The Digital Backbone (DBB) is a digital transformation initiative for the UK public sector, which will provide the technical foundations for joined-up and efficient public services. DBB is being delivered by the Government Digital Service (GDS), part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). We committed to introducing the Backbone in the Blueprint for a Modern Digital Government.
Our mission is to introduce the capabilities needed to connect fragmented services and allow public bodies to share, buy and collaborate on software solutions. DBB is at an early stage of maturity and our scope of work is likely to evolve. We will work to continually understand challenges and pain points within the public sector and deliver iterative improvements.
DBB aims to tackle three fundamental challenges identified by the State of Digital Government Review. These are:
- Public sector services are disconnected, with public servants often manually transferring data and manually progressing a service journey from one stage to the next
- Public sector workers struggle to find and work with each other across organisational boundaries, leading to duplicative and sometimes conflicting work
- The processes involved in delivering software solutions are broken, duplicating effort and spend both when solutions are built in-house and when they are bought.
Our users are people working in UK public sector organisations, including:
- Central government departments
- Devolved administrations
- Arms-length bodies (ALBs)
- Government agencies
- Local authorities (LAs)
- NHS, Police, Fire and Social Care services
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To join community conversations and ask questions publicly, you can visit our GitHub Discussions. If you would rather send us a private query, comment, or feedback, please use our contact form instead.