Government as a Platform in Scotland

‘GaaP’ (Government as a Platform) means a modular, plug and play approach to building digital services, rather than the traditional enterprise monolith approach.

GaaP in Scotland

The Scottish Digital Economy action plan defines a number of goals that this approach will achieve:

“Deploy common technologies that can be built and procured once rather than multiple times” and also “Mandate the use of common platforms and infrastructure.”

This is so that the government can “Simplify and standardise ways of working across the public sector so that it becomes easier to use our services and we don’t waste time and money reinventing wheels.”

and also “Create common digital platforms for services that will encourage Scottish public and voluntary sector organisations to innovate in the delivery of public services.”

with specific use cases such as Payments: “Introduce shared technology platforms, starting with common approaches to publishing information, applying for services, and making/receiving payments.”

The need for these types of benefits were identified as far back as 2011, specifically the McLelland Report was a major review of IT spending, concluding that:

“The key finding of the report was that the public sector is lagging where it should be and there is an opportunity to capture a multiplicity of benefits in radically changing how ICT is adopted and deployed and in how it enhances access to and improvements in the quality and value of services. 

Shared ICT platforms, a connection and spread of exemplar projects and enhanced engagement with the industry would reduce the proportion of cost invested in ICT by individual organisations and deliver local savings which might be partially reinvested in advancing the progress of ICT. It would also open the door to significant additional and wider savings in public sector costs by providing a platform for the operation of other shared services and better support sustainability goals.”

An exemplar case study for GaaP in Scotland (Government as a Platform) is the Scottish Government Payment Service.

As they write on their blog the Scottish Government began pioneering a platform model in 2019 for a single Payments system, an approach intended to yield the benefits described by the digital economy strategy:

“That means building something centrally that is easy for service teams to plug in to and re-use, without additional procurement. That saves them time, money and hassle.

Building a single platform also means we can establish standards that will work across government. That will cut down on bureaucracy and needless repetition of work.

Finally, a platform will make things better for public servants and for citizens. It will be quicker for us to set up new services, or retire old ones. When new payment technologies emerge, we’ll be able to securely add them to the platform once, for the benefit of everyone.”

A similar system has already been developed at the UK Government level, Gov.UK Pay, as part of their GaaP strategy. Asked on their blog why they don’t simply reuse this capability, the SG Payments team explain that:

“the programme is designed to consider the opportunity to develop a platform that could support both outbound and inbound payments. At present, the GOV.UK Pay platform only carries out inbound payments.”

Moving from Alpha to Beta

They have conducted early prototyping work, awarding a first stage to vendors including Scott Logic, with the code shared openly via Github.

In their supplier briefing video, they outlined the plans for the beta stage of work.

The headline goal is to improve the way the public sector process payments to and from citizens and other organizations, encompassing pensions, benefits, grants, taxes and licences, services likely to experience large scale growth. In 2018 volume as around 5 million transactions per year, with usage estimated to expand to 25 million by 2022/3 as the Scottish Government takes on increasing levels of devolved functions.

Beginning at 4:00 the team is introduced, led by Trish Quinn, and they explain their planning process including their service design and the other organizations they learned from to form the strategy. Key Scottish Government agencies they have collaborated with include Social Security Scotland, the Independent Living Fund and the Scottish Public Pension Agency.

Platform Architecture

From 8:50 they provide a detailed review of their planned technology architecture for implementing the service.

Their initial requirements are to cater for outbound payments, utilizing Gov.UK Pay for incoming in the short term but potentially taking this on too longer term.

Central to the GaaP model the core requirement is to provide a standard API for calling all the systems services. There will be a human interface to enable users to query payment status and to authorize or cancel payments, but ultimately they hope customers will utilize the APIs to integrate it with their own financial systems to automate the transactions.

The Payment Platform will act as a broker, abstracting the payment process across and aggregating the services of multiple PSPs (Payment Service Providers), providing a common interface to services such as BACS and Faster Payments, feeding the resulting transaction details into common public sector accounting systems. As new payment methods become available the architecture should make it simple to plug them in.

It will also cater for intelligence of payment processes, for example facilitating alternative methods for those without bank accounts, choosing the best routes for sending payments depending on the requirements of their partner and tracking and handling failed payments.

The platform will be built via a ‘Cloud Native’ approach of hyper-scale Cloud hosting (AWS has been used thus far), a Java-based back-end implemented on Kubernetes containers and a microservices software architecture.

In their latest blog they report they are on the cusp of beginning the first payments.

The NES Digital Service (NDS) was established in 2018 to deliver the National Digital Platform, a central part of Scotland’s Digital Health and Care Strategy.

The objective is a Platform approach for building a unified digital health and care service for Scotland.

As FutureScot reports the team showcased their progress to date.

“The National Digital Platform service layers for the citizen, clinician and administrator have been evolved from a core architecture originally developed by the UK Government Digital Service.”

“The lefthand side shows the NDS agile software and cloud-based approach to creating the platform and the right is a list of the multivarious systems it must integrate with.”

The Platform strategy is to use the same architectural components and design libraries that use the same UI (user interface) components and the same service design components so that service patterns, interface patterns, design patterns will be consistent across the whole system.

Digital Service Design for Healthcare

As they write on their blog a key objective is to apply the service design principles pioneered by GDS to the Healthcare domain.

In this blog CTO Alistair Hann describes the component parts, including a digital identity strategy of integration with the NHS-wide Office 365 directory for staff identities and the ‘CHI number’ for patient identifiers. with future plans to tie in with the Identity Assurance program, and implementing a ‘clinical data repository’ (CDR) using the openEHR standard.

UKAuthority reports how the platform will be implemented on the public Cloud, a 10-year £15m procurement.

In this video NES Director Geoff Huggins explains that their key goals are achieving the best quality data to support clinical care, to enable the innovation of new digital services across Scotland and to support research through using data at scale, to find new ways to treat illnesses.

Geoff explains the team is multi-disciplined, including clinicians and data scientists as well as software engineers.

Geoff describes how one of their first services is the ‘Respect’ app. As they explain on their blog, “ReSPECT is a process that creates personalised recommendations for a person’s clinical care in a future emergency in which they are unable to make or express choices.”

It’s an example of the important modernization needed for digital public services, where currently much duplication of manual, paper-based work is needed.

By developing it on their platform, the app becomes available to any one in Scotland who are connected to the platform, and it enables the further development of new services using the data and combining it with other data, such as emergency care summaries.

Over the next 12 months they plan a series of meetings with other stakeholders to identify how the platform may be further developed to support new services.