ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

I recently came across a Microsoft Whitepaper I authored back in 1999 (hmm, so last century!). Entitled "The Digital Nervous System in Government", it used themes from Bill Gates' book "Business at the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System". Jeff Raikes launched my paper at that year's Government Leaders Conference.

Looking at it now, I wouldn't write it the same way I did then. But what hit home was that here we are, some 9+ years later, and many of the points it makes seem as true now as then, such as:

"Governments everywhere recognise the need to provide better, more efficient services to their citizens in a more timely and cost-effective fashion. It is important for governments to exploit the ubiquity and power of new distribution channels, such as the Internet, in order to provide innovative and more effective interfaces to citizens and partners. Governments also need to be more efficient in the way they conduct their own operations and services."

and:

"Contact between government departments and between the government and the citizen generally consists of letters, complex paper forms, phone calls and meetings. Simple questions such as 'What benefits is this citizen entitled too?' are difficult to answer because the relevant information about citizens is generally held in separate information silos and there is no simple way of obtaining a coherent view of that information without becoming involved in a resource-intensive process."

Even back then I was flagging the key issues of information assurance and data protection:

"A digital nervous system can also ensure a systematic process of data protection and safeguard the privacy of the citizen: with data protection and security audit facilities, access to information can be carefully controlled and restricted to those with appropriate authority. Access to information and the use to which that information is put can also be automatically audited an improvement over paper-based systems, which are difficult to monitor, control and audit.

In the digital age, governments need to be able to collaborate, organise, analyse, connect, communicate and transact. The citizen needs to be at centre of all a governments thinking and operations."

It espoused the idea of the citizen at the centre of public service design long before it became a tagline.

"The citizen is at the centre: governments need to provide a more integrated and cost-effective way for the citizen to deal with the wide range of national and local government bodies. Governments also need to accommodate the needs of the citizen in a variety of roles the citizen as a patient, the citizen as a taxpayer, the citizen as a benefits claimant, the citizen as student, for example."

Apart from making it less centred on a particular technical initiative, if I were writing a similar paper today I'd also include more about the levers that government can use to deliver successful change. Everything from the technology policy curriculum and competence of civil servants through to procurement models (encouraging smaller projects and greater use of SMEs), involving users in service design, agile development and programme management to name a few.

Idealgovernment does a powerful job of bringing together smart ideas on both service improvements and how to make them happen. Perhaps it's time some of us got together to help provide an updated vision and implementation document..? One for this century, not last.

In the meantime, those of you interested in stepping back into last century can read my original 1999 paper. Here it is (in .doc format).

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