A common language to understand services

When we build teams to work on services, the individuals may have never worked together before, and may have different ways of describing their work.

When we try to get to a common understanding of a service and its constituent parts — or what they could be in future — the words we use matter.

It takes time to understand what everyone means when they say things like ‘service’, ‘product’, ‘user need’, ‘platform’, ‘channel’, ‘architecture’, ‘policy’, ‘data’ and ‘strategy’. We all have our own definitions.

A few of us looked at ways to understand services and create a list of terms (a taxonomy) so we can communicate more simply and clearly across large organisation.

A service helps users to do something. Public services exist because of underlying citizen needs, policy intent, user needs and the strategy of a particular organisation. Services help government achieve policy intent on behalf of its citizens, with whom it has a social contract. Services are best identified as verbs (visit the UK), rather than nouns (biometric residence permit).

Often the things we work on are just one step in a bigger process. We’ve called these sub-services, and examples include:

A capability is having all resources required to carry out a task — such as skilled staff and specialist tools — and also considers capacity and maturity.

Appointment booking, for example, is a capability that requires:

Activities are the things people do in relation to using a service, including:

We’ve also used the term to describe the things that need to happen to make a service work:

Activities should describe what happens, but not how it happens, by whom or with what. So, we’d use ‘notifying someone’ rather than ‘sending a letter’ and ‘making a decision’ rather than ‘casework’.

That gives us freedom to think about how the service could be re-imagined to work in a simpler, faster way, or with entire sections removed.

We’ve used ‘technology’ to mean the digital systems, products, tools, hardware and applications we build, maintain and buy. Technology exists to support activities and capabilities — and enables us to deliver faster, clearer, simpler services.

By data we mean the actual information that’s either generated by or used to carry out activities and services. We try to describe what the data actually is using descriptive words, such as ‘National Insurance number’, and avoid acronyms.

Our goal is to create a common language to help teams and large organisations to work better together. The value is not so much in what the actual words are, but the value in making something like this together, as a multi-disciplinary group, and agreeing to try it out.

We find a common, agreed language helps teams have better discussions, are better able to spot commonalities, think about repeating design patterns and organise large portfolios of work more easily. It also provides a language to communicate how things could work differently in future.

If you find these definitions useful, or have different ways of understanding services, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

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