Week 36: 114 services in a week
I’m working with GovTech Barbados to help deliver alpha.gov.bb and 15 to 20 new entry points (start pages with guidance and, in some cases, forms) for digital services. I’m battling jetlag at the moment.
This week in Barbados, we:
- Ran workshops with seven ministries and departments. Together, we mapped 114 potential services for alpha.gov.bb.
- Adapted as plans shifted. We hosted some ministries, departments and agencies at our base and visited others in their offices. It was hectic, but we made it work, and I’m grateful to the team for being so adaptable.
- Pushed things forward behind the scenes: working on access to the alpha.gov.bb domain, setting up a GitHub organisation and agreeing on analytics. All small steps that unlock bigger ones.
What we learned
- We’ve started calling “front doors” entry points.
- We’re building trust with the ministries, departments and agencies. Some teams started the workshops sceptical and ended them saying it was much easier than they’d expected. The Registrar said she wants to digitise the whole birth registration process.
- Our riskiest assumption right now is that alpha.gov.bb will work, and that copying the UK’s centralise-everything model is right for Barbados. We’re going to test that quickly.
- Deep transformation in Barbados doesn’t have to look like it does in the UK (something I have to keep reminding myself). Digitising a birth certificate application might be enough to make a big difference.
- We need to be careful not to import UK assumptions into local processes, especially where negotiation or discretion plays a role.
I’ve started to wonder whether moving everything online might have unintended social effects in Barbados. Is queuing and waiting (and generally taking things a bit more slowly) an integral part of the country’s social fabric?
AI and the pace problem
We’ll need to find better ways to work at pace, and AI can help here. We watched one of the developers take a photo of a group of Post-it notes with service names on them and use AI to generate entry points for those services, with content scraped from the web, in seconds. That isn’t doing the hard work to make it simple, by any means, and to be honest I’m not sure what I think about it yet. But I will say that multidisciplinary teams of six to ten people aren’t going to be sustainable for Barbados. We’ve only spoken to seven of the 30-ish ministries. We’ll need to find a new way, and AI used cautiously to speed things up is going to be interesting.
What’s next
- User research: start testing those assumptions and watching users.
- A show and tell next Friday. We’ve invited the people we met this week.
- alpha.gov.bb: on track to put something live next week, even if it’s just a single page.
- Keep exploring where AI can safely speed things up and help us prototype faster.