WRITTEN ON October 26th, 2004 BY Fred Perkins AND STORED IN Across the Board, What do we want?

If one was needed, the furore over the spiralling costs of NHS provides a prime example of muddled thinking as to priorities in e-enabled services. The media headlines say that it will now cost us 3 or 5 times as many Billions as originally estimated, so that we can “choose our own appointment, or be confident our health records were available anywhere”. No wonder the estimates are soaring. They appear to be estimates of IT costs for implementaion of un- or ill-defined requirements!

Across the board, we are seeing Millions (nay, Billions) of pounds being thrown at technology to “improve” and “deliver” the services that apparently everyone desperately needs, and government equally desperately wants to supply (perhaps for different motives). Yet we see little effort – and it doesn’t need much expenditure – to step back and ask whether bigger, and more certain, improvements could be delivered if we just fixed the rocesses themselves. We rush headlong into embracing new technology, in the belief that the answer lies in the technology. But before spending a penny on technology, surely we need to get to grips with underlying processes?

I recently heard a Cabinet Minister, in front of a large number of industry leaders, admit that bringing about change in government processes is hugely difficult, and the biggest single obstacle to progress inside government and in its interfaces with the public. And this is about change in the way of doing things – NOT in the technology – or lack of it – in the process itself.

The public sector is awash – even sinking – under processes which are no longer relevant or purposeful. Exposing them to e-enablement merely emphasises how flawed they are. But supreme resistance arises when the prospect of change, often even simple change, is proposed.

Most organisations – certainly in the private sector – when they’re considering large IT investments first look carefully at the processes they currently follow, then contemplate how they might work better, given that technology is now available. They look outward to how their customers want to interact with them. They look for efficiency gains and savings and overall benefits for all stakeholders. The recipe for failure is the one that starts from assumptions about the technology and then plugs it into the existing processes!

Andrew Pinder, and many others before and after him, have thrown up their hands in surrender at the insurmountable difficulties in bringing about process change, whether it’s about “joining up” government or “reforming” areas of citizen/government interaction. Don’t dare talk about collapsing multi-Departmental processes into simplified, single-unit ones, nor of making savings from 000’s of civil servants no longer required because entire areas of bureaucracy are eliminated! Why not? Because empires are threatened. Because headcount savings are perceived as too difficult to engineer. Because there is no collective will, nor leadership, in applying our public sector resources in truly more efficient ways of achieving desirable ends.

Our civil service has some tremendous strengths. There are processes and standards well above anything in the private sector. But there is an appalling lack of “leadership” (political and management) working together with front-line staff to deliver better outcomes, if it means disruption to what are regarded as sacrosanct areas. e-Enablement is almost always seen as additional cost from additional processes overlaid umpon existing ones. No wonder costs spiral!

Government has invested heavily in a lot of new technology. What is surely needed now, before we apply taxpayers’ cash to even more technology, is a capturing of the benefits, through fundamental re-thinking of processes across the board. Start making the “old” processes work better, and then, and only then, begin to think about radical new “services”.

The world at large has made vast steps forward by utilising new technology – “out of the box”, interoperable, forward-thinking advances. Instead, government projects almost always semm to assume they have to be custom-built. They end up non-standard, impossibly expensive to update, and stuck in the silo of their development. The NHS struggles, years after it started and at enormous cost, to get to grips with email, while the outside world weekly adds almost as many new email users as the NHS requires in total…for a fraction of the cost.

My ideal e-enabled public service? One which, even if I saw no real change in the way I myself interfaced with it, was radically improved (cost, time, undertsanding..) at a net negative cost, because the public sector itself has managed to make large savings while improving the service.

Show me one or two of those, and my faith in government’s ability to come to grips with technology would be restored. And that, surely, is what it’s all about – not whether I can use my PC to fill in a form which I still don’t understand, and which will still fail to deliver what I consider to be real benefits.