blog.gov.jeOur vision as the States of Jersey eGov and Design Authority team is:
- to design services around the customer to be better, quicker and simpler,
- to increase transparency, visibility and accessibility of customer information,
- to drive efficiency by improving efficiency across the States, and
- to support Digital Jersey in developing local digital capabilities aligned to eGov.
This last one is important because we believe that a key part of delivering a successful digital project, is to have the opportunity to work with digital suppliers that have expertise and provide complementary skills.
We also believe that the States and the wider public sector will provide better digital services for the taxpayer if they have access to an innovative and skilled supplier community.
This blog post follows our recent engagement with suppliers around technical Integration, in collaboration with BCS Jersey (BCS) and Digital Jersey. Engagements like this ensure we share our thinking regularly, and give the opportunity to have it challenged.
By teaming up with organisations such as Digital Jersey and the BCS, we reach suppliers and other specialists and keep them up to date with our progress, as well as on how they can supply their services to the government.
Both BCS and Digital Jersey have been instrumental in helping us reach the right audience, identifying individuals and organisations who have a business interest in how our work is shaping up, or have subject matter expertise that we can incorporate into it.
Integration deep-dive sessions
Last week, following our industry engagement presentation in December, we ran two deep-dive sessions to talk about the integration layer. Taking on board some of the learnings from the December event, we organised these to be round-table gatherings, focussing on a specific area, to foster a collaborative environment.
A big thank you goes to BCS and Ronnie Isherwood for publicising the event widely, which led to a greater attendance than we anticipated.
The sessions were useful in a number of ways. Firstly, we presented our work on Integration Principles and API Guidelines. We identified three areas where we wanted to encourage participation; around API Versioning, Integration Security and Service Catalogue tooling. This in turn has allowed us to take away some valuable insights into areas where we can further develop our artefacts, and improve the clarity of our content.
From our perspective, the sessions resulted in some good discussion and exchange of ideas. The feedback we have had has been positive, and this will allow us to target future sessions.
Let’s keep talking
This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time we reach out to the local digital community. Our blog is regularly updated to:
- communicate our progress and important dates
- be open and transparent about our thinking and the decisions behind our thinking
- give updates on the eGov programme
- share our digital architecture artefacts (these will be shared shortly on gov.je; watch this space)
- ask and gather your feedback
Slack
As mentioned in my previous blog, we’re actively listening and participating with the local digital community on the Tech Tribes Slack team. We’re happy to explore other routes and channels to engage, so do email us at designauthority@gov.je and get involved.