I like this good problem definition work on Louise Downe’s site (on a side note I found the font used on the site hard to read, but maybe that’s just me):
Government services are created haphazardly around internal processes and are not designed for digital.
“Providing services to individuals and businesses makes up roughly 80% of the cost of government.
Of this 80%, around 60% is spent dealing with calls and casework. Most of it completely unnecessarily.
This money doesn’t go to giving benefits, or printing passports - it’s spent dealing with the fall out of millions of applications, renewals, and revocations made by users those who aren’t eligible, don’t actually need to do a thing, or do so in the wrong way.
Let’s be clear, this is not ‘user error’.
Government has haphazardly created ‘transaction’ after ‘transaction’ - licences, taxes and benefits that are not part of a viable service that a user can use successfully unaided.”
The solution – build services as service
“To fix those, we need to stop ‘digitising’ and do what it’s never done before. Build services as services.”
Source: Government services aren’t done yet, so neither am I | Louise Downe, 2015