This wiki is maintained by the Service Integration team (LabPlus) at the Department of Internal Affairs in the New Zealand Government. It is meant as a public resource to support service delivery teams working in the public service to help in the design and delivery of better public services. We try to pull together the guidance and tools to support Service Innovation in New Zealand and beyond. You can help us identify and prioritise your needs at our mindmap or chat to us on our public Slack channel.
We also want to participate in and facilitate a peer to peer support community around Service Innovation. See the Collaborate page for details about existing communities you might want to get involved in.
Everything on this wiki, including the forum, is public. So please abide by the rules of your employers (where relevant) and our Code of Conduct. We encourage you all to be considerate, respectful, collaborative and supportive of each other.
You can join this wiki to contribute to forums, but if you want to be an editor, we'll need to approve you first :) Given this is a government initiative we welcome other public servants to contribute edits. We hope to open this up more broadly down the track :) To join this site please create an account and then return to this page, then you'll see a "Join" button below.
If you are specifically interested in the work of the LabPlus team, please subscribe to our mailing list, follow our LabPlus blog, follow us on @NZLifeEvents or come along to our weekly Open Lab events from 4-5 on a Friday, currently on Ground Floor, 45 Pipitea St, Wellington (after being evacuated from 79 Boulcott St, new venue being finalised in coming days).
LabPlus - the Service Integration Work Program
After some successful experimentation earlier in 2017, the Service Innovation team at the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) got the green light to move forward with our work in supporting a more integrated approach to service delivery across the New Zealand Government, largely on the back of our Government as a Platform (GaaP) work. For more details about GaaP, see our earlier blog posts.
We are really excited to be a core team of service designers, technical ninjas, data and analysis experts, and strategic experts to drive service innovation exemplars and support service delivery teams across government.
The goals of the Service Integration Work Program (LabPlus) are to:
- provide design, development, reference implementations of customer-facing all of government (AoG) digital transformation through tangible experimentation and iteration;
- discovery and prototyping of new reusable components to either fold back into agencies, AoG services or to close down initiatives that are not required;
- support the accelerated implementation of life event services through hands-on support, collaborative co-design and co-development with agencies;
- support growth of an ecosystem of services built on government components;
- transition meaningful outcomes to operational teams (gov and non-gov);
- reduce the barriers to building better services for service delivery teams in agencies.
Benefits realisation
At a basic level, we intend to capture and measurements benefits by:
- recording costs avoided by teams, agencies or AoG when engaged in distinct pieces of work or as a result of reusable components developed;
- measure benefits/value for users and industry, on a per initiatives basis;
- measure of efficiencies realised by service delivery teams participating in LabPlus;
- systemic measure of changes to the system (requires an evidence layer);
- economic or social Improvements for the community (users, industry, etc); and
- we can also measure actual reuse of APIs, code and content by govt and non-govt.
Work Program
Our work program is in five basic parts:
- Service delivery for life events and proactive entitlements, working with agencies to develop user-centred effective services (digital but also supporting non-digital) through collaborative co-design, co-discovery, co-prototyping and co-development of new services.
- Reusable components that support and facilitate faster and easier service delivery in government, with a focus on making reusable components openly available to support non-government (NGO) service providers to build on the back of government data, content, transactions services and business rules, all available programmatically (usually by APIs). These reusable components will be designed and developed in the public eye and we ill reach out as much as possible to co-design with service delivery teams as well as NGO service providers.
- 3rd party reuse exemplars are where we identify and support on an ongoing basis, third parties (for profit and non-profit), that are naturally motivated to build on top of government components, like a human services register or programmable rules about service entitlement.
- An extended Service Innovation Toolkit will deliver the guidance, reference examples, resource sharing, tool sharing and other support mechanisms to support government service delivery teams.
- Evidence and value realisation work will ensure we build both the service analytics evidence base to inform and monitor the effectiveness of new digital services, while also tracking the value created from our work for people, government and the broader sector.
We offer a range of LabPlus Services that help us deliver the work program, so please have a look and see how we can help you.
If you'd like to stay across our work as it progresses, again please join our mailing list or join us in person at our weekly Open Lab events for a catch up and to help us shape the future of government services! Several of our team is on Twitter, so you can tweet @NZLifeEvents.
Now that we are out of experimentation phase, and into a longer-term work program, please let us know about yourself or your agency, organisation or community if you think we should be engaging with you more as we move forward. Many thanks to all those who have been in touch. We are looking forward to more cross sector and civil society engagement and collaboration 🙂