All of us at Equal Experts want to applaud the success of the last two years in the Digital Transformation programme in the UK Government.

Mike Beaven reminds us that the Cabinet Office and GDS gave themselves “400 working days to transform 25 major public services, building digital “exemplars” so good that people would prefer to use them.”

Today, Mike reports that  “20 services are publicly accessible. Fifteen of those are fully live and the rest are in beta.”

We believe this is a huge success. Mike Beaven is saying “we can actually do things as good as, if not better than the private sector.”

We want to tell Mike that the Government is now doing some things so much better than the private sector – we know because that is where we come from.

We believe a key reason for this success is thanks to the government departments themselves that have been actively pushing the digital agenda.

Of course we have our favorites – HMRC is definitely amongst those. We agree with Mike Bracken that HMRC digital transformation is impressive – particularly because of their work on the digital tax platform that recently enabled 3 exemplar services to pass their Service Standard Assessments to go live.

One of those three services is the Digital Self Assessment, with over 1.2 million users to date. This is one of the reason that makes HMRC Chief Digital & Information Officer, Mark Dearnley, say “it really does feel like our digital vision is starting to become a reality.”

Talking further about platforms like the digital tax platform, Mike Bracken adds that “it’s the structural reform of our tax system which they help enable which pleases me most.” This echoes George Osbourne announcing last week the “death of tax return.”. This is what you call digital transformation at its best.

But other government departments exemplars have also done extremely well, like at the Ministry of Justice and at the Home Office, with a total of 6 services fully live, having recently passed their Digital by Default Service Standard assessment.

Congrats to everyone involved. Two years well spent.

Thomas