant to these tasks,” he said.

That outlook reflects the vision of the Transformational Government agenda, which aims to centre public services around the citizen rather than vice versa.

It is also a key aim of the Digital Britain strategy, which states that: “A profusion of web sites with targeted audiences and no overall architecture to link them can make the interface with customers confusing, and undermine each web site’s importance and values.”

The plan recommends “streamlining the sheer number of government web sites.”

For Directgov, this means being accessible to as many citizens as possible through a variety of platforms. Since launching in April 2004, the service has expanded from being purely online to being available on digital TV and is already accessible on Freeview, Sky and Teletext.

It also means moving information away from being grouped around the way government departments are organised -­ education, health, tax and so on ­- and towards themes more appropriate to people, such as money, parenting and support for disabled people.

The aim is to treat the citizen as a “customer”, according to Matthewman.

“It may sound odd saying that it allows us to cross-sell, but that is what we are doing. It is in everyone’s best interest to get people using our services efficiently,” he told Computing.

In practical terms, this means two things. First, putting all the information in one place.

There were 1,649 central government web sites identified by the end of March 2009, of which 762 had been closed and a further 599 will be shut.

Directgov is in the process of putting the 551 citizen-facing web sites onto its central portal. Matthewman hopes that the process will be finished by 2011.

Meanwhile, Businesslink, the government’s business support organisation, is going through a similar process for company-oriented web sites.

Information is moved and re-written according to a style guide and simplified to make it accessible, often squeezing many pages of content into one. If information is not being moved to Directgov, for example where it is relevant to local
authorities, Directgov must be able to link the user to the right place on a council web site.

The second task is to make the site more transactional and encourage citizens to interact with government online by making services as easy to find and use as possible.

Services such as renewing car tax and tax self-assessment are available through Directgov, though the actual transactions are carried out on the DVLA or HM Revenue and Customs web sites.

Traffic is growing fast. Directgov hits rose from 11 million in January this year to 18 million in March after the transfer of Jobcentre Plus services to the site.

Scalability is a key factor, said Matthewman.

“We have global caching capabilities and we can use servers overseas at times of need. The final goal is to be able to serve million of pages per hour without needing to worry,” he said.

But he still wants to get the service out to more people in the UK. Directgov is working with UK Online Centres to help those who are digitally excluded gain access to services and to train people how to use them.

The site is also available on every internet-enabled mobile phone and is linking with
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 “accelerators” to improve its “findability” online.

As well as getting the site out to the public, Matthewman is looking to develop new services. He wants to use more video and audio content to help explain topics.
And an innovation trial platform has been set up at innovate.direct.gov.uk where citizens can try out new services.

“While the core site has to be reliable and maintainable, this is where we can do experiments online,” said Matthewman.

Examples of such experiments are a school closures information site that Directgov staff worked overnight to create when snow brought the UK to a standstill earlier this year.

Staff are also creating widgets that other web sites can carry if they want quick and up-to-date information from Directgov on issues such as swine flu, exam results, or any other matter that government can help with.

The site is designed to work closely with the web community in producing new ideas, some of which may be translated permanently to Directgov.

But the web developer community has not been entirely supportive of Directgov. In a time where the dominant online trend is towards decentralised control of information, the government site is seen by critics as a centrally controlled
bastion of the old school.

Some argue that it should not exist at all, as people will always search for information via Google rather than being led through a path on Directgov.

Tom Steinberg, one of the authors of the Cabinet Office’s Power of Information report and founder of trail-blazing online democracy organisation MySociety, said Directgov consistently trades excellence for breadth.

“I think they could cancel almost all their current projects, and spend the money they already have on making the basic ones better,” he said.

But Matthewman says that the adoption figures for the site speak volumes, and that while Directgov may be trying to do a lot, the key is getting as many people using the site as possible.