Oxford Insights
Our business analysts worked with a multidisciplinary team in the Government Digital Service as part of an agile Discovery to help improve a public-facing legacy system for reporting a death to central and local government. We mapped user needs and pain points and documented data flows to inform the design of a new prototype service.
The challenge
The Tell Us Once digital service allows the relatives of someone who has died to inform multiple central and local government agencies of the death all at once. The public-facing service was user friendly but required manual data migration from civil servants behind the scenes. The legacy IT system supporting TUO had also built up technical debt, meaning some government organisations could not make use of its data sharing capabilities. The Government Digital Service wanted to understand how the system could be improved without compromising the services it already provided.
Our approach
Our business analysts embedded in a multidisciplinary team to conduct an agile Discovery. We sought to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the existing system from the perspective of both internal (civil servants) and external (the public) users. This included:
- Mapping user needs and pain points with civil servants
- Documenting the impact of data sharing for internal and external users
- Mapping data flows for information submitted by users to different government departments
- Using the data flow model to inform the design of a prototype replacement
Our impact
At the end of our Discovery, we left GDS with a well-structured body of research, including clear user and business needs, service maps showing the interconnections and data sharing arrangements between organisations, and a complete map of all data inputs used by the service and the outputs it created. Alongside the multidisciplinary digital team, we produced a proof of concept and prototype for an updated Tell Us Once service that GDS could take forward.
Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash
