[toyg]

Credit where credit is due, this is the legacy of the Cameron government (although the conversation started under Brown, iirc, it was the first Cameron cabinet that really pushed it, by basically setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM). The efficacy and power of GDS has since ebbed and flowed, but clearly they managed to entrench some great practices that continue to this day.

[ColinHayhurst]

Exactly, through recall this was Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, so Nick Clegg (you might have head of him) may have a claim.

Actually the credit should go to the brilliant and dedicated people in GDS doing great work; though I do not know enough to pick out names. The UI/UX and implementation was first class from the get go.

As a Brit my life is made remarkably easier as a citizen and startup entrepreneur. The benefits to the UK ecomnomy are enorous but not measured. In contrast my personal experience of govt engagement when setting-up and running startups in US between 1991 and 2013 were painful. And would have been very painful without help (thank you YC).

Finally if we are going to give leadership credit it should go to Francis Maude [0]. He happened to be my local MP, so I met him quite a few times, and he was most helpful and astonishingly effective in helping us navigate two big challenges we had in facing down, shall we say, "unethical quango-business partnerships". A remarkable, thoughtful man and effective operator, who was in government over three decades [1].

[0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2012/10/16/gov-uk-the-start/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Maude

[gm3dmo]

+1 for Francis Maude because he definitely grokked it.

Martha Lane Fox also deserves mention for: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/directgov-2010-an...

They all tore up the rulebook. The rule being: Government can’t do computers. Outsource to favourite big consultancy. Twenty years were wasted on that nonsense approach.

Some of the greatest resistance comes from the big departments who are actively hostile to many of the changes required to work in this way. There’s a lot to be said for a round of golf at The Belfry with the splendid chaps from the IT consultancy your department spends £2bn a year with.

Golf days: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/abfe49d3-f24c-4b93-b8e...

[Zenst]

I recall GDS being initiated for internal DOH stuff circa John Major, going into Blair era (yip was there when Blair took over the role).

Not that I'd attribute it to any PM, believe it was driven by the government security services (which department/flavor I could not say).

That all said, it may of been a different aspect but certainly has a longer story than told. With that, it started as an intranet project iirc.

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/ has some insight but that seems more to cover the more public web aspects and even they say it is "a story" not "the story".

So be fascinating to peace the "full story" and history together.

GDS was a whole catchment in the early days, that included the phone services and that was contracted to Mercury telecom at one stage, or aspects were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Communications

If any credit should be laid, it would be upon the civil servants and associates that came up with the initiative, who sadly will probably remain nameless even if their names were known. Politicians just green light so much and claim credit, so much goes on behind the scenes of any government. With that, best think of politicians as orchestra conductors who depend upon musicians knowing how to do things, often able to do things right without eye sight of the conductors at times.

[unfocussed_mike]

There was a significantly renewed manifesto-driven push to open source/open standards with the coalition in 2010; some of gov.uk really is down to Cameron rejecting the (Microsoft/EDS/Fujitsu-heavy) approaches of the previous administrations.

I don't really like giving them credit for anything but there it is.

[ColinHayhurst]

Agreed and thank you for the memory jogging link: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story-2010/

Martha Lane Fox, bless her.

And the brilliant Tom Loosemoore, also behind https://www.theyworkforyou.com/

https://www.writetothem.com/

https://www.fixmystreet.com/

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/

[toyg]

What is there now was significantly rehashed under the first Cameron administration. I remember talking to a few insiders at PyconUK, around 2010-11, and they were saying they basically had carte blanche to nuke it all from orbit and rebuild how they saw fit. The government wasn't particularly popular at the time (what with the sweeping cuts to social services), but the people in question were adamant that, on digital services at least, the big guys really wanted to make a difference for good, and that it was a clean break from the past - hence why they were going to places like PyConUK to recruit motivated forward-looking people. That government effectively lasted 5 years, so they did a lot of work in that timeframe. I later heard through the grapevine that the waters got choppier after 2016, and I've not really heard anything after 2019 (beyond the occasional coded grumble on twitter), so I don't know how things are today.

> it would be upon the civil servants and associates that came up with the initiative

From what I understand, the power of this was precisely that it came from people outside the career civil service. Although this narrative came from Conservative quarters (who occasionally indulge in civil-service bashing), I find it credible. Established powers in the system tend to have established friends among deep-pocketed vendors, particularly these days that doors tend to revolve quite furiously. For all the good they did elsewhere, one undoubtedly bad legacy of the Blair-Brown years was eccessive trust on friendly vendors vs in-house.

[heurisko]

The Cameron government learned the lessons of the massively wasteful failed IT projects from the Blair era (see Fujitsu NHS contract).

The GDS started well, but I don't think the GDS can continue to cruise on its earlier reputation. It too has started to fall back into the bad old days of massively wasteful projects with unclear scope, such as the Verify system, that is absorbing hundreds of millions of pounds for dubious benefit [1].

"Unfortunately, Verify is also an example of many of the failings in major programmes that we often see, including optimism bias and failure to set clear objectives." [2]

I think the idea of GDS is a good one, but evidently it needs to continue to reevaluate itself to avoid regressing into what it was originally setup to avoid.

[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Back-to-the-past-with... [2] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/investigation-into-verify/

[chrisseaton]

> setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM

Isn't that massively excessive? Why does the Prime Minister need to be spending his time listening to a report direct from a team implementing software services?

[toyg]

Because otherwise the effort will end up in the quagmire of civil service politics, the sort of stuff you see on "Yes Minister" (greatly exaggerated, of course, in the same way "Silicon Valley" exaggerates Californian startup culture).

With a direct line to the PM, every time a mandarin tried to block things (likely in order to favour his golf buddies from this or that vendor), GDS could go "ok, shall we take it up with the PM then?" and that would be the end of it.

It's effectively the nuclear option, in terms of civil-service management, but sometimes it's the only way to get stuff done.

[djhn]

> greatly exaggerated, of course, in the same way "Silicon Valley" exaggerates Californian startup culture

Which is another way of saying it conveys the reality more realistically than a documentary could ever get away with.

[blitzar]

> every time a mandarin tried to block things (likely in order to favour his golf buddies from this or that vendor)

There seems to be a much longer history of MPs and PMs being corrupt than the mandarins.

[axg11]

Gov.uk is _the_ primary way that anyone interacts with the UK government. Why shouldn't it be one of the highest priority aspects of government? I don't think the Prime Minister was sitting in on daily standups and sprint planning, but it makes sense that they should have a good overview of progress and development in GDS during its infancy.

[rswail]

Effectively it was in the PM's department directly, which means it was not subject to cross-department jealousies etc. Watch some series of Yes Minister, even though set in the 1970s and 80s, it's still all true.

[BoxOfRain]

The Thick of It is supposedly not far from the reality either.

[toyg]

Armando Iannucci is a national treasure and a credit to the Italian diaspora (and to Scotland).

[BoxOfRain]

If anyone deserves a knighthood for services to comedy, Iannucci would be one of my top contenders!

[xboxnolifes]

If there is an alternative approach that has been showing similar or better results, I'm ears.