ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

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taxpayer-funded spend on IT over the past decade or so, combined with the mistaken centralisation models imposed by outdated management methods that hangover from the new public management era, are clearly implicated in the problems we see around us today in overambitious and failing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

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