Policy and analysis Service design

How service ownership works in DfE

Rachel Hope – DfE Digital and Transformation

In this photo there is a central circle with lots of postits arranged inside and out. These postits cannot be read clearly but they represent different users of a service and the stakeholders involved in the delivery of that service.Most of government is mostly service design most of the time. That’s a pithy and powerful assertion, and has been deservedly influential since Matt Edgar coined it a few years ago. But influential is not the same as right – and indeed the title of Matt’s original blog post ended more tentatively with ‘…Discuss.’

This post, which is in effect a case study of acting as if the assertion were true, throws useful light on what it could mean. In doing so it makes it easier to see that there is a risk of eliding two questions and that it is worth answering them separately. The easy first question is whether policy and delivery should understand and respect each other and expect to work in close partnership – to which the answer must be yes. The harder second question is whether the venn diagram does – or should – eventually consume itself to become a single all encompassing circle. Verbally and visually, the argument of this post it that it does, and that argument is powerfully made in respect of the service it describes. But that still leaves open the question of whether the model works as well when the service is less specific or delivered less directly.