ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

I've been contemplating what the barrage of announcements from government and opposition parties alike over the last few months portends. Maybe it's just the optimist in me, but I can't help feeling we are at, or rapidly approaching, the proverbial tipping point for technology policies and their future impact in particular on public services here in the UK.

And not before time. Technology policy has long been in need of far more attention and a radical re-think if the UK is to realise technology's full potential as a key lever helping improve the way we live, work, learn and play. And all of this is of course given additional impetus and relevance thanks to the UK's current dire economic situation.

Well-designed technology policy can be a unique lever of improvement and beneficial change in the quality and operational efficiency of our public services. But when technology and technology policy is ill-considered, it can become a drain on the public purse for little beneficial outcome.

"Subduction zone" is a geological term that refers to the area likely to be carried under the edge of an adjoining continental or oceanic plate, causing tensions in the Earth's crust that can produce earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. There's something about the term that I think aptly captures the way that new ideas and the pressure of our current economic reality are causing a fundamental underlying shift in the thinking around technology and its role as an improver, or drain, on public finances and the services they support.

The most recent example of these underlying shifts in position is of course the Home Secretary's announcement that ID Cards will no longer be compulsory, which is being viewed in some quarters as the death of the ID Cards programme itself, although that level of black and white assurance remains doubtful to me at present. And, as I wrote in my piece for The Register here, there will still remain the question of what to do about issues of identity, privacy and security regardless of whether there is an ID Card or not.

Shortly before the Home Secretary's announcement we also saw the new Identity and Passport Service (IPS) policy entitled "Safeguarding your identity", which was an interesting development given where IPS thinking seemed to be not that long ago. It is, however, largely built on an underlying assumption that the state sits at the centre of our lives. Part of the challenge in the debate I and many others have been involved in over the last many years is that governments neither exist in splendid isolation nor sit at the centre of our lives, but are an important part of a wider ecosystem that includes many other important parts-- notably citizens, businesses and many other organisations, such as those in the voluntary sector.

Whilst government intentions may be benevolent, ill-informed technology policy decisions imposed from above on these complex ecosystems can have a disruptive and corrosive effect right across our society and the way it functions. There are many lessons that the industry, organisations and individuals have been trying to share to better inform policymaking for the UK as a whole and it's important that future technology policy decisions take better account of all these players and the knowledge and experience they can bring to the table.

Only this last weekend a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies entitled "Why we, not government, must own our data" emerged, being both timely and provocative -- and all the better for being so. We should not shy away from asking hard questions of the 16-17bn GBP annual expenditure on public sector IT and the underlying assumptions about its associated governance, architecture and procurement. And the CPS paper certainly does not shy away, calling for an end to the expensive and failing centralised approach to IT projects and instead proposing that control of personal information is returned to individual citizens (the sort of model that mydex amongst others supports). It also sets out an ambitious cut of 50% in the current public sector IT budget.

As both a technologist and UK citizen, I remain convinced of the positive change that IT can bring to our public services, but reluctantly agree that if it is not being used in the right way, then the current levels of expenditure for little outcome -- with just some 30% of projects succeeding -- may justify a radical rethink. My preferred model however would be to cut overall admin budgets and leave departments to decide whether they can best achieve savings whilst improving public services by enhancing or deprecating IT. The best examples in both private and public sectors ably demonstrate what technology is truly capable of when properly designed and implemented.

Whilst the public sector does have examples of IT producing improvements and beneficial changes, often at the local level, all too often it seems that the sort of improvements that the private sector has seen from IT have largely by-passed the mainstream public sector, with much IT used for little more than to replicate a glorified typewriter (word processing) and filing cabinets (databases). This myopic understanding of what technology is now about is disappointing given the true potential that IT can bring, not just in administration but in the very way that public policy is conceived and designed and the consequential way public services are designed and operated.

The CPS paper chimes well with the recent David Cameron speech about "giving power back to the people" and Dame Pauline Neville-Jones's speech "is information about me really mine?", all of which major on a theme of reducing interference from the state and returning more power and privacy to citizens. In the same way that we saw the Thompson report about open source and changing the public sector IT procurement model trigger a rapid response from the government, at this stage in the electoral cycle it is clear that the emergence of ideas like these, whether from think tanks, opposition parties or indeed even from within other elements of the current administration, is likely to cause tensions in the policymaking process, producing the political and technological equivalent of geological tectonic shifts.

And also over previous weeks we had the new cybersecurity strategy for the UK and the "Digital Britain" report. Whilst there has been much well-informed commentary on all of these individual contributions, pointing out good and bad points and omissions, of greater concern to me is that no-one seems to be taking the overall left-to-right view across all of these important technology policy areas and planning a more coherent, structured and joined-up technology policy for the future of the UK. A truly comprehensive vision for what our future digital Britain should look like.

So where does all of this speculation lead me?

Well, if all of these ideas currently in play and counter-play continue to gather pace, I hope we are approaching an "IT Subduction zone". One that will see many alternative ideas driven under the edge of existing approaches to IT and technology policy in the public sector, causing a healthy, regenerative tension in the existing model that will bring about fundamental, possibly volcanic-scale change: the development of a comprehensive technology policy vision for our future Britain.

Then again, maybe that's just the optimist in me dreaming once again ....

It's not something that I usually read for fun, but the Office of National Statistics' (ONS) latest update on public sector output and productivity reveals that the largest annual falls in public sector productivity were also the years when input growth was at its highest.

Despite the decade from 1997 to 2007 witnessing an increase in the volume of inputs into the public sector of some 38 percent, the total public service productivity index fell over the same period by 3.2 percent. It's interesting to note this lack of any direct correlation between inputs and outputs: when input growth was increasing the rate of output growth was generally lower, and as input growth rates fell, output growth rates fell less.

All of which seems to prove some critics' claims that funding alone is not the answer to more efficient, more responsive public services. To see public sector productivity fall like this despite massive taxpayer investments over the period concerned is not a good outcome for anyone.

The same realities apply to public sector IT investments, which over the same period have multiplied to today's startling 17 billion GDP (or more) annual figure. Far from helping deliver the widespread reformation of public services and helping provide us with better, more efficient public services delivered for less, IT has tended to consume ever increasing inputs with little effective outcomes (with, of course, a few notable exceptions, mainly those delivered at a local level).

Unlike the best performance of IT in other countries, such as the Netherlands, the UK seems to lack "well-developed procedures for making systematic evaluations of technical projects and requiring careful certification that project expectations will be met." (see Digital Era Governance). The UK ranks equal top of the league table for having weak cultural and institutional systems for handling technology decisions and projects. The UK also scores "well" in the league table that shows it has an underlying governance system with few or weak publicly operable controls on the executive.

I find all of this very frustrating, both as a technologist and as a UK citizen. IT has a fantastic capability to help deliver the kinds of public services to which I think most of us aspire, whether as citizens or as public sector employees, as I have aimed to set out in ideas such as towards the digital state.

When talking with senior politicians, they are often surprised to learn that there are many alternative ways of using technology to deliver their objectives. It is as if they are currently being "informed" by a view of IT that is stuck somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s. With poor advice, they opt for the IT solutions that have so often proved inappropriate and problematic to the delivery of the policy objectives they originally embraced.

So what is to be done? I believe the evidence is stark and clear, and is well illustrated by figures like those from the ONS. And I therefore repeat what I blogged only recently, and despite some pushback on it, namely that:

"What we need now is an honest consensus on the general failure of the current model and agreement on how to implement the significant changes required. We need not only what I have long called for, a clear manifesto for technology for our future Britain, but a practical blueprint for how to move away from the old model to the types of ideas that Professor Dunleavy and others have set out ... There are many moving parts here that will need to be orchestrated at the same time, from the re-integration, citizen-centric and digitally-enabled redesign of public services, through the technological implications, the impact of co-design and co-creation, the embracement of citizen (rather than provider) culture, the impact on governance/architecture/procurement and not least the management culture."

I have indeed long called for a manifesto for technology. Now is the time for those of us with a passion for, and interest in, the future of the UK, and the pivotal role of technological innovation, to help deliver it. And of course the action plan to turn it into reality.

Technorati tags: UK future Britain manifesto for technology policymaking politics government IT technology policy digital era goverance London School of Economics

I see that the OECD has published a timely warning on the threat to innovation posed by the current economic crisis. In its report, entitled "Policy Responses to the Economic Crisis: Investing in Innovation for Long Term Growth", it warns that "innovation risks being hit hard by the economic crisis as the capital to finance it grows scarce." Part of the report is a useful breakdown of government stimulus packages and measures taken to stimulate innovation.

"Historically, business R&D spending and patent filings have moved in parallel with GDP, slowing markedly during the economic downturns of the early 1990s and early 2000s. Recent evidence, based on corporate reports from the first quarter of 2009, confirms this is already happening, with R&D spending declining in many cases. US venture capital investments plunged 60% in the first quarter of 2009 and the same is true in Europe and in China. Patent applications are down. Incentives to develop a greener economy have also been weakened by the crisis."

The report rightly calls for both business and governments to limit cutbacks in spending on R&D and innovation, to help limit the negative impact of the crisis on innovation. It notes the examples of Finland in the 1990s and Korea in the early 2000s. They both increased investment in R&D during downturns and helped make their economies more competitive and innovative.

I'm not sure most governments yet understand the reality of what the OECD is pointing out. But they are not alone. Many organisations too are behaving in old-fashioned ways, cutting longer term strategic investments and relationships in order to chase short-term revenue. Governments too generally do not seem to understand how the digital domain is part of our essential economic infrastructure and still tend to invest mainly in older era economic institutions and initiatives.

The New Yorker magazine ran a good article entitled "Hanging Tough" earlier this year about the battle between Kellogg and Post of the late 1920s during that economic recession.

"Post did the predictable thing: it reined in expenses and cut back on advertising. But Kellogg doubled its ad budget, moved aggressively into radio advertising, and heavily pushed its new cereal, Rice Krispies. (Snap, Crackle, and Pop first appeared in the thirties.) By 1933, even as the economy cratered, Kelloggs profits had risen almost thirty per cent and it had become what it remains today: the industrys dominant player. You'd think that everyone would want to emulate Kelloggs success, but, when hard times hit, most companies end up behaving more like Post."

And who remembers Post? The article goes on to point out that

"... numerous studies have shown that companies that keep spending on acquisition, advertising, and R&D during recessions do significantly better than those which make big cuts."

Quite. And those organisations that do the right thing by their customer, rather than by short-term imperatives (such as a narrow focus on short-term revenue at the expense of longer-term strategy and growth), will also do significantly better in the longer-term.

Economic crises are an opportunity for smart management to ditch old thinking and adopt new models better suited to a post-recession economy. Economic crises have a key role to play historically in terms of creative renewal and destruction. Old style business models, or inadequate executives who try to run their business by looking in the rearview mirror (assuming that what worked in the past will work in the future), are those that are likely to fade.

The current model of policymaking around technology tends towards constraining innovation and an insufficient investment during an economic downturn. The tendency too, in the face of a general lack of understanding of the nature of our digital age, is to re-use old-style regulation for new offerings, or to prescribe detailed, pedantic regulation in contradiction of dynamic change. The result frustrates both innovation and the best interests of the consumer and citizen.

Part of the change we need to see is to the adoption of public policy that is adaptable and flexible rather than static. The danger is that Government interventions that aim to support industries that do not have a viable business model will undermine the restructuring required for more sustainable growth.

The focus instead needs to be on innovation-related stimulus measures that help prepare for our future growth, that understand where we are heading, not from whence we came.

Technorati tags: UK future Britain manifesto for technology policymaking politics government IT technology policy economic stimulus R&D

When I was speaking recently at the 2009 Identity and Privacy Forum, I was struck by the presentation given by Professor Patrick Dunleavy from the London School of Economics* on Digital Era Governance.

I usually consider the issue of public sector services primarily from an IT (and UK citizen) perspective, whereas Professor Dunleavy considered them from the angle of public policy. Whatever way you look at it, there is a fundamental problem in public sector IT which now needs to be addressed. For example (looking at figures from Kable), in 1998/1999 the UK's public sector IT budget was 7.6bn GBP. By 2007/2008 it had increased to 17bn GBP, a growth of well over 100%. Assuming a conservative and relatively linear growth profile over that period, some 120bn GBP has thus gone into public sector IT over the past decade.

In this context, it was the slides Professor Dunleavy used showing that in 2008 just 340,000 out of 142 million citizen contacts with DWP were handled online that caused the largest audience reaction. But what struck me most was the view that the prevailing style of new public management is dead and needs replacing with a new digital era governance.

Whilst recently departed IT Minister Tom Watson may have been content to talk about a notional Web 3.0 at the recent Tower09 event on public service reform, the reality is that the majority of public sector IT struggles to reach Web 1.0. The extensive taxpayer-funded spend on IT over the past decade or so, combined with the mistaken centralisation models imposed by outdated management methods that hangover from the new public management era, are clearly implicated in the problems we see around us today in overambitious and failing public sector IT initiatives.

As Professor Dunleavy points out in his presentation, in 2008 online communications amounted to less than 1% of DWP's customer contacts and it currently takes each DWP civil servant an average of four months to send one email to a customer. Yet 51% of DWP customers were already online by mid 2008: evidence that suggests it simply isn't true that the DWP faces unique "digital divide" issues that mean it can't make use of digital era services.

The 2007 National Audit Office report on "Government on the internet: progress in delivering information and services online" found that although Internet users rated government websites reasonably well, the quality of those websites had improved only slightly since 2002, some five years earlier. And after, drawing from the Kable figures, some 100bn GBP had been sunk into IT in the public sector.

That doesn't strike most independent observers as a good return on investment.

In the analysis of what needs to change, I believe that the ideas set out in Professor Dunleavy's deck and the associated book (Digital Era Governance: IT Corporations, the State, and e-Government) contain the seeds of a framework for the type of change we need in the governance, architecture and procurement of IT associated with public services. There seems to be a growing consensus that the UK public sector needs a heavy-hitting, inspiring and properly empowered Chief Information Officer (CIO) to drive real, impactful change in the way the UK's public services are delivered.

But a role change alone won't deliver the management and cultural shifts required. There are many moving parts here that will need to be orchestrated at the same time, from the re-integration, citizen-centric and digitally-enabled redesign of public services, through the technological implications, the impact of co-design and co-creation, the embracement of citizen (rather than provider) culture, the impact on governance/architecture/procurement and not least the management culture.

As Sir Michael Bichard recently commented, the time for tinkering and merely repackaging public services has gone. It is time to fundamentally reinvent them based around citizen need. We need a whole new approach to the prevailing governance, architecture and procurement models in the public sector, one that catches-up on the reality of what has happened in the commercial sector and, most significantly, the Internet and World Wide Web and the consumer-driven world around us.

What we need now is an honest consensus on the general failure of the current model and agreement on how to implement the significant changes required. We need not only what I have long called for, a clear manifesto for technology for our future Britain, but a practical blueprint for how to move away from the old model to the types of ideas that Professor Dunleavy and others have set out.

And given the UK's current economic situation, I can think of no better time to start the detailed planning on that blueprint than now.

* transparency declaration: I am a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE

Technorati tags: UK future Britain manifesto for technology policymaking politics government IT technology policy digital era goverance London School of Economics

I suspect it would be hard to find many people who disagree with the notion of empowering citizens (although I have encountered a few). Public services need to put people first, investing power in the hands of citizens and our communities.

For many years now we've heard much talk of the need to personalise public services and to provide citizens with greater choice and control. But why has the delivery of this objective been so slow, and how will the current economic situation affect the government's ability to deliver? As Ed Mayo recently commented at the Tower09 event, citizens all too often find public services difficult, lonely and boring.

Since information technology (IT) is a key element of modern public services, the public sector needs to take better-informed technology decisions -- not solely about how to optimise the business value of their existing technology infrastructure, but also how to re-think business structures and services in line with what technological innovation now makes possible. The application of information technology has become a key lever of policy and business change, helping to enhance both the quality of public services and efficiencies in their operation, with the user of those services placed at the centre of design rather than the provider.

It's not as if were short of the evidence that demonstrates how it is possible to both improve operational efficiency and the quality of public services without additional budgetary expenditure. Take for example Edinburgh City Council, which is saving 9GBP per citizen every year through its IT-enabled services strategy whilst also delivering dramatic improvements in the quality of its services. And Wakefield Council has eliminated 127,000 commuting miles, saving 4 million GBP in the process, through flexible working strategies delivered by IT.

But I don't see this as being about using IT purely as a sticking plaster on existing services. Unless IT is understood at the time policies are being considered and public services designed, it is difficult to realise its full potential in the delivery of public services. Public services need to be re-thought from the ground up with their target users' needs in mind. There's only so much lipstick you can stick on a pig.

Progress in transforming public services to focus on the citizen has been far too slow. Back in 1997, an i-forms (intelligent forms) project demonstrated three separate government forms, each from a separate government department, being intelligently integrated into a single on-line interaction. The pilot project was regarded as successful by both users and departments alike. It simplified the citizen experience and joined-up the services they needed. But twelve years later -- a lifetime in the digital age -- we seem no closer to being able to use such smart, integrated public services. This was one of many pilots that never made it into full implementation despite the technology delivering an improved service that everyone commended.

So what's the problem? After all, technology itself is not the issue. IT was clearly capable of solving complex service-improvement problems well over a decade ago. Which raises the question of just what are the real blockers to progress? And how might we address these and begin to realise the benefits of the smart application of technology policy to a more efficient, agile, relevant and adaptive public sector?

I realised long ago that the real challenge lies in achieving the cultural change implicit in moving to a citizen-centric model of public service provision. It requires a shift in focus 180 degrees away from the current provider-centric model.

This is problematic: the mechanisms that exist in the commercial market, and which enable producers and service providers to constantly monitor and improve their offerings, do not generally exist in the public sector. The idea of public policy preferences being checked against facts and evidence, and informed by ongoing citizen feedback in order for optimal decision making and change to occur, remain deeply challenging issues, not least because of the way government itself has been built and designed around the provider not the citizen.

What often seems to be overlooked is that the problem of how to better focus public services on citizen needs is one that would need to be addressed regardless of whether IT existed or not: it is perfectly possible to re-orientate thinking around the consumer of public services rather than the provider whether IT is involved or not. But IT can help optimise and accelerate that process and deliver better outcomes by enabling the fundamental redesign of services in ways that would simply not be possible in its absence.

A further impediment to effective, timely improvement is the reality that the cost of the structural reform implied by a truly transformational government programmes is short-term, whereas the benefits are mid- to long-term. And integrated, joined-up public services, focused on the citizen not the multitude of public service providers, cut across a variety of back office functions, budgets and fiefdoms, raising complex governance and procurement issues that have not been tackled to date. To do so requires leadership and vision at the highest levels of government.

We need to break the culture of resistance to change, to stop tinkering at the margins within existing provider-defined services and rethink the UK's public services based on user need not provider-side assumptions. As Sir Michael Bichard recently commented during his "a new way for Government" presentation at the London School of Economics, we need to fundamentally reinvent public services not just keep trying to repackage them. This is the difference that IT, and good user-informed design, brings to the table.

Perhaps the UK's current economic situation may have a silver lining after all -- if we can learn the lessons of what has failed so far, and what is more likely to work. But we need to be careful not to retreat into the old, failed models of the past: organisation's that bunker down and centralise during a downturn are doing precisely the wrong thing, and kill innovation. Simplistic, mechanistic across the board financial cuts have a significant corrosive effect and often impact the wrong targets.

The public sector also needs to understand risk management (in place of risk avoidance) and be more open about its mistakes so that it can learn and improve. It needs to return to the ethos of "doing things right" rather than just "getting things done", and to do so at the most local level possible.

If we are serious about the UK's public services taking a real benefit from the digital age, we need a fundamental repositioning of IT and of the role and design of public services in order to succeed. As with the 1990's reform program in Canada, we need to reassess fundamental questions such as what it is that the UK state will need to stop doing, as well as what we want to preserve.

IT has a fundamental role to play in that improvement programme, not just in terms of operational efficiencies but in enabling real cuts in budgets whilst improving service delivery through the complete redesign of public services.

Canada's experience in a challenging economic environment was apparently that their reform program provided a period of great innovation and the start of properly integrated services enabled by IT. Let's hope that the more positive aspects of the Canadian experience are something we can see replicated here in the UK.

Out of our current economic crunch may finally come the leadership and cultural shifts required to drive the redefinition and reinvention of UK public services that we have been anticipating since the late 1990s. And not before time.

Technorati tags: UK future Britain manifesto for technology policymaking politics government IT technology policy