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The “One Website” problem.

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There’s not a Government in the world that’s not struggling with the “One Website” problem. And as news starts to break of trouble brewing at gov.uk, it’s worth stopping for a moment to try to understand specifically what the problems are and how we can adjust our approaches to continue to improve Government services.

Because, you see, first and foremost that’s the point. Whether it’s a website, an app, a call centre or an actual person looking after your enquiry, the starting point isn’t one website, or a portal or indeed gov.anything. On the contrary, the critical starting point is the question “How can we improve service delivery?”.

Read this to hear what I’m on about: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/18/the_inside_story_of_govuk/

If we take this article from the Register on face value, it points to a couple of really key issues.

1. The “website”, in all its shapes and forms became the main focus

2. The strategy to make it all look the same didn’t help

3. Sometimes people want lots of complex information, not bullet points.

4. And most of that information doesn’t change very often.

The pressure on any big business nowadays to save costs is overwhelming (and make no mistake, all Governments are big businesses) and the logical step to reduce duplication of back end CMS’s etc can’t be disputed. Equally, customers shouldn’t have to understand Government to work out which site to go to. But the decision to somehow put all the sites under one huge domain is flawed.

How often will someone renewing their driving licence want to search for nearby hospitals? Or will people lodging planning applications be interested in content about parks and recreation?

Nobody would support the existence of 300 websites in one state but Government is simply too big for one website and the only way forward is to construct a portfolio of linked applications that will help the public. This can only be done through real understanding of customer needs. And our recommendation to clients we work with in this area is that the criteria for what you do first is based on one thing.

It’s not “Drupal” or “UX” or even “Gov2.0″. It’s simpler than that. It’s “which of these things has the greatest capacity to improve service delivery and the lives of our citizens”.

Ok, let’s get on with it…

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