A short film to explain what we mean by Government as a Platform. By designing government services in blocks which do one job each, it’s easier to fix them, upgrade them, share them, and scale them up.
In the past, government has designed public services in a particular way. Each service was built on its own, independently of the others. The service, represented here by this light, did what it was designed to do, but not always very efficiently. Many services duplicated their efforts to do the same thing. The result was a series of disjointed siloes. We think there’s a simpler, easier way. The same public services, but designed and built differently. It’s an idea called “government as a platform”. It breaks things down into smaller parts, like building blocks. Each block does one job. It’s easy to connect blocks together, and scale them up when demand increases. If some part of the service breaks, we can fix it or upgrade it easily. Platforms can be opened up, too, allowing third-party services to use government data. We’ve already begun to build platforms. GOV.UK is a platform for publishing. GOV.UK Verify is a platform for identity, and there are many more to come. This is what we mean by government as a platform. Better, smarter public services.
