Before I go into the article proper, indulge me with this image depicting a potted history of the Birmingham City Council website as rendered on a leaving card I made for the last remaining original Webteam member when he left the organisation:
People's names changed for privacy reasons, obvs.
Why does it look like a page from Ceefax, I assume you're wondering? Because the very first iteration of what is now the online service, Birmingham Assist, was delivered on 'touch sensitive' viewdata terminals placed in strategic locations such as libraries and neighbourhood offices, and it basically worked and looked like Ceefax. There were a couple of kiosks in unsupervised public locations on the street, but as you can imagine they didn't last long.
The whole thing was established as a joint pilot project between people in the University of Birmingham Computer Science department, and people in the training services division of the council's Economic Development Department. The name Assist was essentially a backronym, ending with the word telematics, which was the word in vogue at the time referring to people using computers and stuff to find information and stuff from remote servers before the World Wide Web was ubiquitous in people's minds. The site started as a series of viewdata kiosks, and once the university got a webserver the information was synchronised as a website too.
Around the council in 80 days
The point of this history lesson is that you can probably guess that a service which has existed in the organisation since 1994 will have moved around the council departmental structure a few times.
After being a pilot project in the Economic Development Department it moved to Information Services, with the team located in the Central Library. Then it moved to Customer Services briefly, then to Communications, then back to Customer Services for an extended period of time, and now since 2020 has been in what has essentially been the IT department, under the different names the IT department has had.
In my opinion, the Golden Age of the site was when it - and we the team who maintained it - was part of Communications; the central team which coordinated everything sat in Corporate Communications, and about half the people who maintained the content on a day to day basis sat in departmental communications teams. The other half? More on that later...
As staff maintaining the site we felt reasonably well respected by our colleagues in the rest of the council, and there was a lively community of website editors who met every three months to share news updates and discuss matters of interest and concern, and there was enthusiasm for continually making the site and the service better, and introducing new functionality as emerging technology permitted.
And there was a shared vision for what the site was for.
So what's the website for anyway?
Back then we just called it the website; now, of course, it's the digital service.
To my mind, there are multiple purposes for the digital service:
- For residents to report problems or request services
- For residents to find out general and niche information relevant to them as people who live here
- For visitors to find out information which will help them with their visit
- For potential visitors to find out information which shows how interesting the place is to woo them from being potential visitors to actual visitors
- For potential inward investors to find out key information to enable them to be satisfied their inward investment will be a wise one
- For the council to communicate to citizens what it actually does across the board so that citizens can be assured their taxpayer's money is being spent wisely
- For the council to communicate to engaged citizens the policy backgound underpinning the whys and hows of its service delivery in addition to the whats
- For the council to foster engagement in citizens who are not yet engaged, by presenting that policy background in an interesting and informative manner
- For the council, without straying into the realm of politics itself, to inform and engage citizens of the difference between the work of the elected councillors and the permanent staff, and why it is important to vote for councillors which will adequately represent citizens' interests at election time
- To facilitate the two way dialogue between council and citizens when it comes to the council informing citizens of its plans and seeking feedback on those plans, and for citizens to make their voices well and truly heard when there are important matters of concern affecting them.
Chingas. That's a lot of purpose, isn't it? I know at least one person reading will fundamentally disagree with at least one listed purpose there, but remember, I'm not talking about the purpose of the website here, I'm talking about the purpose of the online service, which is more than just one website. And I've previously written that the received wisdom of having One Site To Rule Them All is perhaps a flawed wisdom - that we should embrace the idea of multiple sites which are focussed on their own purposes and audiences, but with all of those sites maintained by the single team which is tasked with delivering the online service as a whole.
But if you look at that list, it doesn't really fit within any single one of the wider service areas most council websites^Wonline services sit within, does it?
So where should the service fit?
Early on in my local government digital career I attended an all day conference at which one of the main speakers was the Corporate Website Manager at Clackmannanshire District Council, and he wowed us all by telling us that he reported directly to the council Chief Executive. He then underwhelmed us by saying that as the Corporate Website Manager he was a Webteam of just himself. But by way of context, the population area the council served was about 30,000 people - not only less than the population of the seaside town in which I grew up, but a population smaller than the total number of employees of Birmingham City Council at that time.
Many council structures have some kind of separation of areas of the council which are directly responsible for delivering services to citizens, and areas of the council which are responsible for facilitating those delivery areas to enable them to do so efficiently.
To my mind, the online service is a bit of both - it provides service directly to the citizens by way of information services and transactional (form-based) services, and it also supports the service delivery arms with that direct service.
When council online services are located in either Communications or Customer Services, there's a tendency for the missions of that wider service to have primacy in the priorities for the website; Communications wants to focus on telling the citizens how ace the council really is, and Customer Services wants to focus on encouraging citizens to report potholes and pay their council tax and rent online rather than phoning up. Poor Consultation and Engagement rarely gets a look in wherever the service is sitting. When the service is in IT, even in the modern era of the Government Digital Service DaDP Framework, it's kind of seen more as a technology platform than a human interactions and relationships platform.
So, really, where should the service fit?
You'll be working out that with that list of purposes I'm going to say the online service should sit with none of the traditional parent service areas.
My proposal is that the Online Service, Communications, Customer Services, and Consultation and Engagement should sit together in some kind of Department of Citizen Relations (rubbish name, let's think of a better one), working together to a common Citizen Relations strategy. The Online Service should be its own distinct service itself rather than part of one of the other services - it can still work as a business support provider for the other services, but none of them should have primacy, and it needs to be able to determine its own priorities within the Citizen Relations strategy.
There's a potential mastodon on the plain when it comes to 'development', which might typically be done by software engineers in an IT department. I'm not going to directly propose whether the people who do that development should sit as part of the Online Team in DCR or part of the Software Engineering Team in IT, but I think there should be a consideration that some pieces of web or online service web development are probably best done by people sitting with the people doing the online service content development, and there are other pieces of web or online development best done by software engineers. This should not be an opportunity for a land grab or a turf war, it should be an opportunity for the person in charge of the Online Service to work with the people in charge of the other DCR services together with the person in charge of the Software Engineering Team to plan the needs and aspirations of the service for the next three to five years and allocate responsibilities and boundaries accordingly.
The content creation and publishing model
Having created our department in which the online service should sit, who should be creating the content and designing the forms and back end service interactions for it?
The answer, clearly, should be 'experts'. And by experts, I mean experts in creating content and designing service interactions.
Opinions have long been divided as to whether all the content and interaction creation should be done solely by staff working in a single, central corporate team where service areas provide them with facts and requirements to turn into engaging content and user-friendly forms, or whether the people actually creating the content and the forms should be working embedded within the service areas for the central team to act merely as final publishers; described as a devolved creation and/or publishing model.
In the latter model, so long as the devolved content and interaction creators are indeed experts in creating content and interactions, there's nothing inherently wrong with that model; when I first started working in local government as a Website Communications Officer, I indeed worked as a devolved content creator in a Directorate communications team, initially sending my work to the Corporate Webteam for publishing and then later on being given trusted access to publish my work directly, later moving to the corporate team itself.
However, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, whilst some of us who created the content for the site were web experts employed specifically as web experts in our respective service areas, there were many content creators who were not so specifically employed - in too many of the service areas, they didn't want to allocate budget to employing a dedicated web editor, so they gave the job of creating content for the website to staff as an add-on to a substantive job. Whilst there's no denying some of those staff creating content as an add-on were very capable people who could have done just as good a job as website communications officers as they did as transport planners, sadly some of those staff caused more work for the corporate team having to pick apart the supplied content to completely rewrite from scratch than had that staff member simply supplied the salient facts for the team to write about.
So whilst you could indeed say we'll create a devolved content model and direct the service areas to staff it properly, unless you're absolutely sure the service areas don't have sufficient organisational autonomy to simply say no we'll give the job to a Business Support Assistant as a development opportunity, that's a high risk strategy to adopt. And even if you can be sure every service area is employing dedicated online staff now, we are living with the inevitability of a constantly shrinking workforce as budget cuts continue for the foreseeable future. If the Parks Department is told it needs to cut two staff members, it's reasonable to guess they're more likely to cut the website editor and the business support officer than they are to cut a park ranger and a groundsperson. Their core business, after all, is maintaining parks rather than maintaining an online service.
So my recommendation is to indeed have a centralised corporate team with tamed and reliable knowledge providers in the service areas.
Who's in charge?
I know, in the modern era of empowered multidisciplinary teams we don't really like to use antiquated command-and-control era terminology like 'the person in charge', or 'the online service manager', or 'the boss'. These days we - rightly - consider that if we're trusting people to do a job we should be able to trust them to get on with it rather than needing to have somebody stand over them whilst they do it.
But flawed terminology as In Charge actually is in the modern era, we still need somebody to lead the service - to, amongst other things, at least most if not all of:
- Decide on the overall strategy for how the site is going to develop over the coming years
- Allocate priorities to incoming requests
- Lead on the creative vision for the service
- Ensure that innovations and emerging technologies are properly investigated and assessed for potential adoption
- Have the awkward conversations with service areas about why their request - or often, demand - will not be met at this time
- Be the principle advocate for the online service in the rest of the organisation
- Be the named person for people who don't know who to talk to about matters they need to raise
- Be the go-to escalation point about issues and problems which are not being resolved
- Have at least a conversational understanding of the wider context of internet technologies and how they work
- Ensure the team works to common design guidelines to create a unified synoptic service
- Ensure the team feels engaged and motivated to produce their best work and maintains a professional interest in the industry in which we work
- Arbitrate on internal team disputes
- Ensure the team have all the Continuing Professional Development opportunities they need
- Ensure they keep to their own CPD plan
- Commission work and development
- Be able to be firm at the contractual level with third party suppliers
- Communicate the work of the team and the service to our peers in the wider LocalGovDigital community
- Ensure the team as a whole and individuals within it get the appropriate credit for the team's successes
- Have a good understanding of the tensions between creating a service which works seamlessly for our citizen users whilst still being practical under the constraints our service areas are working under.
This role should be sufficiently senior that when senior people from the rest of the organisation try to assert their will by saying 'don't you know who I am?', they themselves can respond by saying 'yes, I know who you are, but don't you know who I am?' but not so senior as to being separated from the people doing the doing; the best leaders can lead by example, and in this context that example is, erm, exemplified by having the capability to do the doing themselves. It would not represent good optics for the person in charge of the online service to be the sort of person who says 'I don't really understand technology or the internet very much'.
In the DaDP Framework there are a number of roles which could be fits for this - there's potentially the Head of Digital Portfolio, there's the Lead Product Manager, there's the Service Owner, there's the Content Strategist, there's the Lead Content Designer or Head of Content Design, and possibly some other GDS roles which I'm missing. None of them are really the perfect fit for the task, though, are they? And if you're a council which is adopting the DaDP Framework and have a number of those roles in place, which of them are you designating as the person in charge of the online service, and how do the other people in the other roles feel about that?
For this role, the shortcomings of trying to shoehorn the GDS Central Government DaDP Framework into local government become apparent, precisely because GDS and www.gov.uk are not local government - whilst there is much crossover in how we need to serve the needs of our users, there is much that is very different, and it's an ongoing error for Local Government Digital to consider it must dance to the tune of Central Government Digital at all times.
As a job title which fits the role outline I've described above, I would actually propose taking a leaf out of the world of film and television production, and name it Online Service Executive Producer. In modern television production the executive producer is the showrunner with the overarching creative vision, but they also commission the creative input from other people - if a show has an ongoing story then the executive producer is responsible for the ebb and flow of that ongoing story, and may well write some or all of the scripts for each series, but they'll also commission scripts from other writers. The executive producer is not too proud to get their own hands dirty in the course of bringing the show to our screens, but they also employ more specific experts - producers, directors, scriptwriters, etc and get the best creative work out of all those creative people to make the best show they can.
Conclusion
The most controversial suggestion I make in this article is the proposal of a specific new department within the council which brings together the Online Service, Customer Services, Consultation and Engagement, and Communications to serve the needs of the citizens within the constraints of the council fairly and to the best of everybody's abilities.
It may well be a step to far to radically reorganise an entire council's corporate services department in that way, but I would hope that even if it's not realistic to do that and those four services need to stay in their respective existing departments, that the joined up thinking described can be achieved.