Phil Buckley, Product Manager of the Performance Platform, writes:
I’m very proud to announce the latest release of the Performance Platform. Building on the performance statistics we have for GOV.UK, this release powers the dashboards for all the different Licences, Notices, Registrations applications you can make. David Williams blogged about these in March.
The Licensing dashboards are the first of many; the Performance Platform is built to allow any government service to input data from any source, to see how that data changes over time, and in the future to compare their service’s performance with that of similar ones. The aim of the platform is to allow the owners to make data-driven decisions to improve their services.
Although the primary audience for this information is the person who owns the service, all this information is also publicly available - you can see it yourself at https://www.gov.uk/performance/licensing; and in the future you will be able to download the data too.
In this instance, we are combining data from both web analytics and from back end systems so we have a very good picture of how many licences are being applied for online and how many are being processed.
Users can drill right down into specific local authorities such as Cornwall, or look at individual licence data such as collecting money in the street for charity.
As an example of the sort of data being collected, here is the drop-off rate for all online submissions in the week starting 6 May 2013:
So, we can see that many more people are downloading a form than are going to submit it; and of those who get to the submit application page, only 68% (21% of the total visitors) actually successfully submit the form and where necessary pay the fee.
Now, with all data, it seems to me that the most important question is: is this number big or small? And the truth is that at this early stage, we don’t quite know the answer: given that in many instances people actually have to pay money for one of these licences, a 32% drop-off rate may be perfectly reasonable.
However, it’s fantastic that we now have this benchmark, and as we start to get more and more data in on this and on other transactions, we will be able to see more clearly if this is typical behaviour.
There’s plenty more to come from the Performance Platform, and we hope it will give real power to service owners and allow them to make a positive impact on the transactions people make with government. In the meantime, those who are technically minded might be interested that the Performance Platform code is publicly available on github.
I’ll write more when we have more services available and more statistics to compare - but I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the Performance Platform team who have worked so hard on the project.
1 comment
Comment by Week notes #6 | Dafydd Vaughan posted on
[…] a bit of time looking at the enquiry service so we can hopefully produce something similar to the Licensing performance dashboards on […]