In March I talked about the Digital Marketplace and our vision for the future.
I introduced 6 broad themes about how we’re helping the public sector buy what it needs to deliver great digital services, and why these are important. The themes were:
- services so good that users prefer them
- make things open: it makes things better
- enabling end-to-end buying that’s as frictionless for users as possible
- building collaborative supplier relationships
- building capability and increasing self-service
- going wholesale: scaling the Digital Marketplace
I’m going to talk about each of these individually, over a series of 6 blog posts. This is the first in the series.
Services so good that users prefer them
We want the Digital Marketplace to be our users’ preferred route for buying and supplying digital and technology.
The Digital Marketplace is where:
- public sector buyers find the services that help them deliver digital and technology projects:
- suppliers apply to provide these services to the public sector through ‘frameworks’ (agreements between government and suppliers)
This requires more than delivering a digital service that meets users’ needs.
Through experience, and by talking to other users outside of the digital and technology category, we’ve learnt that traditional approaches to creating frameworks do not always meet the needs of both buyers and suppliers.
The marketplaces of government
Collectively, these frameworks help establish the marketplaces where public sector buyers and suppliers come together. It’s important that they can be designed in a way that meets their needs, as well as being legally compliant.
To make that possible we need:
- market conditions that ensure fair and open competition, where buyers’ actions are transparent and proportionate, and all suppliers are treated equally and without discrimination
- products and services are available to meet public sector demand, and can be bought in the best way
- behaviours between buyers and suppliers that support collaborative and constructive relationships, and more flexible, digital, agile and transparent interactions, focussed on joint delivery
- contracts designed for the digital age
A multidisciplinary team: learning and doing together
We’ve brought together a range of commercial, policy, procurement and legal people. They work with service teams including product managers, user researchers, content designers and interaction designers.
Together, we’re setting new standards by encouraging user-centred, design-led and open approaches to public sector procurements and contracts. We want to meet user needs, not government needs.
The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) has already channelled £12.8bn of public sector spend through central deals. By working with CCS to design frameworks so good that users prefer them, we hope to build on this success.
As always, we’ll be thinking out loud by blogging here regularly. Sign up to follow the Digital Marketplace blog to track our progress.