30 Sep 2004

Point both to official and to NGO information and advice services

One key thing we need in the advice and legal e-services sector is
clarifying the differing roles of government and the independent advice
and legal sectors in delivering information to the public.

There’s often tendency amongst staff in local and national government
to underestimate the need for information from independent sources.

E-enabled public services need to make clear the availability and status
of these different sorts of information from different sources. 

 

Yes, we want choice in public service, research says

Do people want choice in public services? Yes, says research by Mori for the Audit Commission, not just because they want to choose but because they think choice will make services better. Two in five say it’s essential to have more choice of schools for special needs children, or in support for the elderly living at home, and one in three want more choice in how to pay council tax and in GCSE subjects.

But people feel pessimistic. Choices are made for them. Public services are “take it or leave it”.

Of course, people could have more choice without e-enablement. But e-enabled services in themselves can be a choice, and e-enablement can make choice and the comparison that makes that choice better informed far easier.

The Audit Commission, like some of the thousands of other bodies, offers a feedback form on what you think about its web site. But how many of these bodies are receptive to feedback on what they actually do?

(I picked this link up from Tom Raggett. I have a Doppelgaenger frisson when I read that he too is tall, interested in e-government, and resisted the white van speaker scam).

 

E-Participation: the missing link

Not sure about the situation in the rest of the EU, but here in Spain, E-Participation -to me one of the more relevant virtues of the eGovernment package- is mostly missing in debates on how politics on-line should be.

A good example on that is all the debate after the demonstrations prior to the Spanish general elections and just after the terrorist attacks of March 11 in Atocha Station (Madrid) with almost 200 persons killed.

The Spanish conservative party (Partido Popular)which was then in the government insisted to connect the bombing with the Basque separatist terrorist organisation ETA, despite there seem to be several clues indicating that it was coming from the islamist type of terrorism.

RIght or wrong, thousands of Spanish citizens started to get really angry with the government, and using e-mail and specially SMS arranged a big demonstration in front of the Partido Popular headquarters in several Spanish cities like Madrid or Barcelona.

 

29 Sep 2004

What 600 people say they want from an e-voting system

I think the resolution on voter-verifiable e-voting is a pretty good “what we want” sort of statement. If you like it, you can sign up and support it too.

The wish-list extracts are:

“We feel that voters and candidates must be able to feel certain that voting intentions are accurately recorded. If any doubts do arise then all stakeholders must be able to verify and audit all aspects of the election.

“Due to the opaque nature of [computerised voting] technologies ... it is crucial that electronic voting systems provide a voter-verifiable audit trail. By this we mean a permanent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter before the vote is submitted, and is difficult or impossible to alter after it has been checked. This must be achieved without compromising the secrecy and integrity of the ballot thus, to prevent vote selling or coercion, the vote records cannot be kept by the voter. It must be noted that such an audit trail is only useful if it is used regularly for recounts to verify the electronic result. Without a verifiable voting system every election is open to allegations which will raise doubts over the results that administrators will be unable to disprove. However an audit trail alone is not sufficient - all aspects of the voting process need to be made secure. Providing a voter-verifiable audit trail should be one of the essential requirements for any new voting systems.”

 

Maintaining medical privacy in an e-enabled health care system

FIPR makes the point that patients must give informed consent for the sharing of their personal health information for research purposes, just as they do for use of tissue samples. If not, FIPR predicts something like the Alder Hey child-organ scandal or the animal rights backlash.

Where consultation is impossible the party seeking access should consult a sample of patients affected, and give public notice of the proposed use.

The risks are made much worse by collating centrally patient records that have to date been held by GPs, says FIPR. It wants to see personal health information left in the hands of its natural custodians - GPs, hospitals and other carers - and transient administrative data such as billing information promptly deleted in the interests of preserving medical privacy.

 

Civil servants, local councils, information and transactions

Following on from William’s remarks in the last post, I think that Ed Straw’s recent paper for Demos, The Dead Generalist, is also worth reading in this context.

And following on from posts made by Helen and others, it’s often the seemingly simple stuff that just doesn’t seem to happen. I’d say that e-gov often tries to run before it can walk. Targets are made for transactions, when it’s often just basic information that doesn’t get joined up.

Take an example. I live in Southwark. Southwark has various refuse collection serices: for domestic wate (bins), for garden waste (different types of sacks), for cans and bottles (boxes) and for paper (special bags). I, as citizen, see all these as waste collection. I need to know what will be collected when, so I know when to put it out, and I also need the wherewithall to put it out. But when I visit the Southwark website, I’m told about ‘recycling’ in one place, and ‘garden waste’ in another. I have umpteen different paper schedules for each type. Frankly, it took me a while to cotton on to the idea that ‘recycling’ was different from ‘garden waste’...and I’m sure I’m not the only one around here.

When I try to find out where to get garden waste bags, the only link on the Southwark home page about domesic refuse is to something about ‘schedules’, which does not link to any other info at all (hey, I need bags, and I need to fill them, before the schedules become useful).  Everyone around this area is putting out different stuff on different days and nobody knows when it’s getting collected. The council’s scheme seems to be silo-based, with each department thinking about its own services, but not about the Southwark resident who has to deal with it all.

Having said that, the guys are all very helpful when they turn up, and pass on info that I then pass along the street grapevine. Kind of an alternative Internet…

Then take the phone. When I called Southwark, I used to have to hang on for around an hour...to pay them money. Now (there’s a brand new call centre) I call them and get a response within 15 minutes, which I’m told by call centre staff is much appreciated by residents used to the old regime. There’s expectations for you.

At iSociety last year, we did some primary research that included one London borough (part of my research patch), where I learned that local surveys showed that residents primarily (70%) wanted to communicate with the council by phone. And the phones *were* extremely busy. But the council tax department depended on a ‘fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry’ call queuing system (I kid you not - it was a freebie that had been thrown away by someone else). Staff did their best, within the contraints, and senior staff were doing their best to bring in new call managment systems for some services. But frankly, as I resident I would have been tearing my hair out - just as I do in Southwark. There have been so many years of underinvestment that there’s a lot a ground to make up.

So why the central government focus on e-gov rather than phones? I think they think phones are not sexy...but most people have no problem calling all kinds of commercial and entertainment services.

Where I do find public sector transactions online (like the supposed filled-out PDF achieved after going through a dozen screens, that then fails to appear - I won’t embarrass the body concerned publicly, and I’ve already mentioned it to them privately) the outcome is often not worth the effort.

In my opinion, there’s too little citizen-centred design in evidence right now, and too little thought being put into the provision of basic information in a sensible way, to justify moving up from information to transactions.

We need to think seriously about the basic building blocks, the way information is architected, as it relates to the citizen, before moving on to the heavy-duty stuff. And we need to think about the language that is used: what the heck is ‘environmental services’, when it’s at home? It may well be a council department, but it’s not a council service and it’s not the language that people use when they need to get their bins emptied. The same problem applies across swathes of government (with central government often the worst offenders). Getting rid of the silos is the first step to getting anywhere. But having read Ed Straw’s pamphlet, I don’t hold out much hope.

 

Will e-government kill off the bureaucrats? Or will the bureaucrats kill off e-government?

A kind friend points out this paper by Abhijit Jain -

http://astro.temple.edu/~jain/ETEPO03.pdf
http://astro.temple.edu/~jain/

“This paper has examined contemporary EGovernment
research and literature through the lens of
Weber’s theory of bureaucracy. The paper finds that
two somewhat contradictory themes emerge from this
exercise. While according to one theme, IT can be used
to override and reform features of Weberian
bureaucracy such as hierarchy, division of labor and
rigidity of rules; according to the other theme, these
very features have the potential to render EGovernment
projects unsuccessful.”

 

28 Sep 2004

Let’s join up benefits and put an end to the bureaucratic nightmare

The vital aspect of all service delivery to the disenfranchised and needy is flexibility and high-calibre staff who explain things clearly and do what they say they will do immediately. A joined-up service would simplify their lives hugely.

eg. Someone claims Income Support or Job Seeker’s Allowance. They fill in Housing Ben & Council Tax Ben claim forms with their IS / JSA form, which should be forwarded to the local HB / CTB office on their behalf. I say ‘should’ advisedly, and when the forms don’t reach their intended destination, the claimant carries the can for not making their HB/CTB claim within the time limits, and may lose benefit. The HB/CTB office’s line is the claimant should also complete one of their own new claim forms and bring it directly to their office. Daft!

If the IS/JSA claims were made on line at the DWP/Job Center, the HB/CTB claim could be tranmitted instantaneously to the HB/CTB office.

The system for Pension Credit has transformed HB/CTB claims for the over-60’s who qualify for Pension Credit. Their income is assessed by the DWP for Pension Credit and the information is automatically passed onto HB/CTB and they are legally obliged to accept this figure as correct.

eg. A pensioner claims Carer’s Allowance for looking after their disabled spouse who gets a qualifying disability benefit. The Carer’s Allowance is awarded with 3-months’ backdating. The couple get Pension Credit. From the date that entitlement to Carer’s Allowance started they are entitled to extra Pension Credit (Carer Premium), but the actual Carer’s Allowance has to be deducted from the Pension Credit. The claimant has to inform Pension Credit of the change of circumstances. It can take months to sort out, making sure that all the arrears of benefit are correctly paid. (It gets even worse if the spouse’s retirement pension includes money for carer, as the pension has to be adjusted, and then the pension credit has to take into account the reduced pension and the new carer’s allowance. This can also take months even though for Hackney residents Pension Credit and Retirement Pension are administered by the same office based in Glasgow.) I have a case where I am still banging on about money owed from 23/2/04 - 19/4/04.

The situation is the same for younger people, on IS / income-based JSA. It’s a bureacratic nightmare!

I suppose the most frustrating thing for people doing my type of job is the amount of time spent checking and chasing to ensure that the claimant gets what they are entitled to. It is not uncommon to send a complaint letter about delays, with a list filling an A4 page logging all phone calls / correspondence to date. There is no way that most individuals could do this for themselves because it requires such a good knowledge of how the Welfare Benefits system works.

It would be great if the agency dealing with a claim for a particular benefit automatically informed all other bodies of the decision, including local Council Tax, Tax Credit office etc. etc.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2 examples of things that work well:

1. Council Tax

By sheer chance I have developed an email contact with someone quite senior in the local office. It started because of a complaint I made about rude counter staff. I email this guy frequently and mostly get a reply the same day, or the next working day, AND he gets things sorted out or refers them straightaway to others who run with it.

The alternative is to write a letter, but replies are at best slow in coming and at worst non-existent.

Unfortunately, Jo-public either has to phone (usually engaged) or visit the offices (or write). If their problem is to do with arrears they are forced into agreeing to make payments they can’t afford, with little or no scope for negotiation.


2. Housing Benefit / Council Tax Benefit

I have an official email for the use of Local Authority landlords. Again, queries usually dealt with efficiently and quickly - especially important when a claim is not being paid for a spurious reason.

The public can also email, but only to ask very basic questions like ‘have you received my claim?’ or ‘is there any other info. you need’.

Telephone enquiries are more of a lottery, depending a lot on who you speak to and how well they are able to extract information from the system.

Got to stop, next client has arrived. This one is multiple debt which is another grim area to explore!

 

Following on from ‘Opening Up the Interior’

Opening Up the Interior, or ‘making the government navigable’, I think gets to the heart of the matter. And I think government is now suffering from an extreme form of the Red-button fatigue that plagues digital TV creators. Too many citizens have been disappointed, or frustrated, by the government’s endless portal-without-content (http://www.open.gov.uk, http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk, http://www.ukonline.gov.uk, and now http://direct.gov.uk) to listen anymore.

‘Come and look at all our services online!’ has failed as a message, because Government has been saying it untruthfully since 1996.

Open.gov.uk is an interesting case. A great brand, a great URL, did what it said on the tin, has a huge userbase, and Whitehall politicking killed it off.

I think direct.gov.uk is getting closer to the right direction (although they still commit some howlers like opening links in new windows, or having a iframe at the top that hides the search box from mozilla users), but nobody is going to care anymore, and a new approach is needed if we want to drive uptake and awareness of government services. The public have been disappointed too many times.

Mitigation:

The government needs to get really damn good at the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) business, or at least start spending a lot more money on Google adwords than the current forms of marketing.

Furthermore, this optimisation needs to explicitly target service delivery pages of interest to the consumer, even considering practicing Search Engine Inhibition on less core areas of the .gov.uk domain. Optimise the bits that people will use, and let the others, well, carry on, as is. By SEO, I don’t mean paying some shady backstreet blog-spammer to dump direct gov links all over the web, but doing the inhouse, on site best practice that works. legal, decent, honest, and effective.

Because portals are dead. browse-as-discovery is dead. Google is now (or soon will be) the default content discovery mechanism for users.

Fortunately, doing well on google can be exceedingly cheap (despite what people will tell you)

stef

 

A single tax & benefit authority?

Wouldn’t it be better if .............all benefits and taxes were administered by a single authority?

For example, we have the ludicrous situation where Housing Benefit is paid by 400+ Local Authorities (all with different systems?), but, in order to assess this benefit the LAs have to establish - from the Inland Revenue - the amount of any Tax Credit being paid to the claimant.

Granted, the recent announcement of the Customs & IR merger goes some way towards this, as has the transfer of some DWP functions to IR in recent years. However, it’s all taking too long, and meanwhile the prospect of a single e-channel to service these inter-related issues is probably getting further away rather than closer due to the differing priorities and approaches of the organisations involved. 

 

How about systems we can use and data access standards we can trust?

I’d settle for systems that are fit for use by ordinary, fallible, human beings. 

I particularly want systems that my 84 year old mother or her older brother will use (and that I can use when I am their age). That means keys the size of pennies, a big joy-stick not a mouse and a great big screen with voice-over confirmation. Also they must be quicker and easier to use than ringing my sister to do it for her and have security with which they feel confident.

They still have their mental faculties but have long exerience of watching their children (including me) and their grandchildren wrestle with systems which are fine so long as you are browsing or playing games but worthless as soon as you wish to do anything serious and supported by youngsters who they would not trust with their door key, let alone access to their pension or bank account.

I’d settle for systems that my sister or I, or some-one they trust, can use for them. That means allowing them to chose who they trust with their data and us to decide, in turn, who we trust to look after it for them.

That means a revolution in standards of governance. Currently we have almost the worst of all possible worlds. We are spending vast sums on electronic security while those who build, operate and support the systems can (who checks?) include former (?current) hackers and fraudsters.

Meanwhile data sharing is compulsory or forbidden according to legacy investigatory powers or departmental legislation for a manual world, with fragmented, usually unknown, governance with the call centre and data handling outsourced to the lowest bidder and their hierarchy of subcontractors.

The Data Protection principles are not enough.

All staff need to know to whom they are supposed to allow access to which data, how they are to check the authorisations, who to ask if in doubt and the penalties for them (as individuals) if they break the rules. The provenance of those developing and running the systems (indivduals and subcontractors) needs to be checked (with periodic life-style spot checks on those in key roles).

As far as possible the routines should be common and apply to the type of data, not just the department (one set of rules for name and address, another for routine medical data (allergies et al), another for sensitive medical data etc) and allow for consent driven over-ride (but how do you check it really is me and I am not under duress).

Philip Virgo, Secretary General, EURIM

 

Five more axioms for e-enabled government

A) It should be possible to improve or change government

B) People need privacy to think, vote, live

C) Government needs access to data, but it should be generally transparent
what data, and how it is used

D) Software is insecure

E) People should have choice in the mechanisms of government, as well as the
results (because results depend on mechanisms, in the real world)

 

Admin note - anonymous contributions

If anyone wants to contribute and prefers to remain anonymous they’re welcome to log in here.
Username anon
Password enter
I’d quite like it if you also drop me a private email but that’s not necessary. 

 

Thoughts from the front line on how we counter terrorism abroad

In broad terms, at basic operational level, we need further
maximisation both of the security and the speed/flexibility of
communications. This could greatly improve efficiency.

My impression is that we (HMG) are already some way ahead
of others on this. But things are still pretty clunky
for the most secure stuff.

Secure remote working is also still quite hard.

In broader security terms, we need greater ability to prevent misuse of the
internet, eg tracking of hosts whose sites incite/facilitate/promote
terrorism. But this of course runs up against the classic difficulty of
balancing security against privacy and civil liberties.

We need ways to ease the difficulties of establishing post-conflict democracies,
for example - off the top of my head - e-voting by mobile phone. One can see
huge and obvious technical/security difficulties, but distributing mobile phones
by which votes could be cast might be a lot better than vulnerable polling
stations. Probably barmy.

 

27 Sep 2004

What you really really want

Kable’s report into the DWP’s research about welfare claimants’ attitudes towards receiving direct electronic payments is a good example of why we have to worry away more deeply at this question of “what we want” from e-enabled services.

There’s always more to it than meets the eye.

It’s great that DWP asks its customers, and publishes the results like this - it seems that over 90% are satisfied with getting payments electronically, 13% preferred the old paper books, 8% had payments on the wrong date, 3% had had wrong amounts, and one in six felt the system needed improving (eg speeding up, clearer dates, statements).

But this change isnt about whether people prefer paper to electronic: it’s about cost of transaction and managing fraud levels. People are being asked whether they can cope with a symptom of the change, not whether they agree with the underlying cause.

It’s a bit like crude of school league tables, which teach us to ask more sophisticated questions about the value of what schools do, and the context in which they do it.

It’s well worth having the DWP research, just as it’s worth having the league tables. Well done the DWP, and let’s keep thinking about what we really want from welfare longer term, deeper and wider. 

 
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