Start with forms
When we started thinking about alpha.gov.bb we had lots of options for where to start. And no shortage of people with opinions about which problems we should be solving.
That could have paralysed us. I didn’t that. I just wanted to start delivering value to users.
My vision was to ship something small daily, we quite meet that. But here’s what we did do.
Sometimes the right answer is just to start.
We could have done user research, but I had a hunch we understood what a good government service looked like by now. Most of the team had spent years designing them. The thing that would help most was deliver things that worked more easily, qickley.
At GovTech Barbados we decided to “push on open doors”. That meant digitising forms as quickly as possible.
Delivering a PDF form as a simple digital service puts value infront of users. It means people start to feel the different. You get to test your ways of working with stakeholders. You’ll see if they are as receptive to change as they claim to be.
Digitising forms is not the end goal. Full transformation of digital services end-to-end is. But even today, with the help of AI, that is a long, complex road of winning hearts and minds, changing opinions and building political capital finding users real problems. In Barbados, we needed to demonstrate you can do the simple things well first.
In an ideal world, I’d have teams do this quickly, as soon as they find a form. I think of this as “delivery as discovery”: the team learns as much as they can by doing low risk delivery and hopefully you’re building political capital by helping to solve problems for everyone.
Forms in government are generally easy to find
They should be easy to digitise. Claude digitised roughly 80 forms for me in one evening, albeit as prototypes. I was blown away, and that set the tone for what I wanted to achieve with AI.
The complex thing in digital transformation is always the people. An old boss of mine used to say: “people take time”. What I find is that if you gather evidence and prove competence, people often come along with you willingly. The brave come early, but the sceptics need to see proof.
Digitising forms allows you to, build proof, find out what works, how people work, and how easy they are to work with. And all the time you’re digitising simple forms, you’re building up collateral for larger digital services. Two or three simple forms all of a sudden can be combined into something that delivers the solution to a user’s problem.
Email submissions won’t break anything
You can inject a digital form into a paper back-office process fairly easily. Send the submission by email to the same place that the paper forms get processed. Removing a small step from the user. You don’t have to convince stretched stakeholders, to change anything. Unless they want to.
In Barbados we found stakeholders often wanted more than just an email. We built a case management system as soon as we could. We then started routing some forms to it.
You’ll get data
We didn’t have much data when we started. If we had we may have chosen a different approach. You can get data about how many people are using a particular form and that can help small teams to prioritise where they put their effort.
What you get by working in this way
- Quick delivery of value, to users.
- Evidence and proof that your teams can deliver, or you find out in low-risk ways that you have problems that need to be solved. You get to practice in the open, particular important if you have a new team.
- Data and analytics about what is being used. Something we didn’t have much of in Barbados when we started.
- Potential for spotting bigger services by combining multiple smaller ones together. This was a big hunch for me. Yet to be proven.
It’s easy to complicate this kind of work. You don’t have too.
It’s by no means flashy. In fact I’d, say it’s boring and safe, but in a way that helps you deliver value.
A testing ground for your team.
I see this approach as building the foundations for later transformation. To do this well you’ll need to build a design system, sort out your infra and many other, not-insignificant things.
In Barbados I think this approach served us well. We started to see people asking for work like the things we were doing.
That for me is success