ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

There's an interesting piece in The Times today entitled "Google or Microsoft could hold NHS patient records say Tories":

"Patients will be given the option of moving their medical notes to private companies after the Conservatives said that they would replace Labour's centrally determined and unresponsive national IT system."

This picks up on the recent Centre for Policy Studies paper "It's our data", which looks at how control over citizen data needs to be returned to citizens and removed from the state. At the moment the state has both access to and control over our personal information. The paper argues that control should be returned to us, as citizens.

Contrary to The Times' subhead, it's not just about the big players (like Google and Microsoft) but about enabling a marketplace of potential providers. A recent example in the UK is Mydex, a community interest company that Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb (who is uneasy with large corporates such as Google or Microsoft potentially holding his personal information) might find a bit more palatable. (Transparency declaration: I know the folks who set up and run Mydex. I also know folks at Google, Microsoft and Parliament ....).

The idea of letting third parties manage aspects of our digital lives and personal information is not new. Many of us choose to share and store such information daily with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and numerous online banks, to mention just a few.

We're already well accustomed to storing some of our most useful digital bits such as our financial information (debts and credits alike) with third parties such as banks. In practice these days, banks are effectively large secure data centres, looking after our digital information. At the moment they're generally limited to financially-related information

The ideas in the CPS paper explore the potential for enabling third parties (which might include the banks if they were to expand their services) to also store other aspects of our personal information. We could then release, exchange and swap that information under our control in the way we do our financial information.

I have previously presented to the Board of one of the major high street banks on this very topic, about how they are well placed to store other pieces of our digital information. If I'm happy storing my financial information with them, why not other pieces of digital information? It can only be a question of time before a bank enters this high-potential market.

Indeed, I sometimes think two very different worlds are on a direct collision course: the banks and the new cloud service providers. In many ways, the core competence of both is the abilty to run secure data centres containing digital information and to make it accessible to us as and when we need access. As to whether banks will move into storing our other digital information, or whether one of the cloud providers such as Amazon or Google will move into the financial market first, remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure. Competition in our current, disruptive digital age is going to come from some very unexpected sources and directions.

The principle underpinning this debate is that control of our personal information should not rest with the state, but be returned to us as citizens, even though of course government may need appropriate access to deliver effective public services. The citizen should also have the right to unplug one supplier and move their personal data elsewhere if they're unhappy with the service provided. Or if someone's really suspicious, they might choose to store their information across several providers so that no single provider has complete access to their personal affairs (a bit like people do with banks, often having multiple credit cards and using them for different purposes).

Of course, such architectural changes to the way public sector IT operates could not be made in isolation. It's the whole governance, architecture and procurement of IT in the public sector that needs to be re-thought. You can't really pick away at one piece (such as procurement, which is where the attention often goes) without addressing the other two as well. We need a comprehensive plan, not to continue with an endless series of stovepiped initiatives.

So expect to see many more ideas emerging over coming months. Ideas that I hope we can robustly debate and consider in order to find a new, more sustainable and effective way of marrying IT to the delivery of twenty-first century public servces.

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