If people still have to come in three times, what is the online service solving?

The metric most often used in digital government programmes is the number of services available online.

The metric citizens actually feel is the number of times they have to travel to an office, and the number of documents they must obtain and submit that a government body issued in the first place.

A service with a web form that must then be printed, signed and delivered in person has not reduced anybody's journeys. It has added a step.

The real problem is rarely the web page

People come back several times for a small number of reasons.

Documents are incomplete, because nobody told them in advance what their particular case required. The list on the website is usually the union of every case, so applicants bring too much or too little.

Records disagree between agencies. A name spelled slightly differently in two systems becomes a reason to go back to the source and correct it.

A signature or a physical presence is required — sometimes for a genuine legal reason, and sometimes as a convention nobody has reviewed.

What the technology genuinely helps with

Telling people what they need in advance. A short set of questions leading to a document list for that applicant's specific case is worth more than a page listing everything. This is not AI, only good design, and it removes more second visits than anything else.

Machine reading of documents. When someone photographs a document, the system can say immediately whether it is legible, complete, and the right one. Being told the photograph is unusable at the moment it is taken beats being told the following week.

Not asking for what the state already holds. Every request for a copy of a document issued by another government body pushes the cost of integration onto the citizen. Joining data between agencies is hard work, and it is the part that makes the real difference.

Showing status. Which stage, waiting on what, expected when. This usually exists inside the internal system and is simply not shown to the person whose case it is.

What needs extra care in the public sector

Models face tighter constraints here than in the private sector, because citizens cannot take their business elsewhere.

Any decision affecting a right must be explainable, appealable, and owned by a person. A model can order a queue or check documents. It should not decide anyone's entitlement.

Accessibility belongs in the design from the start. A service that works well on a recent phone and badly on an old one, or that assumes fast internet, excludes exactly the people most likely to need help.

A truer way to measure

Replace "services online" with two numbers: trips required per case, and days from submission to completion.

Those two force the design to look at the whole process rather than at a screen.

What GIPSIC does here

We build systems for public bodies and educational institutions. This work is usually integration with legacy systems that cannot be changed, plus designing the citizen-facing part simply enough that everyone can use it.

We will propose something different from the brief if we think it serves the goal better, with the reasoning and the trade-off stated. Often removing one step delivers more than replacing a whole system.

If you would like to talk about your agency's services, get in touch.