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 ....

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