Mapping Complex Systems for Government

Background

Government Digital Services (GDS) sits within the Cabinet Office of the UK Government. Its job is to set standards of excellence in technology and digital for government, as well as look for ways to create digital transformation.

My role as the lead user researcher sat within a small team at GDS. I was tasked to discover how the government uses, stores, shares and safeguards personal data, and from there, to whether this data could be shared across services.

Approach

I began by identifying what was currently assumed, understood, and undocumented about how personal data was used across government. This included clarifying ownership, responsibilities, existing standards, and where uncertainty or inconsistency existed between departments.

I then worked with teams across multiple departments and agencies to map how personal data was collected, stored, shared, safeguarded, and used in practice. By scoping out end-to-end data journeys, I was able to surface pain points, dependencies, workarounds, and areas where process, technology, and organisational structure interacted in ways that created friction or risk.

To make this complexity legible, I translated findings into visual data journey maps and shared artefacts that supported discussion and sense-making across disciplines. These artefacts helped stakeholders identify common patterns, challenge assumptions, and focus attention on areas where improvement was both necessary and feasible.

The combined insights were used to develop hypotheses and propositions that framed where meaningful change could occur, and where further research was needed before moving into Alpha.

Research Objectives

At the start of Discovery, the work focused on understanding current practices, pain points, ownership, and standards around the use of personal data across government services.

I set up a detailed research plan to capture areas of focus.

Mapping & Visualising Data Journeys

Using a combination of desk research, telephone interviews, meetings, and workshops, I sketched out multiple, complex data journeys within the Department for Education and a smaller, arms-length body to map the impact and processes, and discover if there were common issues and patterns.

This information was captured in the form of infographics pinned to a wall so that stakeholders could understand these findings more readily, and stimulated questions and thoughts that led to deep dives of areas that needed more clarity (e.g. what happens inside XYZ database? Who else uses this data, and so on.)

Data Journey Infographics

In tandem with this, I spoke with multiple stakeholders and users of services and data across a range of governmental departments and agencies, to gain an in-depth understanding of the limitations and challenges around digitising services. From this, we developed a clearer understanding of which areas of need were viable to explore, and what was beyond the boundaries of our ability to improve.

I met with third-party technology providers to understand their systems and limitations so that I could better understand:

How and why the data moving through these systems was cleaned and processed, and what the impact was down the line
How this was perceived and treated by users of this data along these journeys

Putting all of this data together, we identified a core cycle of data life-cycle patterns across government departments and, pain points associated with each step of the process.

From Insight to Direction

The research revealed consistent patterns across government.

Personal data played a critical role in service delivery, yet ownership and accountability were often unclear. While teams wanted to reuse data held elsewhere, confidence in sharing was low due to risk, legacy systems, and uncertainty around governance.

Data quality issues were frequently the result of fragmented ownership and costly downstream reconciliation rather than poor intent.

From these insights, a set of hypotheses was developed to test where meaningful change might be possible. These focused on eligibility decisions as a driver for data reuse, clearer mechanisms for permission and consent, and the decoupling of services from underlying data stores.

This work led to two strategic propositions. One explored a distributed, federated approach to data access that avoided centralisation. The other examined how shared governance and permission models could enable data reuse across departments without being constrained by organisational boundaries.

Andy Bennett

Executive Technologist

June 2020

I worked with Lynda during the Discovery Phase of the Personal Data Exchange project at the Government Digital Service in 2016.

Lynda worked diligently throughout the Discovery, conducting interviews, analysing the results, synthesising insights and following up with more interviews based on the things she learnt and discovered.

At the end of the process, she ensured that all the notes, knowledge and findings were thoroughly documented in such a way that they are still being used and referenced by other teams at GDS today (4 years later). Some of her findings have shaped and reshaped the whole personal data and eligibility discussion in Government, centering it firmly around the needs of users and how Government can provide better, cheaper, quicker and more secure services to them.

I would love to have to opportunity to work with Lynda again in the future and highly recommend her.