Digital

Sharing the importance of improving public services (in Vietnamese!)

October 19, 2015 by craigmilligan No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a post by Neil Campbell, our Information Security Officer

When the team arrives in the office every morning, I’d like to think they have three things on their mind: breakfast (who doesn’t?), the morning update and what they are going to achieve that day. However, a morning in late September also introduced an additional consideration for some of the team; the challenge of communicating through a translator.

Introducing the “Communist Party’s Central Steering Committee on Information Technology in Vietnam”

We had the opportunity that morning to spend time with some of our Vietnamese counterparts, as part of a wider visit to Scottish Government.

The visiting group’s official title was “Communist Party’s Central Steering Committee on Information Technology in Vietnam” – a bit of a mouthful but we soon learned we had much in common, including a passion for long names.

The delegates did not speak any English, which made those advance thoughts on communication so important. Communicating in manageable, clear phrases through a translator can be a challenge and it does remind me of the challenge our content designers tackle communicating Government information.

The importance of improving public services

We were able to explain to our counterparts how important our team believe it is to have a central point of access for public services within Scotland. We also spoke about how the website is supported by a purpose built publishing platform, and that the teams are proactively engaging with the public sector to create content that meets the needs of users.

What else did we cover?

• progress made by the mygov.scot programme
• enabling digital transformation within the Scottish public sector
• usage of agile delivery methodologies alongside traditional governance mechanisms while still incorporating user feedback
• importance of strong product ownership
• understanding the wider landscape of the public sector
• finding the right skills for your teams
• early discovery work on a performance platform

These topics seemed to resonate well with our counterparts, as they had seen similar challenges in embedding new ways of working within traditional organisations.

Sharing learnings

Our counterparts were interested in how we were mandating uptake within the public sector as well – leading to an interesting discussion about the autonomy of local Government. We were keen to explain how our ambition is to bring people on a journey with us, rather than mandating uptake. Understanding the structural context is critical for a programme such as ours and will be vital to success.

Given my attendance as well, topics such as cyber resilience and supporting the digital market were well covered. We have a close working relationship with our information security colleagues in wider Scottish Government – so we were keen to explain how these relationships were established.

What did this experience tell us?

• we shouldn’t let language be a barrier to communicating learnings, discovering new things or finding different ways of working
• solutions to the challenges we all face won’t just be unearthed within the Scotland or the UK
• we can look abroad for innovative, new ideas that have the potential to benefit people’s lives

We’ll be posting about future progress and new features here on our blog, and also on Twitter. Have something to share? Let us know in the comments below.

Comments