WRITTEN ON June 28th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Transformational Government, What do we want?

This new paper Excellence and fairness makes quite a lot of sense. It picks up some of the more contempory service and technology themes we like at IdealGov, like user involvement, feedback mechanisms using the Internet, and problem-solving communities for professionals. That’s cool.

Unless I’m missing something (and I haven’t printed it out and read it properly) there’s not much new or specific. There are general principles which are quite good, against an insistent background protestation that there is a role for central government in all this (the quote “Don’t just do something, stand there” springs to mind, but perhaps they’re not Ronnie Reagan fans).

The glaring omission is any attempt to sort out the role of personal data in the delivery of services. The assumption that it is for government to deliver services that are personalised carries with it the dangerous and intrusive fallacy that government therefore needs to know everything about people, and to share that data – recklessly, as is already clear – across its own organisational boundaries.

But who owns that personal data? Who cares most, and who is best equipped to keep it up to date? The outsourced agents of some distant branch of the Whitehall tribe? No. We do, obviously. If we’re to have person-centric services we need person-centric data. Not centralised childrens’ databases, health records and ID management.

It’s the whole decade-old CRM fallacy all over again. The problem is ego. The remedy is empathy and an openness to the emerging, more person-centric ways of doing things.

Some quotes from the paper below…

Alongside the extension of choice in health and other services, there must be a deepening of user involvement through new forms of individual and community control. The exact mechanism will vary from service to service, but the aspiration will be the same: enabling more personalised services by giving citizens the information and power to shape services around their needs and aspirations, rather than by assuming that someone in the Government knows best.

Well, that’s pretty cool. Tricia at CSM would use the word participation.

On feedback (see IdealGov Jan 2005)

The internet has given a powerful voice to consumers to give feedback on private sector services – that feedback is now spreading to public services and must be embraced. NHS Choices is a large scale example of the public sector soliciting feedback on health care, building on the example of websites such as patientopinion.com. The challenge for public service providers is to listen to and work with websites that provide a rich seam of feedback, even if that feedback makes for uncomfortable reading.

And on problem-solving communities, like TEN’s The Key service for headteachers (not to be confused with The Key, the Cabinet Office project to encourage other innovartions lke The Key)

Technology is now also providing totally new and powerful ways for professionals to collaborate and learn from one another. For example, there is already a massive growth in websites which bring together professionals and public sector volunteers, such as school governors, online. The Government will continue to support such developments while bearing in mind that their success is often attributed to their independence.

But there’s lots of “everything was terrible 10 years ago” political puff, and waffly stuff like –

This does not mean rolling back the investment and reforms of the past 10 years. Instead we must build on the progress already made. This means empowering citizens not only by further extending choice, but also by strengthening accountability mechanisms and radically increasing transparency. It means unlocking the creativity and ambition of public sector workers to innovate and drive up standards in partnership with service users. And it means less
micro-managing and more strategic leadership from central government.

I’m precluded from making any derogatory remarks about this kind of pointless false non-choice waffle by the terms and conditions of the paper (see below). But man it’s a drag to wade through on a Friday evening…