Point 4 of the Service Standard requires that you "make services simple to use" – and that applies to spreadsheet templates too, so let's start the conversation about how to do spreadsheet templates well. If you're going to use a spreadsheet template in your service, there are a few design accommodations that you can make to improve the experience for users.

We've seen the challenges that pop up when relying on spreadsheet templates and the resulting frustration from users when they are forced to grapple with submitting their data using one.

We've come to a worrying conclusion: asking users to fill out spreadsheet templates in the way we do it today does not meet user needs and should not be used as a design pattern in usable and accessible government services.

We share some lessons learned about data practice, technology innovation, funding models and data sharing from talking to CSIRO, Australia’s premier science institute.

Have you taken the time to carefully select a data management tool for your staff and organisation to use, but are finding that hardly anyone uses it and that the uptake is fairly low? This article aims to explore why this might be happening in order to help us understand what can then be done about it.

Are you passionate about data but don’t understand why others aren’t? There are several common reasons that stop staff and colleagues from taking that next step and really caring about data.

Whether you are a fan of James Bond or not, the latest James Bond movie No Time to Die brings up quite a few interesting data modelling challenges. We lead you through all the double-o shenanigans and we’ll discover some general modelling lessons for operational data.

In the Internet era, the data problems we have are different. In this first in a series of posts, we’ll examine how the different ways that people create and use data today impacts how we must shape a data architecture.

Register Dynamics made a submission to the National Data Strategy open call for evidence, in which we discuss the difficulties with data that Government faces which could be fixed with a better approach to data infrastructure.

Something is very wrong with personal data in Government. Citizens still submit their personal data using paper and pictures of letters, and services bear the burden of low-quality evidence. Why isn’t Government more joined up in it’s data sharing, what are the dangers, and how do we solve this problem once and for all?