WRITTEN ON May 21st, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, Political engagement, Power of Information, Transformational Government, What do we want?

Here’s the approximate text of a talk I gave last night in Committe Room 15 of the House of Commons, for a Pitcom meeting on “Trustworthy e-Government”. Dr Louise Bennett (of BCS Security Forum) said some might think Trustworthy e-Government was an oxymoron.

Trustworthy eGovernment shouldn’t be a subset of egovernment, nor e-government a subset of government but a healthy new ecosystem rooted in government.

I’ll treat it not as an oxymoron, but as aspirational.

Imagine a bank where you kept your current account, mortgage, health and car insurance. Perhaps you’ve been with it all your life, because there is no choice. Maybe you’re not very happy with it, because every time you make a deposit they make a 40% service charge and an extra 10% for insurance. Then they go and leave all your personal details in a skip. Imagine, in short, you are already far from happy with the bank even before they hire mercenaries to engage in futile wars and start telling you to eat five fruit & veg a day.

When that bank says “we’re putting in the mother of all CRM systems, closing all our branches and making you sit in a call centre queue or bank over the internet” you might not celebrate immediately. You might, to say the least, adopt a cautious wait & see stance

In November 2002 the then PM Tony Blair said he wanted to harness the power of information technology to create “a new relationship between citizen and state”.

As ORG – of which I’m acting chair – points out in response to Thomas/Walport review: “Such an endeavour should not be taken lightly.” We might have added “particularly by someone who – for all his strengths – remains famously clueless about technology.”

My start point on the theme Trustworthy e-Government is: we DO have a problem.

If anyone doubts we can share a moment of dark humour reading through the lists of recently disclosed government data breaches or the random self-referential data generated by a DirectGov search on the terms “national DNA database”.

We have a serious problem of trustworthiness of e-government because of

– poor design and functionality
– cost (not just direct cost, but the frustrating ineffectiveness at displacing existing costs)
– unnecessary levels of surveillance, data retention and aggregation which are
– offensive to human dignity and
– probably illegal under EU law, a serious fact about which our authorities seem strangely complacent

This is not a shallow problem we can fix with the umpeenth version of Windows and a memo telling civil servants to encrypt their memory sticks. We can’t stifle it with more elaborate project reviews. We can’t outsource it. (Well, we could if Accentrica could see a way of making money out o it, but it wouldn’t solve the problem).

My first observation is that trustworthy e-government has to be rooted in trustworthy government.

We can’t get away from fundamental issues of MPs expenses, the evidence base in the war on drugs or for the ID System, truthfulness in making the case for war. As teh independent Diplomat Carne Ross points out, governments can decide either to tell people the truth, or not to. This runs to how we account for PFI expenditure, release news, and handle statistics and other financial data.

The foundation of trust in what will be e-government is rooted in trust in government.

As we computerise and reinvent government the basic measures of whether we’re doing a good thing or not remain the same
– quality of service as seen from customer’s point of view (not the producer’s subjective opinion or meaningless central targets)
– cost, because we work hard to pay our taxes and many of us would see more of our kids (with consequent desirable social outcomes) if we didnt have to pay so much
– trust

At that point I explained why IdealGov started, and the three principles of

– quick wins based on readily available tools like search, RSS, other XML, Mashups
– participative design; co-governance, and
– the need to dig deeper for foundation of trust.

Believe me, there’s an Internet-savvy generation that can see exactly what we’re doing in computerising public services under the Transformational Government policy. They’re not apathetic at all. As Louise B. said: they’re aware, and sceptical. And they’re seriously unimpressed.

At what level do we need to fix the problem that e-government, as we are proposing to deliver it, will not merit trust?

If Jim Norton was here he would give us a stern professorial look and remind again – rightly – to think in formal project engineering terms, and to think in terms of business change not IT projects, and to do the cost-benefit analysis accordingly.

The problem is not that the technology does not work, though the way we’re going about it I’m quite sure that parts of it wont. It’s not just about the management change and bringing the whole team with you. We’ve gone over this ground so many times: McCartney review, Anne Steward’s work, Gershon review, gateway process, the whole history and rationale of OGC and the CCTA before it (older readers with better memories please elaborate)

The problem is at the level of INTENTION

If we embark on e-government with the wrong intention it will lead to social rejection of the e-services we create. This will be as complete a failure as if the system crashed, fuse blew or all the staff walked out on strike.

I think some of this wrong intention arises because of a confusion between rhetoric which talks of us customers and remorseless action where we’re caught up as innoent bystanders in the attempt to salvage a just safe and tolerant society from the chaos of interconnected globalisation. I have issues with how we’re going about that; I see too much emphasis on the “safe” and not enough on the “just & tolerant”, and I find globalised interconnected chaos wonderful, for all its drawbacks. I think we need to adapt to live in it, rather than pretend we unscramble it with technologie of control.

If I had to describe the problem of intention it would be that in the UK egovernment:
sounds like its meant to treat us as customers
but acts like we’re paedophiles, freeloaders and terrorist suspects.

Today’s leak or kite-flying exercise about a massive data retention database is a small step among many steps too far on a massive journey in one direction.

Thomas-Walport review is looking at data sharing, to which we understand Permanent Secretaries pledged resolute ongoing commitment immediately after the HMRC disks episode.

It’s not for me to make the case for the benefits of data sharing. what is clear to me is that

– there is a widespread misconception that data sharing is in itself a benefit, when it’s no such thing. It is a responsibility, and it may create liabilities. If there are benefits we should state the real benefits (in terms of the basics above: service, cost, trust).
– there are limits to its effectiveness
– needs a highly structured approach
– Louise touched on why this is important, and what a fraught and complex matter it is. The work of Jeff Jonas (founder of SRD, now with IBM) and his description of a “librarian” function brings some clarity to this

All in all, there is high risk of creating toxic soup. There’s a risk of creating Kafkaesque outcomes: problems arise, the computer says “no” and you cant trace the error back to source and have it rectified in every place where it has had an impact.

To start to make sense of this and discern a right way ahead we need to return to some of the good words government uses and put meaning behind them

It’s always good to remember Tony Blair’s aspiration that “we are the servant and not the master”. It’s good to be customer-centric. There is Increasing talk of empowerment and active citizenship – hey, that’s even a module on the compulsory curriculum.

Take the major public services:
– education
– health
– law & order

…none of these are services dished out to us. They all require active participation and work. We’re grateful to Ed Mayo of NCC for his stream of insights about the need to make the voice of the customer the driving force in what you do. I greatly admire the work of Tom Steinberg and MySociety – sometimes controvesial in this House – and the way it exemplifies an irrepressible delight in the more active interest and participation in civic life the contempory internet makes possible.

Tom and Ed together write the Power of Informaiton review, which has now become Tom Watson’s mini-manifesto.

We’re starting to see emergence inside government of problem-solving communities
– vast scope for this among 5m public servants
– TEN’s Key service for headmasters perhaps first and best example
– Patient Opinion (Healthy Choices) qv

If we want user-driven outcomes we must accept that these are likely to be based on user-driven data.

This represents a significant cultural shift from the original Transformational Government.

But it’s likely to prove an effective and painless antidote to the increasingly toxic centralisation of our personal data.

There are straws in the wind. In the field of health, while we persevere with CfH, parts of which will collapse under the weight of its own arrogance,
As of last week there are now three credible sources for privacy-friendly portable personalised health records

On ID, if I may quote a commenter on IdealGov who writes about a Harvard project to create user-centric relationship management

“We will end up with three views of an individual – the government one (central and local), the private sector one, and the individual’s own one. My assertion is that over time the individual view will prove to be the richest, deepest and most accurate and that ultimately data will flow from there into the individual’s trusted (or mandatory suppliers) – and not flow into non-trusted entities. Getting to that stage will be a long and complex process – but the process has begun. Just to give you a quick insight into the metrics – everyone in the UK could be given an individual-centric identity with fairly rich online functionality for around £1m per year, a tiny fraction of the sums being spent on the top down approaches.

If we want trustworthy e-government, the technologies are there to do it, with more coming on stream all the time

That’s why I say that to earn out trust in egovernment will require a shift in intention: it will require empathy; and integrative complexity (that ability to see others’ points of view which George W Bush so famously lacks)

In conclusion:

The trustworthiness of egovernment is a serious and deep problem. We could argue that it’s largely of government’s own making, but we can have some sympathy – work of government is complicated, customer base is endless and fast moving technology is hard to get our heads round. There is a problem of arrogance and reluctance or inability to listen.

But we are all in this together. The right mindset is just a Damascene conversion away. Technological solutions are available and more are coming

To some extent I believe this problem will be self-rectifying. And I think there’s huge political advantage to be had in recognising all this and going with it.