Shared insight library

"Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice" - Chekhov

How can we share insights across the public sector? Can we reuse each other's insight work, instead of constantly repeating the same studies again and again?

The User Experience section in the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency is currently exploring an "open-source" solution for insights in Github. The vision is increased collaboration across the public sector, outward transparency, and a development process that to a greater extent builds on user insights, innovation, and research.

Challenges

Many will probably recognize these challenges.

• Knowledge that disappears when reports are shelved after they are completed
• Concentration of knowledge among a few long-term employees who must spend a lot of time verbally sharing their own knowledge over and over again
• Limited sharing and reuse of insights across teams, departments, and the public sector
• High development pace in DevOps teams where documentation and sharing of findings are not prioritized

Maturity for insight

Research and insight work often leans in one of two directions:

1. Generative exploratory research, often detached from current solutions where we seek in-depth domain understanding to identify opportunity spaces for future services and solutions.

2. Evaluative research where we measure and analyze, often with the intention of finding the right solution to a problem we are already familiar with. Seen in context, these extremes help us identify the right problem and solve the problem in the right way.

Some organizations have already achieved high maturity around the use of insights, research, and innovation, while others have recently started the journey. It can often require large amounts of time and effort to build culture and work patterns around documenting, sharing, and using research data and insights in the organization, which some are better equipped for than others. What we know is that it can be particularly difficult when insights are deprioritized in favor of frequent and short development deadlines. Or when the gap between insights and decision-makers becomes too large, where reports are shelved without promises of funds and capacity for follow-up and implementation afterward.

The goal of the insight library is initially threefold:

1. Contribute to increased value creation for organizations with high maturity
2. Be a springboard for actors who have recently started the journey
3. Reduce the gap between generative long-term studies and decision-makers at different levels who have the resources to act. We do this primarily by connecting insight work to developers' work tools and making the work open to everyone.

Prototype - Insight Library

The insight library consists of two parts, a collection of GitHub issues and an associated GitHub project.

1. Github issues
   Issues enable search on all text and tags across all issues in addition to filtering content in a more advanced way. This view is best if you are looking for something very specific and need in-depth search.
2. Github project
   The project consists of a series of predetermined views that filter the insight based on given categories such as STEEPLE + EIF, as well as the government's digitalization strategy. This view is best for finding relevant insights that are linked to business and strategic gains.

Register your own studies/findings and insights

If you want to share your own insights in the insight library, we have set up three types of forms that can be filled out. We distinguish between studies, findings, and insights where the study describes the data collection itself, a finding describes an important discovery from the study, and insight is several findings seen in context that explain why something happened.

Contribute to the insight library

Our goal is that the insight library should be owned and moderated jointly across the public sector. If you want to contribute to realizing a shared insight library across the public sector, we would like to hear from you. We also hope that everyone (municipalities, state, business, voluntary organizations, citizens, etc.) will provide feedback and submit suggestions and ideas on how we can make the solution even better. Feel free to create a new thread in the Github discussions forum or contact us at ima@digdir.no and sss@digdir.no.

We’ve also recently created a GitHub wiki, where we’ll be publishing and updating future documentation, guides, and other relevant content.

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