"The Government Digital Service truly was once world-beating. What happened?"

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/24/government-digital-service-truly-was-once-world-beating-what-happened

Hmmmm....

There's lots in here that's right - there was some great work and lots of Whitehall pushback - but there are lots of omissions of where GDS got it wrong.

Not just failed big projects - hello Verify, UC, RPA - there was too much focus on one lever 'civil servants building transactional services that end in a website' to change govt

While ppl would rave about ease of ordering a driving licence online, there were closed post offices

While ppl would rave about the transparency of the performance dashboard, there wasn't accountability

While ppl would rave about the ease of using Universal Credit, there was a fall in benefits payments, a rise in food banks & humans being sanctioned thru a smartphone screen

While people would talk about a single government website and citizens not needing to understand the structure of government, there was a failure to understand and work with some of the useful democratic tensions between bits of central/local/the rest of govt

As a human who pattern matches I see many similar human failings in current government's plans around data.

This time it might hit even higher heights, & lower lows, as the data leaders might have more political agreement with their political leaders

So, yes let's damn well praise the good but let's also recognise that some things go wrong.

More humility and honesty in the debate about GDSv1 might help create a culture that expects, or even demands, more humility & honesty in the debate about the new data teams

Because we all learn from the past and the work of other teams....