17 Mar 2008

Sage of Omaha on public-sector pensions

Wise words from Warren Buffett:

Whatever pension-cost surprises are in store for shareholders down the road, these jolts will be surpassed many times over by those experienced by taxpayers.  Public pension promises are huge and, in many cases, funding is woefully inadequate.  Because the fuse on this time bomb is long, politicians flinch from inflicting tax pain, given that problems will only become apparent long after these officials have departed.  Promises involving very early retirement – sometimes to those in their low 40s – and generous cost-of-living adjustments are easy for these officials to make.  In a world where people are living longer and inflation is certain, those promises will be anything but easy to keep.

 

Channels, marketing and pin-point accuracy: Tower08 and the language of Transformational Goverment

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.

 

You Can Get It If You Really Want

I heard last week of the local authority contact centre which is putting a new spin on what it means to offer customers personalised services responding to citizens’ needs. Yes, all local authorities share the new Service Transformation Agreement target to reduce avoidable contact. But when local residents ring to ask what films the Odeon Cinema across the road from the call centre is showing, call-handlers are absolutely delighted to look out the window and provide an information service which swiftly delivers 100% customer satisfaction.

Hey, this “let’s be responsive to citizens’ needs” thing needs unpacking a bit, doesn’t it?!

 

16 Mar 2008

The birds and the Sullen Ladies work their refreshing effect

A wet Palm Sunday weekend among the spring flowers and birdsong has quite washed away the irritations of last week. Perhaps I was intemperate, dear readers, in my final Blog Cast of the previous week. Perhaps it was the celebratory glass of sherry (we also had some terrific DirectGov stats in: we scored 8071!).

My conscience was pricked by a note from Walter (copied, I fear, to Gus and Jeremy)

Calm down, Bonar. Let’s not have undignified language from a fellow Wednesday Morning group member. There’s no need to panic.

We can take out this Web 2.0 threat with the precision of a Jamie Noon tackle or, indeed, of one of those devices made by our corporate event sponsors Lockheed Martin. Let the propellerheads and Public House geeks waste their weekends changing the fount on our word processors or remixing the data on our government web sites.

The rest of the world is absolutely uninterested. People want government to tell the what to do and think - vide Ben’s latest poll: 93% say things would be better if the government was more in control. The 2007 Big Conversation told us to spend serious amounts of money just sorting our traditional IT out.

Nobody asks for these Web 2.0 developments. If they want any Web at all it’s strictly Web 1.0 for now, thank you. And that is precisely what our transformative strategy will do, with pin-point precision. All we need do is identify who everyone is and what they’re like, then we can channel things at them. Our messages will be clearer than ever before.

Now we’ve completed Modernising Government (see Cabinet Office press release PR08-731) we can relax a little. After all, the pressure for eye-catching initiatives has gone now, hasn’t it?

Among the wet daffodils, the helibores, and early flush of my beloved Sullen Ladies I can see Wally is right. This problem will go away, all its googlings and twitterings with it. I can’t think how I let that little fellow irritate me so much. Whippersnapper.

 

14 Mar 2008

Desist! And give me my data back!

Just in from Patricia in Sir Bonar’s office:

I did promise I’d do a Blog Cast today but I’m afraid I’m dictating this to Patricia in something of a rage.

That IT manager fellow - the one we’re going to blame when everything goes wrong, and sack - arranged a small symposium. It was just DitPol, Affteck (3) and young Nick from my private office. Gus dropped by, and Walter. Brian said he’d try but I dont think he’s going to head his head around this stuff, poor chap.

Anyway, after we’d heard from Gus and Alexis they put up this...I can only say: student, with no apparent qualifications, CV, job or understanding of authority. Apparently he’d written a system which stole all our data about government consultations and made them obvious and easy to respond to. We weren’t able actually to see it because out Internet connection wasn’t working. I know there are lot of consultations under way but I must say I found the whole thing most unimpressive. I mean, if we wanted to make consultations transparent and obvious it wouldn’t have been hard for us to do so ourselves in the first place.

He then made some derogatory and frankly disrespectful remarks about DirectGov. I believe someone sniggered. People are quite heedless of the morale of the 100-odd Civil Servants we have working on our flagship Web Site. He chirped that his friends had knocked up a better search service in 45 minutes in the pub. Then - if I caught this right - that his eleven-year-old sister Ruby had rewritten our £50m TransportDirect service so it ran on rails.

Whippersnapper! I told him to give us our data back immediately, and to desist.

My own Nick then first started wittering about mashing upwards. Whoever heard of such a thing? Then he claimed he could make all our pictures flicker, which sounds pointless, indeed undignified. None of this sounds to me like progress at all. Nick never even pretended to wear a tie in the office on Fridays, and now he’s even been spotted wearing Lycra. I think the time is fast approaching when we shall have to sack him as a Gershon efficiency measure. Patricia tells me he’s been secretly Blog-casting. Well, he never asked my permission, so we have our cast-iron pretext.

I must say, all this clever easy-to-use Web 2.0 and facial networking activity is all very well for propellerheads who want to lose their jobs. Mercifully such people, like the civil liberties fanatics, make up a tiny fraction of the population.

I have no doubt that the man on the (probably now bendy, heaven forfend) Clapham omnibus expects us to spend proper resources with our most trusted suppliers to deliver proper traditional IT-based word-processed services. They expect a table of contents and a jolly good index.

What on earth is the use of a Web Site which just does one thing? There are only so many hours in the day, and it’s not as if we can make our machines read these things for us. What is the purpose of having a government communications service if everything is made so obvious nobody needs to be told what to do? Above all, which would you rather trust: a Web Site properly procured under EU rules from the likes of British Aerospace and Deloitte, or something knocked by by a Polytechnic student after a late night out at the pub? There you have it.

Really, these symposia where one meets little smartarses in T-shirts make my blood boil. To think I cancelled four perfectly good whole-person review meetings to make space in the diary for it.

At times such as this it is an immense relief to leave the office and to dwell on the prospect of a long weekend in the garden. (dictated by Sir Bonar and transmitted without sight)

 

Muddled Messages?

Yesterday, the Chancellor stressed the importance of meeting ever more stringent emissions and environmental targets; Tonight I peddled to an exhibition of proposed plans for thousands of new houses which will mean many thousands of extra car journeys.

Apparently, Whitehall ordered the “regional assembly” to order our “district council” to allocate sites for housing. But, that was before the current fears over “climate change.”

However, there seems to be no mechanism for re-examining whether the original targets are “sustainable” in an era of ever tighter controls on emissions and the increasing need to grow more of our food.

The brief online consultation is about the fine detail rather than the overall concept. There’s no mechanism for influencing or re-examining the original decision.

 

13 Mar 2008

Click here for Mindthegap entry form

Let’s assemble that Wibbipedia.

 

Tower08: TellThemWhatYouThink’s perspective

Crossposted from the TellThemWhatYouThink blog:

I had the pleasure of speaking to the assembled great and good at the Tower08 Transformational Government conference on Monday this week.  I hope that video will be available at some point, and I’ll link to it if it is.

I talked, reasonably predictably, about the resusability of public data, and about why it’s important to embrace the idea that data should be made available in ways that allow people to use it, reuse it, combine it in new and clever ways and produce new, useful tools.

I also pointed out that there is an incredible amount of value to be generated from this data if it can be published in ways that allow more collaboration, and that it’ll be much cheaper in the long run if Government doesn’t try to solve all the problems. I drew a comparison between DirectGov’s fairly awful search facilities and the results produced by DirectionlessGov, which drew both heckles and laughs—an odd response. I am rather surprised to find that there actually are people out there who think that DirectGov’s search is better than Google’s. It’s a strange world we live in!

Being fairly new to the scene, I was most struck by the huge differences in people’s interpretations of what transformational government should be about. In fairness, this shouldn’t have been that surprising: everyone is interpreting it according to their vested interests, which is predictable enough.

At one end, there are people saying that everyone should own their own data, that public data is public property and should be disseminated in ways that make it as useful as possible, that massive data sharing and joined-up delivery of public services through one site is a dangerous folly.

At the other, you have people saying that we need to make identity card systems to share everyone’s data throughout government, that we should make public services usable online by having ultra-secure identification methods, that we need one place to find everything anyone might want from government, and that web 2.0, sharing and mass collaboration are merely the whimsical trends du jour.

I think it’s probably easy to tell where I stand! I’m happy to say that there is a cadre of people in government who also tend towards the former view, and that it is larger than one might think. These ideas are gaining some traction, at least, and that is quite something.

 

Swedes axe their central government portal

Anna Kelly from the Swedish Administrative Development Agency drops a bit of a bombshell. The generally enlightened Swedes closed their central government portal last week. Now there’s nothing there (and no, it’s not for sale).

Nick and I tried to ask Anna about the reasoning behind what could well be an eminently sensible decision. But she’s baffled and a bit hurt by it, and can’t see any rationale beyond misguided cost-cutting.

The UK of course is going in the opposite direction, axing all the other web sites centralising all content on DirectGov, which still lacks a decent search engine. 

 

Personal-data centric isn’t personal

Becky makes a good point: Transformational Government isn’t person-centric. It’s personal-data centric. There’s a big difference.

There’s nothing “personal” about the personalisation it advocates; it would be truer to describe it as “data-subject-specific”.

 

12 Mar 2008

Blogging Minister blogs his Ministerial speech

Tom Watson spoke at the Trans-Gov Tower08 event, with a theme of open-source government. Apart from some website consolidation (which I still don’t quite get) he promises to do a number of ideal things:

- improving our online content, including minimum standards for the content of remaining websites
- Ensuring that all content held on government web sites is fully accessible to the major search engines.
- Embedding data mash-up into thinking across all of government not just the early adopters within departments.
- Driving through the cultural change in all our communications that sees the internet, mobile and other new media as the norm
- ensuring better innovation and much faster implementation. Build stuff small, test it out then iterate, iterate, iterate.
- capturing the skills, talent and energy we need for change - from within the public service and from outside. Over the next few weeks I hope to say more on this.
- using new media to engage more directly and more effectively with individuals and communities.
and the most frequent question my civil servants will hear from me is, ‘Why not’?

Tom’s prescription for this job seems to be the Power of Information, and I can think of no better basis.

I was also pleased to hear him speak sensitively about the Civil Serf position. Granted she transgressed, but the IdealGov principle is that if people complain about something it is because they still care. The civil service needs such people, and to draw on their energy. In a transparent, open, self-confident administration how big a misdemeanour would it be to describe life as you see it (without breach of confidence) and show you care?  Anyway, Tom is now taking comments on some possible civil-service blogging guidelines, which seems the constructive response.

I spoke on day 2 in a session about channels.

I thought I spotted our new correspondent Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom there, but he must have left very early. 

 

Freedom of Information & Email Addresses Thoughts

As some people may have noticed, mySociety have recently launched another website. This one, WhatDoTheyKnow is a Freedom of Information filer, I’ll let you read the blurb on the site about how it works…

My efforts on this have mainly being collecting contact details for the ever-growing list of public bodies, to whom the Freedom of Information Act (and the supplementary orders, adding in new ones) applies.

Earlier on, I had a brain-fart. It went along the lines of:

what if there were a standard/Government Best-Practice/regulation, throughout the Civil Service (and anything on the {.ac,.gov,.mod,.nhs,.police,.sch}.uk LIR, really), for common ‘service’ email addresses.

e.g., in the way that RFC-2142 mandates (well, as much as RFCs are mandatory) “postmaster” and “hostmaster” to include: 

“foi” for Freedom of Information
“dpa” for data protection
“secretary.of.state”
“ministers”
“permanent.secretary”

Or suitable alternatives/equivalents for the last three.

In doing so, things for individuals would (I’d say) be so much more useful: using aliases would remove the problems of individuals’ email addresses falling out of use, when people move on/change portfolio, it would enable people to not have to worry about looking for the email address on the webpage (where they are easily traceable on the body’s website...), it means reception desks can say “ah yes, you want foi@werock.gov.uk” and not “erm, I’m not sure, let me transfer you to IT/Legal Services, they might know”.

Perhaps even extend this over to constituency.mp@parliament.uk?

So, I guess the point of this post really is for a collective opinion gathering… hopefully it’ll be something for some of us to talk about at the next Govhack Afternoon Teas too?

(ooh, is that three plugs I managed to squeeze in?)

 

10 Mar 2008

Makkal sakti! A victory for Malasia’s netizens

Alex sends this

Malaysia’s weak opposition was up against a hostile mainstream media and restrictive campaign rules, but it can chalk up much of its stunning success in Saturday’s election to the power of cyberspace.

Voters exasperated with the unvarnished support of the mainstream media for the ruling National Front furiously clicked on YouTube and posted comments with popular bloggers about tales of sex, lies and videotapes in the run-up to Saturday’s election.

Jeff Ooi, a 52-year-old former advertising copywriter who made his name writing a political blog, “Screenshots” (www.jeffooi.com) won a seat in northern Penang state for the opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP).

Elizabeth Wong, a human rights activist and political consultant who runs a blog (http://elizabethwong.wordpress.com), won a state assembly seat in the central state of Selangor.

YouTube, the phenomenally popular video Web site, did as much damage as any opposition figure could hope to inflict, after netizens uploaded embarrassing videos of their politicians in action on hot-button issues.

Astounding. Cheers!
 

Kicking off the Tower conference

Sir Bonar writes:

Paid a quick visit to the Tower this morning to kick off a Transformative Government conference. I restricted my own role to chairing the 0730 meeting of chairmen and keynote speakers. I decided with some reluctance against giving my famous “five C’s” speech this year, even though it is invariably well received. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour.

We agreed the new Cabinet Office Minister should do his Interweb talk. I had a chat with Tom, who is a fellow blogger. I must put Patricia in touch with his secretary to share some technical tips on posting. He’s also a fellow Ear-Podder. I played him von Karajan’s 1983 Ring Cycle on mine. I think he complained he had jam on his, but I couldn’t see any. 

We all agreed the most important thing was to exemplify the fact that we are on top of everything and that that we are the ones who “Get it”, along with our supplier partners such as Fujitsu who generously sponsored this event and the after dinner drinks. We shouldn’t underestimate the capability of our sponsoring partners. A firm such as Lockheed Martin can help us to deliver the payload of public services with pinpoint accuracy. That’s what they do: accurately and affordably. I reminded everyone to make sure they thanked our many other sponsors for their support.

I’m strongly in favour of this very sensible plan to close down 500 web sites. It’s a bit much to ask even the unemployed to visit 500 different government web sites, let alone those with proper jobs. It makes our message appear fragmented. Far better to make it just one. Apart form anything else running just one web site instead of 500 must mean a tremendous saving in electricity. One can’t be too conscious of such things in this increasingly “green” age of climate change, of which the effects are to be seen everywhere. I’ve observed for myself the effects at first hand: this promises to be an excellent season for F Meleagrii, but my own 2008 vintage is some fifteen days earlier than that of 10 years ago.

We agreed to throw in a few vox populi. We used films of people sitting about moaning about local government. One has to do that to show commitment to Customer insight, to which no-one surpasses me in my personal enthusiasm. Anyway, having agreed the broad thrust of our messages I took the car back to the office for some real work in the form of 16 back-to-back meetings. We have an urgent leak enquiry about some naughty filly called Civil Serf.

 

09 Mar 2008

How we can resolve the data sharing and security dilemna

Sir Bonar writes

The security of information is very much a hot topic around the management board tables of Whitehall. I know myself from personal experience that in these days of 24-7, flexible working it can often be difficult to know where and when to read official government papers securely.

Indeed, there was even one occasion recently as I was reviewing a Cabinet Sub-Committee agenda in the back of my car when I noticed a cyclist, drawn up alongside the vehicle at the traffic lights, who appeared to be making every effort to read the document. I well appreciate that not everyone in the Civil Service has the privilege of using the Government Car Service or indeed the security of a lead-lined box in which to transport one’s confidential papers, but even those of us who do cannot be too careful in this age of what I call data proliferation.

You will recall the recently well-publicised episode at Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. Personally, I didn’t see what the fuss was about, particularly as I’m led to believe most of the people affected would have already uploaded such information to popular facial networking sites such as YouSpace already. Anyway, there was a media stink which led to the unfortunate departure of my good friend and colleague Paul Gray.

Only a few days later I found myself chairing the bi-annual review of the Department’s risk management dashboard, and data security was at “red” on the risk register. This must be seen as the direct result of a combination of unhelpful stories in the news media and the continued efforts by outsiders to gain unauthorised access to our data. 

It would be inappropriate to name names in this open “Web Log” forum, but suffice to say that when the media raise questions about the Civil Service’s competence in managing large government databases, they should pay rather more attention to the concerted and determined efforts of third parties to gain illegal access to our information.

The ICT industry has been beating a path to my door over the past few months, urging Government to procure new software, adopt new standards and implement new procedures to address concerns about data security. Whilst we have listened carefully and are currently considering our response, which is due to be published in the autumn, I just wonder whether the time hasn’t come for a more radical approach. 

So let me end this second Blog Casting with a challenge. Is it not time to manage better the risks associated with so many government databases by consolidating them all into one system? A single system could be hosted at a single site, with the physical security risks attended to by the appropriate agencies.  One database would do away, after “data-cleansing”, with any anomalies or inaccuracies.

The clever part of this approach is that at the same time we could realise all the benefits we seek from data sharing without the need for actual physical data sharing. My good friend David Varney missed a trick here, as I take great pleasure in reminding him. Instead of the complicated mess of data sharing, we take the one simple step of data integration.

Many of the security problems encountered in recent months by HMRC, the MoD and DWP arise at the very moment where we share data between departments. If we do away with the need to share data by integrating all the data on to a single system, at a stroke we do away with the security problems associated with data sharing, couriers, postal systems and such like.

In this way both the Civil Service, under the aegis of the Cabinet Office, and the public could be confident that services are better co-ordinated, more efficient and personalised. Access could be far more tightly controlled to the important data held on the single government database.

I feel this would also go a large way to restoring what I call the “processing balance” in society. This is a theme to which I look forward to returning shortly in a future Blog Cast.

 
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