ntouk - Jerry Fishenden's new technology observations from a UK perspective

New Technology Observations from a UK perspective (ntouk). Most active month, over 300,000 hits.

Reinventing Government for the Internet age

28 January 2008

Last week, I spoke at the at the Oxford Internet Institute's and Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology's event "Gov 2.0, or Truly Transformative Government", hosted at the House of Commons.

You can see from the agenda here what an eclectic range of speakers participated. As with other OII events I've been involved with, this was a lively, open affair - with a wide range of views and opinions from speakers, the audience, and the various discussion panels and moderators.

My designated topic was "Reinventing Government for the Internet age". Something of a challenge to address in just 15 minutes ....And a great time, as I was in mid flow and watching the clock, to remember that "less is more", and that cramming a zillion Powerpoint slides into such a short slot is not to be recommended - unless you want to sound like someone competing in a speed-talking competition.

My theme picked up on a topic I have previously blogged about - such as in The New Reformation - Technology as a Policy Lever. The basic thesis being that the truly transformative nature of technology is not yet understood during the conception of policy - and instead technology is all too often merely seem as something to be thrown at projects during their operational and administrative phases like some miracle pixie dust.

The whole problem being, as Bill Gates has described it, that

... if you're too focused on your current business, it's hard to look ahead and even harder to make the changes you need to ...

The current public services model is provider-centric. It habitually views the public sector from the provider perspective - not the citizen's. This is increasingly out of step with the Internet and Web 2.0 thinking and the process of business transformation currently taking place all around us. Even when people talk about "citizen-centric services", all too often it seems to be the provider's notion of citizen-centricity - not that driven by citizens themselves. All very Reithian.

I've always thought it an interesting parallel that back in the 1970s, the car industry, airlines and many other part of the economy were in the public sector. Today of course to most people that seems unimaginable. In the same way, many of today's public services are increasingly being delivered in new ways as we move to a model where key UK services are enabled by the public sector but not necessarily operated by it. Yet CIO's and CTO's are not in themselves able to drive change:any successful major change programmes are never about technology alone. Trying to use technology as the main ingredient to force change is doomed to fail, unless the entire business model is conceived as a change programme: otherwise we seem condemned to continue putting lipstick on the pig and blaming the IT guys when change programmes go wrong.

If you look at an outline of citizen pathways and how they operate at the moment, it highlights how silo'd and dysfunctional services remain for the citizen. I used a highly simplified example of an adolescent's drift into crime, where he finds himself constantly flicked between one public service silo after another (education, social services, the police, the courts etc) with no-one taking complete ownership. If we're serious about citizen-centric services, we need to move to citizen pathways modelled around citizens' needs - and this will never be achieved in the long term merely by using a sticking plaster such as "data sharing" (which seems to me a way of trying to perpetuate a service delivery model whose sell-by date has long since passed).

In the digital age, the public sector doesn't need to own or hold everything itself in order to provide an integrated service. It can exploit other investments (across both public and private sectors and the personal sector, that driven and owned by citizens themselves). The outcome, for once, can be greater than the sum of the parts. And there are interesting new potential organisational models outlined in the likes of Healthvault, which enables citizens to own their own health records and decide who has access to them and when. Rather than a provider assuming they own the data and have to build and operate all the systems. That is old provider-centric thinking - not citizen-centric thinking enabled by the digital age.

The other key point I believe that is often missed is that this is all about "It's the Internet stupid" not the Web. The Internet is about driving services, not Web sites. In terms of public services, this understanding will help drive a shorter time to delivery, better reliability, wider syndication, broader (and more compelling) experiences and support for multiple channels and devices. We're already witnessing the start of this transformation - most obviously in assisted living (using technology to enable people to live longer, more fulfilled lives in their own homes and communities rather than in hospitals or institutions).

And I still don't buy that technology moves too fast for policymakers to understand it and plan for it properly. The reality of planning for technology is that anything that is going to significantly impact us in terms of technology in 10 years is already 10 years old.

So my overall recommendations (as I raced through my slides like a runaway train) were to engage technology at the inception of policy research and planning not as an after-thought. And to build ...