Over the past few years we’ve been designing and building digital services for LGSS – the local government shared service – and its multiple customers.
One thing that is immediately noticeable about working across different organisations is the contrast in language, terms and general vocabulary. How do you approach that kind of issue? What other challenges does it stir up? The answers to those questions is something we’re yet to figure out but one thing that’s come out of the work so far is a demonstration of how much of an issue definition and clarity is within the public sector.
We face a similar issue with our own digital vocabularly.
What do we mean by digital? What do we mean by digital literacy? How is service design different from business analysis? These terms aren’t commonly understood, and can they have many interpretations which makes a structured, pragmatic discussion very difficult.
We’re trying our best to define any team-specific wording when communicating to our customers. Where possible, we’ll use our customer’s way of speaking, to make sure we’re understood – but we’ll define these terms too, just in case.