What 'Digital' is...

User-first Culture— if we treat users, whether they are paying or not, as customers, then our focus will be on doing everything to engage them, retain them and please them.  To be digital, the culture within the organisation must be to deliver user needs; features that are beneficial to the user with quick results or low cost.    It is also critically important to ensure that both the citizens and workforce have the necessary digital skills to benefit from new transformation initiatives.

Instant Feedback — in a digital world, users should expect instant feedback to their requests. They should not have to wait minutes, hours or days to know that their request has been successful or not.  When considering target response times, these should be measured in milliseconds.

Real-time — a digital system should expect to receive requests 24 hours a day, every day and be available on demand.  The data used and returned by the system should be the latest.

Automated —  a digital service should include as much computer processing as possible (ideally 100%), without the need for manual intervention.

Intelligent —  digital services should do all the heavy lifting, minimising the effort and understanding required by users or other machines. An intelligent service means it should be able to handle raw information from the user, transform it and perform necessary calculations without them ever being aware. Intelligence means the service should be able to anticipate a user’s next steps to prepare and suggest actions.

Online — a digital system should be accessible anywhere with an Internet connection, with no unreasonable limitations on device and usage.

Beautiful — beautiful UIs and well-designed APIs.  This is best practice for a service in the digital age.  It should be easy to use, intuitive and meet the needs of target users in order to promote widespread adoption.

Driver for change — a digital service defines business processes, and is not defined by them. Digital means business processes changing as part of the transformation.  Don’t mimic offline processes in an online way.

Regular Improvements – A digital platform should be improved and upgraded as often as necessary.