In Development

For some time now, we’ve been aware of a paradox: we are building and operating user-centric services but use government-centric language to describe them. The launch of the igovt website is a small yet important step towards changing that.

Take the Government Logon Service (GLS) as an example. According to our website, which is intended for a government agencies audience, “In a nutshell, the GLS is an all-of-government shared service to manage the logon process for online services of participating agencies.”

The very name, description, and use of a Three Letter Acronym are so government-centric. What does an average person, say a student who just wants to check his/her account online, make of this? Do we really want to try and explain to people what a “logon” is?

There is of course logic in using government-centric language, especially in the early days of a new service for which there are few, if any, precedents and mental models. Describing as accurately as possible what a service does from a functional perspective allows for precision. It helps external experts and interest groups get an in-depth understanding of what the service does and, sometimes more importantly, what it doesn’t.

But it is more than choice of language alone. It’s also about perspective.

Protecting privacy has been a major driver for the all-of-government authentication services. An important way of designing in privacy is the separation of who a person is (identity) from what they do online (activities) so that data aggregation and building profiles of people aren’t possible. Two different government departments operate two different services based on their respective strengths.

This world-leading approach has been highly acclaimed by privacy experts. Yet, from the view of a person or organisation interested in getting better and quicker government services, it just means more complexity that they have to try and understand and overcome to get to what they are really interested in- the service they want.

The second issue therefore is that people don’t want to integrate and coordinate government’s services; they want government to do that. This desire is reflected at a strategic level in the Development Goals for the State Services. At an everyday level, it means that we had to find a way for our privacy-protective design to be presented to people as a single, integrated online service without diluting the design itself.

And, it was apparent that the time to act was now, before the Identity Verification Service was launched and before future authentication services further increased complexity.

The result is igovt. It is not “just another brand” but, over time, will represent a significant shift. A shift to using user-centric language; a shift to government integrating multiple online services from multiple government agencies for people without any dilution of security and privacy protection; a shift to making it easier and more convenient for people and organisations to get government’s services.

Though there are many models we can learn from, there aren’t any tried and trusted models that we can simply adopt. It is therefore neither possible nor appropriate to try and make the shift in one giant leap. Instead, it’s more of a journey from inside-out thinking to outside-in, learning along the way.

The next step in this journey is to re-brand and re-describe GLS as the first igovt service.

Technorati Tags: branding, GLS, igovt, IVS