Government Digital Service (GDS) Tidbits

I’ve recently started reading the blog run by the Government Digital Service (the team behind .gov.uk) and there have been a handful of particularly interesting posts over the last week or so.

In a lot of ways, the GDS team are a similar organisation to some parts of IT Services, and rather like how we *could* be working in terms of agile/devops methodologies and workflows.  They’re doing a lot of cool stuff, and in interesting ways.

Most of it isn’t directly unix related (it’s mostly web application development) but when I spot something interesting I’ll try and flag it up here.  Starting with a couple of examples…

“Three cities, one alpha, one day”
http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/07/23/three-cities-one-alpha-one-day/

This is a video they put up in a blog post about rapidly developing an alpha copy of the Land Registry property register service.  This rapid, iterative, user led development approach is an exciting way to build a service, and it’s interesting to watch another team go at something full pelt to see how far they can get in a day!

I’d have embedded it, but for some reason wordpress is stripping out the embed code…

FAQs: why we don’t have them
http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/07/25/faqs-why-we-dont-have-them/

Another article which jumped out at me was this one about why FAQs are probably not the great idea we all thought they were.

Like many teams, the team I work in produces web based documentation about how to use our services, and yes, we’ve got our fair share of FAQs! Since I read this article, I’ve been thinking about working towards getting rid of them.

Instead of thinking about “what questions do we get asked a lot?” perhaps we really should be asking “why do people ask that question a lot?” and either eliminate the need for them to ask by making the service more intuative, or make it easier for them to find the answer themselves by changing the flow of information we feed them.

I doubt we can eliminate our FAQs entirely, they’re useful as a way of storing canned answers to problems outside our domain of control – eg for things like “how do I find out my wireless mac address?”  However if we can fix the root cause where the problem is within our domain – we reduce the list of items on our FAQ, which makes them clearer and easier to use if people do stumble across them – and still gives us a place to store our canned answers.

Ideally I think those canned answers would better live in a knowledgebase, or some kind of “smart answers” system.  Which brings me on to my last example…

The Smart Answer Bug
http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/07/31/the-smart-answer-bug/

“Smart Answers” is an example of an expert system, which guides customers through a series of questions in order to narrow down their problem and offer them helpful advice quickly and easily.

The gov.uk smart answers system had a fault recently, which was only noticed because their analytics setup showed up some anomalous behaviour.

It turned out to be a browser compatibility fault with the analytics code, but the article really shows up the power of gathering performance and usage data about your services.

Although the example in the post is about web analytics, we can gather a lot of similar information about servers and infer similar information about service faults by analysing the results.

If we do that analysis well (and in an automated way) we can pick up faults before our users even notice a problem.