3.2 As part of the 2012 Government Digital Strategy the Cabinet Office and departments identified 25 high-volume transactional services for end-to-end service redesign. These services, known as the Exemplar Programme, were expected to be made available to the public by March 2015.
3.3 GDS aimed to use the programme to demonstrate how new approaches could be used to transform services and build relevant skills and experience. GDS saw improving the customer experience as an important way of encouraging people to use online channels as their first choice. The programme's aim was that departments would redesign all services handling over 100,000 transactions each year.
3.4 The programme was successful in delivering some new services and improving the user experience of some existing services. The programme concluded in 2015 with 15 of the 25 exemplars available as live services and a further five accessible to the general public in trial form. Some of the remaining services have since become available.
3.5 However, the programme achieved only mixed success overall, for the following reasons:
• Lack of end-to-end transformation
GDS's analysis indicates that only six of the live exemplars and two of the publicly available trials had provided an integrated service by March 2015. Full transformation and digitisation was not achieved, either for the citizen or for government.
• Mixed impact
GDS analysed whether the value of expected benefits for those exemplars over a 10-year period exceeded the costs of development. In 12 cases the benefits exceeded the costs, but in 10 cases the costs outweighed the benefits. No data were provided by departments for the remaining three exemplars.
• Challenges of working together
In our report Early review of the Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme, we identified conflicting objectives between the main stakeholders in delivering the rural payments digital exemplar.18 To differing degrees, many of the departments we interviewed raised similar concerns about GDS's support for exemplars.
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18 Comptroller and Auditor General, Early review of the Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme, Session 2015-16, HC 606, National Audit Office, December 2015.