WRITTEN ON March 17th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Power of Information, Transformational Government

Here are my written-up notes from the panel session intro I did last week. Many thanks to the organisers (to whom I’ve also sent private feedback)

Both our hosts, John Suffolk and John Higgins, know of my unease about the unfolding of Transformational Government and of the outcomes of a cosy bilateral relationship between the CIOs and Intellect. I’m sure that’s why they asked me to be here at Tower 08, and I hope that in exploring that concern I’m doing what they wanted, constructively, and without being either churlish or ungrateful.

Because they have been excellent hosts; we enjoyed a terrific dinner last night in stimulating company. I greatly enjoyed the Minister’s speech (with one quibble – see below).

We’ve been asked to talk about “channels”. Already I’m uneasy. Channels are what broadcasters beam at viewers. The channel is what IT vendors exploit, in one memorable phrase, to “kill the competition and hoover up their footprint”. My specific unease about the language of directive marketing mirrors a broader unease about Transformational Government.

It’s upside down.

It purports to be citizen-centric, but is based on the principle that we the government own the data, and we the government will join it all up, the better to do things to you.

Of course we need to transform government, but my fear is that the underlying motivation behind Transformational Government is not yet right.

We all need financial targets as a discipline. Money makes it possible, and can measure whether we’re doing is really needed. We needed the financial dimension of the Gershon efficiency review. Eithne at Fujitsu needs to meet her targets.

But I question whether money is the right motivator. It’s a poor guide to ethically complex questions. Whether or not we go to war, pursue GM or build supercasinos has tremendous financial implications. But money is not the best guide to what decision we should make in these situations.

Nor is it the best guide to how we should refashion the politics of participation, use personal data, shift into greater co-creation of public services define a mechanical, rules-based relationship between the individual and the state. These are deep and difficult questions.

Let’s get better at two things. We all, not least those who have concerns about Transformational Government and ideas about how it could be approached better, need to express ourselves better and more constructively. And we all need to learn to cultivate a better form of respectful listening so we appreciate the complexities and dimensions of what is being undertaken, and the underlying purpose of what others are trying to achieve.

Personally I’d like to see us reject militaristic language: less of the golden bullets and carpet-bombing. Tom Watson wants to “deliver services to citizens with pinpoint accuracy” as he speaks under the logo of Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest arms dealer.

Let’s also move on from the language of manipulative centralised marketing. IPS ponders “various forms of coercion” for its ID system. TG talks of sharing of intelligence, driving take-up, exploiting technologies. It’s all focus, target, segment, execute. This is the discriminatory and coercive language of those who cancel 161,00 Egg credit cards, not the respectful, empathetic language of whose who place human dignity at the heart of their plans for public services.

It’s good that the voice of the customer has crept into the margins of the Tower08 event. It’s in the NCC town hall discussions shown as vox pops, Bob Johnston spoke in those terms, also with respect for those on the front line. Alexis Cleveland used emotional mapping to differentiate between the effects of an efficient school-meals decision versus a long-winded one. So that voice is here, and that’s a welcome improvement.

But that voice needs (as Ed Mayo describes it in his NCC booklet “Playlist for Public Services”) to become the driving force of what we do. When you listen to it in the right way, it’s very articulate. You may not like what you hear, but at least you have a true starting point.

John Suffolk talks of “citizen-centric” and Tom Watson about open-source government, and the driving principles of the “Power of Information” agenda. If we start to fulfil the potential of these words we’ll be undertaking something really radical and worthwhile. This is not about the centre gathering, hoarding and sharing personal data, or broadcasting through new online channels how many veg a day we should all eat and what a good job our elected representatives are doing.

That’s upside down!

Instead of supporting human dignity, that drowns out creativity, participation, expressions of real need, feedback.

People are largely responsible for their own health, education safety and earnings through their careers. Rowan Williams says we should call people “agents” of public services, not customers or clients, because their role is an active one.

To put this the right way up again, the data should reside with them. They have the greatest motivation for looking after it and keeping it up to date. That puts the person at the centre of public services.

The final project I was involved in at Kable (now part of The Guardian) was ThePublicOffice, which helped service providers practise listening to people with complex service needs, then to rehearse designing services which met those complex needs. They quickly worked out that we need, simultaneously, channels of three sorts. This is easily illustrated based on health care:

1. We need a GP: a professional who is on our side, even to the extent of being pretty sceptical (as we heard from Ben Page) about the NHS
2. We it all goes wrong we need blue flashing lights and A&E, no questions asked (but with the allergy bracelet to hand)
3. Much of the time we need low-cost self-service access to information. NHS Direct online or by phone is fine. There’s no need to ask my address or date of birth, or indeed for any entitlement criteria.

None of these channels prevails at the expense of the others. Each has its time and circumstance. Clearly there are great cost differences.

To conclude, we need to turn Transformational Government right side up again. We need to start to use different language. My vision of the future (since John H asks us all) is that we predominantly control our own data as it relates to our case load for banks, retailers and public services. We use freely distributed open source software on local systems, or on web services such as personalised Google or Microsoft Healthvault. We share data as necessary with the parties we transact with. If we seek to defraud the system we lose the right to participate and the pattern of our activity is revealed, but if we play by the rules we can be anonymous or pseudonymous. Our data is with the person who cares for it most: ourselves.