Harnessing the Power of Digital: Richard Pope on Platformland

Richard Pope, author of Platformland: An Anatomy of Next-Generation Public Services, joined the Digital Service Network to expand upon the themes discussed in his book and offer a strategic vision for improving digital services. Pope was a founding member of the UK government’s digital service team and was the first product manager for Gov.UK. He draws heavily on these experiences to explain how the public sector has largely failed to harness the power of digital platforms and highlight the importance of designing digital services that work for the public.

Platformland Overview

Richard Pope explains that today’s digital infrastructure, when applied with the correct intent, can provide government practitioners the opportunity to systematically eliminate administrative burden and increase the public’s access to digital services. In Platformland, Pope makes the case for using digital platforms to build public services and infrastructure that (1) work harder for the public, (2) are simpler to build, and (3) are understandable, accountable, and democratic. Ultimately, he says that it is important to prioritize designing for the public, not for the government. 

Work Harder for the Public

Pope explains that the aim of most public sector digital programs is to deliver the status quo more cheaply, rather than find ways to make digital services work harder for the public. He explains that this emphasis on efficiency is a trap because services that work better for the government often do not benefit citizens. Additionally, Pope points out that digital technologies are not being effectively employed by the government. For example, the result of most digital programs is a digitized version of an analogue process, often contributing to backlogs and increased administrative burden. Pope finds this frustrating because he believes that when applied with the correct intent, today’s technology presents governments with the opportunity to systematically eliminate administrative burden. 

To properly leverage technology, Pope argues that governments need to shift their focus from efficiency toward redesigning services to make them easier for the public to use. He then shared some practical steps practitioners can implement to ensure that digital services work harder for the public:

• Deploy automation for the public good, not narrowly defined efficiency savings or user needs. Pope notes that this will require a mindset change in which practitioners move away from efficiency goals to instead focus on what will improve individuals’ lived experiences.
• Systematically measure administrative burden for the public and public servants. This will highlight opportunities for improvement and help practitioners take the first step of deciding where to apply the potential of digital platforms.
• Mandate the creation of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to allow loose joins between services. Pope argues that teams need to prioritize the creation of APIs because it will lead to a more systematic way of improving government services. 
• Make all credentials available as trusted digital credentials and ensure services can consume them. Pope believes that this is the biggest opportunity in the public sector for crafting better services as it is an add on to existing infrastructure. 

Simpler to Build

Pope also shared the reasons he believes good public services are still too hard to build. He says this can partially be attributed to the time digital delivery teams spend trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’ during product development. Not only does this cost them time and money, but it also leads to a loss of commonality across products, making services less intuitive for users. Shifting to a common components approach would allow delivery teams to meet their needs more cheaply and efficiently because they could solve a common problem once and reiterate the solution across multiple platforms. 

Pope says it is also important to keep in mind that governments run on lists. These lists tend to be built for a single purpose and tightly bound to a single organization. As a result, when digital delivery teams attempt to reuse data from these lists for their services, they often must take a data sharing approach. Pope argues that this hurts service delivery because data sharing generates data that is a poor copy of the original data. 

Additionally, shared data often ends up out of sync because the ongoing cost of sharing data is too great. For this reason, Pope argues for a data access approach over data sharing, in which data would be maintained as a common resource with good custodianship and proper access controls. Most importantly, this data needs to be maintained in such a way that it can be used by multiple organizations, not bound to a single service. Building off of these recommendations, Pope shared the following practical steps for creating services that are simpler to build:

• Organize governance to support and use components that solve problems once. This is a mindset change that requires practitioners to be critical of whether or not services are taking advantage of existing components. 
• Decouple data from services. When new services are created, data needs to be maintained as a separate entity and APIs should be created around this data. Organizations should also think critically about other services that might find their data helpful. 
• Reframe transparency as an enabler of transformation. Digital services need to start functioning more like high quality, open source projects. Organizations should not only incorporate transparency into their data management, but also into their overall structure. This will help delivery teams better understand each other’s work and what is happening elsewhere in the service delivery system, improving cross-team collaborations and service delivery overall.  

Understandable, Accountable, Democratic

Pope argues that we are in a time where software is political because people’s lived experiences of the digital are shaped by politics. In this final section, Pope shared some pointers guiding how delivery teams can grapple with this. First, he argues that the public should have the opportunity to see how services work and be able to suggest changes. He shared AJ Balfour’s quote, “democracy is government by explanation,” to underscore the importance of giving the public opportunities to understand how digital services function. 

Pope claims that user feedback for digital services is crucial as the better digital services meet professional standards, the worse they are at meeting community needs or satisfying users. Thus, he argues that creating opportunities for users to meddle in the public sector is key because democracy is about giving people opportunities to shape services and, in turn, shape their world. He asserts that the only way for public services to get better is through co-production. For this reason, civil society organizations need to develop ways to understand how digital public infrastructure works and how it is changing by actively soliciting feedback from users and staying connected to the user experience. 

To increase accountability, Pope posits that digital infrastructure needs appropriate, responsible institutions that can offer reasonable guidance and oversight. Practitioners interested in making their services more understandable, accountable, and democratic can follow these practical steps:

• Put transparency at the point of use. Transparency is needed to help the public understand why a service exists, how it works, and how they can seek recourse if something goes wrong. 
• Systematically publish information about how services and infrastructure work and how they are changing. To increase transparency, organizations need to release information about their services such as their change log, source code, and notes. Pope believes there is no excuse for that info to not be in the public domain. 
• Grow new digital institutions with appropriate mandates and oversight. Digital institutions must start somewhere. Often, they start as small teams. Thinking of these teams as proto-institutions and arguing for the creation of proper infrastructure early on is part of growing digital institutions. In the future, Pope expects that the greatest contribution of the digital to government will not be efficiency, but how the government is organized, making appropriate mandates and oversight crucial for ensuring democracy.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, Pope expands upon why he wrote this book and why he settled on these three themes. He explains that in the absence of a clear narrative about the role of digital services and infrastructure, digital platforms will remain a side concern or be seen as a tool for short term savings rather than as central to the operation of the modern democratic state. He believed that his book could help to fill this gap. 

Pope says it is important to make the argument for digital services that merge these three themes together. It is not enough to say that digital services need to work better and they can not simply be better designed. Instead, practitioners should use the book’s three themes to practice intentionality in  their design and execution of digital services. 

Finally, Pope recognized that it is easy to feel helpless as a digital practitioner working in government. He reminded attendees that even when digital practitioners can’t shape policy or what is happening in the political sphere, they can shape their profession. By prioritizing transparency, accountability, and trust in their work, practitioners can shape the services they provide to be better for the public and ultimately contribute to a more democratic government. 

Key takeaways 

• Make digital services work harder for the public. Shift the focus from efficiency and digitalization to identify ways that digital platforms can be employed to reduce administrative burden and improve the lived experiences of the public. Center projects on redesigning services, creating APIs, and building infrastructure for digital credentials.
• Aim for services that are easier to build. Don’t waste time trying to reinvent the wheel and instead focus on a common components approach. Leave data sharing behind; prioritize data access, maintaining data as a common resource with good custodianship. Incorporate transparency into data management and administrative practices such that digital services can function as open source projects. 
• Prioritize services that are understandable, accountable, and democratic. Leverage co-production to improve service delivery by providing opportunities for the public to understand how services work and to suggest changes. Treat digital service teams as proto-institutions and argue for the creation of proper infrastructure early on. Don’t get discouraged. Remember that by shaping your profession, you shape service delivery and thereby shape democracy and the lives of the public.