Making the Sausage: Who makes GovTech?
This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Given the fanfare about GDS’s success, you could be forgiven for assuming that the civil service is now full of happy, productive, multidisciplinary teams, cheerfully designing and building world class services unaided by any third parties. But just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a sprawling sector of suppliers and vendors to support the government’s digitisation ambitions.
Why does the government still outsource so much? We’ll look at how procurement processes impact service design, and ask: is it possible to be a public servant in the private sector?
Reading:
Sinead Doyle is a Digital Strategist and Service Designer. As an Associate Director at Transform, she helps clients set a vision for their digital products and services. She guides multidisciplinary teams through the service design process, to produce better, simpler customer experiences. Over fifteen years in digital, she has worked across strategy, creative, and media, at agencies and consultancies, on projects spanning public and private sectors.
Sinead was Lead Service Designer on the Covid Vaccination Programme with NHS England in 2020. She co-led the MoD’s Defence Innovation Unit training programme, upskilling a large cohort of senior staff. In the run up to Brexit she made a crowd-sourced map of EU funded projects in the UK (Look Around EU). She is currently Account Director on the design workstream of HMCTS Reform programme, digitising citizen-facing court processes within the Ministry of Justice. She is also working on an approach to sustainable design for adoption across a 50-strong design practice.