Earlier this week @chadpbond was talking up the value of Government as a Platform components to the @OECDgov service design and delivery thematic group.

A not insignificant part of me still belongs to that ambition so I had a look at the performance data.

A thread... 1/11

I looked back at a 5 year period from the most recent week of data on http://www.gov.uk/performance . Went for cumulative volumes, not because they offer specific insight but as you'll see, because they nicely show the scaling value of the Government as a Platform component model. 2/11

First up, http://GOV.UK  (not far off its 8th birthday!). No curve here, just sedate year on year growth. Bit surprised by the huge drop last Christmas and apparent fall in traffic but assume that's from changes around cookies. A massively obvious COVID spike. 3/11

Second, Verify. Always embattled but every year the incline of usage gets steeper and the peaks (due to Self-Assessment) higher. The spike of COVID demand, presumably from Universal Credit, is very obvious in the second image. 4/11

Third, http://GOV.UK  Pay. Took its first payment in August 2016 and has now processed £494m.

2 years to 2m payments, 3 years to 4m, 4 years to ~10m. Has taken over 4m payments since March alone. 5/11

Finally, there's http://GOV.UK  Notify. Not much more you can say but wow at this lovely example of hockey stick growth.

In the last 6 months it's sent over a billion messages. And that's just in the UK - the code is being used by other countries to do similar 6/11

Mention should go to http://GOV.UK  Platform as a Service too. There's no public performance data but quotes like this from @armstrongkatya's recent blogpost ( https://medium.com/@katy_77804/re-arranging-the-deckchairs-on-the-titanic-why-the-launch-of-the-new-energy-performance-of-7940d92a1523) underline the compelling need for the secure, scalable infrastructure it offers. 7/11

And finally, important to recognise it's brilliant I could get this data from the Performance Platform ( http://www.gov.uk/performance ).

A shame the evolution of performance measurement stalled but hopefully the research will come good in time https://dataingovernment.blog.gov.uk/2017/03/20/meeting-user-needs-how-we-receive-and-share-service-data/ 8/11

Tech is only one part of how you scale high quality delivery of services. None of this rapid flex to support services would be possible without a wider Government as a Platform ecosystem. The UK helpfully packages it all up in the Service Toolkit - https://www.gov.uk/service-toolkit  9/11

There have been some high profile recent discussions about digital government in the UK but set that against the absence of so many headlines that could have been but aren't because of committed teams set up for the long-term plugging away to meet the needs of their users. 10/11

Not just the UK tho - we wrote about the enabling tools and resources governments need to support a service design culture in our report "Digital Government in Chile - Improving Public Service Design and Delivery".

Here's the section on enablers - https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org//sites/b94582e8-en/1/3/3/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/b94582e8-en&_csp_=864d08acdfdb1985bef8f2d586727be5&itemIGO=oecd&itemContentType=book#section-d1e3844 11/11