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In this blog, Juliet Kampasi, Service Design Lead at Opencast, and Ishika Mukherjee, Lead User Researcher, explore why bringing policy, delivery and user needs closer together is essential for creating better public services. Drawing on their experience across government transformation programmes, they discuss how embedding user-centred design earlier in the policy process can help organisations reduce uncertainty, make more informed decisions and deliver services that better meet the needs of citizens and businesses.

Ahead of her SDinGov session, The Data and Analytics Ecosystem: The Hidden Layer of Service Transformation (24 September, 2pm), Dr Angela Orviz explores why service designers need to understand the data and analytics ecosystems that underpin public services and previews the themes that will be discussed during the talk.

Organisations have access to more insight than ever before. User research, analytics, operational data and performance reporting all provide valuable perspectives on how services are performing. Yet many teams still face a familiar challenge: deciding what to improve first.  Through our work supporting service transformation, we have seen that the issue is rarely a lack of evidence. More often, teams struggle to connect different sources of insight in a way that supports confident decision making and prioritisation.  By bringing together user needs, operational knowledge and quantitative data, organisations can develop a richer understanding of end-to-end journeys and make more informed decisions about where to focus their efforts. This article explores why connecting insight matters, what we have learned from doing it in practice and how it can help teams prioritise improvements that deliver meaningful value for users and organisations alike.