A single platform for government services in Scotland launched in beta this week, pulling together services from local and central government.

The mygov.scot portal uses API technology to present content from partner websites, including all local authorities north of the border.

Mygovscot is being developed by Online Services, a division of the Scottish Government Digital Directorate which is also supporting a wider programme of service transformation.

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For beta, we’re now drawing up and agreeing our objectives of which there is an abundance,” said Peter Smith, product owner for the alpa and beta phases. “It’s going to be a case of prioritising them to deliver the most benefit quickly.”

In a blog post this month, he added: “Top of our list will be to deliver a minimal viable version of a publishing platform, so we can separate content production from site development and releases.

“The publishing platform will allow our content designers to begin to work outside of our development team so we can focus on features and new content independently. In Alpha we had one product backlog, but in Beta we’ll have a product backlog and a content backlog.

“The challenge with Beta will be how we deliver breadth as well as depth of content to users.”

A separate blog post by Rachel Dowle, head of content, explained how content had moved from the Scottish Business Portal, whcih has now closed.

She said : “We are collaborating with key partners across the business sector to understand the landscape of existing services, who their users are and to share outputs such as user research. We are also continuing our work with UK Government’s Digital Service (GDS) to improve the journey between devolved and reserved services.”