Foundation of Trust

To get the benefits of e-enabled government build it to earn people's trust, so it is seen to be robust and trustworthy even when things go wrong and critical independent experts pull it apart. This has to be done consciously and in advance

06 Nov 2007

ID Cards: the Pea-Moss says

At yesterday’s morning press briefing

ID Cards

Asked whether the Prime Minister was considering shelving the role-out of ID cards, the PMS replied that there had been no change on the Government’s position on ID cards. There had been one newspaper report on Sunday and the Home Office had made clear that there was nothing to substantiate it. Asked if the report was “garbage,” the PMS said that he did not want to use such language, but the Government had been denying those suggestions quite forcefully.

Asked on the report in the Guardian saying there was to be a review on the technology used, the PMS reiterated that the position on ID cards had not changed. The PMS added that these things were kept constantly under review as people would expect, but nothing had changed in regards to ID cards.

Asked whether the Prime Minister had ordered any fresh review into the technology since he became Prime Minister, the PMS said he was not aware of any review.

What they should have been asking, of course, is who is the Cliffe’s Enemy of Bonfire 2007? The improbably answer is a giant seagull sitting on a signpost..something to do with planning applications and a mediocre local football club, we’re told. 

 

05 Nov 2007

Maybe just maybe…

The Sunday Mirror* seems to have an exclusive when it reports the breakout of common sense and evidence-based policy making in Whitehall.  Yes indeedy, the Sunday Mirror announces in their BROWN SCRAPS I.D. CARD PLANS EXCLUSIVE that:

Gordon Brown is to abandon controversial plans to introduce compulsory ID cards for all. Instead, the Prime Minister will focus on tightening up existing anti-terror laws and on new measures to be unveiled in Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech. The cards are already compulsory for asylum-seekers and their introduction next year for foreign nationals will go ahead as planned. But the proposed roll-out to force all Britons to carry them will be shelved indefinitely, according to Whitehall sources.

The article claims that Mr Brown has apparently been persuaded that the “£7billion scheme” [sic] would inevitably be challenged in both UK and European courts and the last thing he needs is for the war on terror to become bogged down in litigation. Interestingly, it’s not those charged with leading the sensible harnessing of technology to deliver better services who have delivered the critical evidence-based blow. Nonono, it’s senior government law advisers who have told Mr Brown what seemed plain to most observers, that

ID cards for all would make “no significant contribution” towards beating the terrorists.

In a quite extraordinary break-out of honesty,

A minister involved in the original ID card plan proposed by former premier Tony Blair said: “Time and technology has moved on. We now have photo driving licences and isometric passports [Whatever they are. Ed] are being introduced. They fulfil the role of ID cards.”

Hmm. I thought photo ID driving licenses were introduced in 1997??
Of course we were never going to see the compulsory introduction of cards for UK citizens in this parliament anyway (it will require new legislation in the next).... so maybe this tale is just wishful thinking based upon what we already know. Certainly my deep throat source close to the PM continues to tell me that “of course ID cards must stay - it’s the only dividing line left with the tories”.

Ho hum. I bet it got a few people excited.

 

31 Oct 2007

What happened to the Crosby review?

So why hasn’t all that promising hard work by Sir James Crosby for Gordon Brown seen the light of day? Remember, he was looking into what Britain needs from ID management from a public-private business point of view. The Crosby review began in Sept 06, was due by Easter 07, then “being finalised” in early July, then due “late summer” (07, one assumes), then thought likely to appear with the CSR, but...zip.

If I had to guess I’d say Sir James came to the sensible conclusion that the market (ie British business) does not need what the government has asked James Hall’s IPS to deliver, and that nothing he has heard independently suggests that IPS’s business case stacks up. I very much doubt he has any evidence that people generally want what IPS is doing. So his recommendation may be that it is an irrelevance, or needs fundamental change.

But the ID cards policy is what makes Labour look tough on crime. Chuck it away and they look as soft as Tories or LibDems, the thinking goes. So it’s sacrosanct, even though the business case doesnt stack up, it’s technically ludicrous, people dont want it and it offends common sense and human dignity. In project terms, it fails Gateway Zero but sneaks through on some irrational derogation.

If that’s it then the review as Crosby would write it would be unpublishable, and there won’t be any market sizing or business case other than IPS’s own flawed and partial one. Crosby’s work would only come out in dribs and drabs under FoI with HM Treasury resisting all the way.

That’s what I reckon has happened. But if anyone knows better, or has a different guess, drop us a line or a comment.

 

25 Oct 2007

PM’s “Liberty” speech starts to tackle our deepest concerns

Maybe government’s IT strategy is not to be a subset of criminal justice after all. The Prime Minister, no less, has described the state of the foundation of trust in our e-enabled public services as far from ideal. In a speech on liberty at Westminster University today Gordon Brown offered as PM to relinquish powers just as he had in gis first days as Chancellor. Specifically he spoke about data sharing (to be reviewed), more freedom of information, biometrics and ID management (no perceptible change of course)

This is the century of information. Our ability to compete in the global economy, to protect ourselves against crime and terrorist attack, depends not just on natural wealth or on walls or fences but on our ability to use information - in industry, in our schools and universities, at our borders, in our police forces and intelligence services. And it is clear that we can use DNA to help solve crimes and we can use new powers of access to information to deny terrorists and criminals financial freedom and the ability to move across borders.

At the same time, a great prize of the information age is that by sharing information across the public sector - responsibly, transparently but also swiftly - we can now deliver personalised services for millions of people, something not dreamt of in 1945 and not possible even ten years ago. So for a pensioner, for example, this might mean dealing with issues about their pension, meals on wheels and a handrail at home together in one phone call or visit, even though the data about those services is held by different bits of the public and voluntary sectors.

But if Governments do not insist on accountability where people’s data is concerned - and are not held independently to account - then we risk losing people’s trust which is fundamental to all these issues and more.

And as what is possible changes, so the protections we afford to individuals must change, and we must respond to the need for a more secure way of establishing and protecting people’s identity; to the new opportunities to use biometrics to identify false passports or DNA to solve crime; to the need to deny terrorists and criminals financial freedom and the ability to move across borders; to the pressure to provide more personalised public services. In all these areas the challenge is both to be able to use, where appropriate, the opportunities of new technology in pursuit of security or in pursuit of justice—and simultaneously to put in place proper standards and oversight to protect liberty.

The information age has, as Tom Friedman has so well drawn out, flattened hierarchies and potentially increased the power of all citizens. So we should not fear the advent of the information age - and it should not lead us to abandon or fear for our values - but at the same time I believe we require a new and imaginative approach to accountability and to winning people’s trust in the ways in which information is held and used.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t yet ideal. We’re not in a state to export our e-government to Scandinavia, New Zealand, Canada, Holland. But it’s starting to tackle our oft-expressed and deepest concerns. Is Transformational Government about to be transformed for the better? It’s a surprise, and it fels like a good thing. 

 

24 Oct 2007

US government CIOs discuss their priorities

America’s government CIOs are concerned above all about Information security and privacy at the moment, according to the latest DotGovBuzz.* Other priorities are information sharing, identity management, and the adoption of emerging Web 2.0 collaborative technologies, it seems.

“If we don’t get privacy and security right, nothing else matters,” Tim Young said, summarizing the discussion.

America’s state and local CIOs say cross-bpindary collaboration is their biggest challenge, followed by securing citizens trust. Meanwhile a name change from FirstGov to usa.gov plus a PR drive has tripled awareness in the main government portal.

 

16 Oct 2007

Fascinating Lessig Danish TV interview (in English)

Prompted by RMS’s free and open-source software, Lawrence Lessig spent 10 years tackling copyright problems by way of the Creative Commons. He says he’ll spend the next 10 tackling far-from-ideal government corruption, misinformation, and the influence of money, whether on global warming or nutrition (or oil or war, we might add). Government finds it hard to understand things when there is a strong interest in misunderstanding. But transparency and what he calls peer production (which we have come to call co-governance) makes it easier to shame and change the system. Fascinating interview from Danish TV (In English).

 

12 Oct 2007

Patient Opinion secures two breakthroughs..

Hurrah! Patient Opinion, the independent, responsible, not for profit, ethical, user-friendly feedback service (not to be confused with the clunking great fistful of taxpayer’s dosh that is Healthy Choices) has made two crucial breakthroughs with a competitive win for hospitals in the north west and funding to offer services to mental health users (see below). Let’s let the bad health IT stuff fade away, and see the good rise up!

 

21 Sep 2007

Power of the plastic token

Britain has a far-from-ideal social problem of 72-year olds who aren’t self-evidently over 21 and cant buy wine. The cost-effective solution would have been for him to have a fake ID surely.

Nice reaction last month from a London school child I know who saw his first driving licence: “Cor...they’re exactly like the fake ones!”

 

03 Sep 2007

Ideal Gov-ipedia Qs

Why do you need to give your postcode if you want to buy a £10 freeview/digi box from Tesco?

Why is it impossible to register for a municipal swimming pool discount card in Southwark without giving your date of birth?

And now that I have clearly completely lost my mental faculties… Which is the least worst course of action when your brain has run out of room to remember passwords and associate them correctly with the appropriate user name: to re-use the same passwords to access multiple web-services, or have sufficient unique passwords written down somewhere?

Come on ninjas, help me out

 

31 Jul 2007

Our input to Crosby, in a year when Easter falls mighty late

Here’s a presentation Ruth, Scott and I did with input from Philippe to Sir James Crosby some weeks ago, exploring some of the known unknowns about ID. They seemed to find it quite helpful, and I really enjoyed meeting them. Looking forward to their report which is still due Easter 07. 

 

20 Jul 2007

Radical customer focus and public services

We had a great dinner party conversation last night about customer focus, and what radical custoemr focus would mean for public services. Here’s a note Scott and I produced afterwards. Very glad of your comments

At first sight the idea that all public services should be wholly customer focused seems obvious.

We largely agreed it is desirable. Ed Mayo’s Playlist for Public Services offers an excellent prescription, clear and compelling. The “Ideal Government” experience called ThePublicOffice proves it works. It’s illuminating and refreshing for public services providers to immerse themselves in the customer perspective, and it’s a good way to work alongside their business service providers.

Yet it’s not happening. The Playlist still seems fresh and radical but was published two years ago. Public services simply do not have the dialogue with their customers that they would need to determine what customers want. Indeed, if public services just did exactly what customers wanted, then government might not be recognizable as government.

So what’s the problem? Why is it such a radical, threatening or difficult idea to be wholly customer-focussed?

There are deep symptoms that all is not well. Services are complex on the receiving end, requiring people in difficult crises to become experts in putting their service packages together. We have profession-oriented services, not customer or patient-oriented ones.

Buyers and suppliers work in an adversarial contractual relationship instead of a shared approach informed by the needs of the end customer. Suppliers meekly do what procurers ask; they don’t challenge their clients even when it would be in the end-customers’ interests for them to do so. 

We don’t test or pilot new ideas or projects with citizens. We don’t consult effectively. In one case 80% of the problems encountered in a major problem would have been identified by “walking through” the process first.

We should road-test new public services before roling them out. But political timescales don’t allow for piloting; the Minister will be gone before the lessons come in.

First we have to unpack the immense complexity of what we mean by the customer, and the difference between customers and citizens.

What is it we are to be driven by: the choices and elective behaviour of customers, or the sense of civic duty of citizens?  Are we to be driven by the opinions they hold, their physical well-being, or the actions they take? Are we concerned about the opinions of those who don’t use services, and how can we be driven by the requirements of people who might never use a service more than once? Do we prize expert stakeholder opinions over possibly ill-informed lay preferences?

When you do ask customers/patients what it seems you hear very clearly that the answer is surprisingly little. They want the basics from public services, not gold taps. They want less surgery, fewer drugs.

Simply to listen to them is the first huge step forward, and gives them immense relief.

It’s not all easy. They can be ambivalent, change their minds or give different answers depending on how you pose the question.  They might say they only want to give their name and address once, and at the same time that they don’t want their tax, welfare and health records joined up.

They can be apathetic.

And, of course, some are intent on gaming or undermining the system. Services need to identify and deal with such exceptions. But public services that treat terrorists, crooks and fraudsters as the rule will alienate the generally law-abiding majority. To do this builds e-enabled public services on the wrong relationship between the customer/citizen and the state. 

What can we do?

It may seem in terms of customer focus that many public services are something of a desert. There’s an obvious huge “win” out there; potentially this desert is fertile. To irrigate it we need to add formal, customer-oriented service design as we transform and e-enable public services.

Some first-grade public services are inevitably centralized and capital intensive: centres of excellence with specialist medical equipment for example. But the information parts of the service can flow freely and at no cost. There’s no reason not to have people well-informed, helping themselves and each other, offering and sharing feedback.

A key ingredient for effective public services is empathy and caring about outcomes. We hear of major departments taking senior officials through “back to the floor” programmes.

A possible quick win would be to appoint “problem managers”, who stay with you for the duration of a difficult episode such as bereavement or ID theft. They “own the problem” and secure the resources you need, regardless of origin.

For public services to show empathy and become customer focused, large numbers of people will have to do things differently, because they feel differently about it personally. You can find groups of people who happily agree that this is important. Some will never “get it” and will simply have to be told when the time is right in no uncertain terms that this is how future public services will be. Let’s focus oour efforts on those who can make a difference and are ready to be converted. Ends

Did we cover the salient points? Did we get it right? 

 

16 Jul 2007

Godalming Quacks produce a minute to make any Home Secretary quake…

After lenghty and silent deliberation the Godalming Friends came up with this minute

Erosion of Civil Liberties

As requested in Minute 6 of Area Meeting on 10 June , we have discussed the erosion of civil liberties.  We are extremely concerned about:

· the proposed introduction of ID cards
· anti-terrorist legislation
· restrictions on political protest.

We wish to focus our efforts on developing relationships with all sections of the community instead of fostering a climate of fear.
We invite Friends to submit further concerns, which we hope to attach to these minutes.
We ask our clerk to convey this minute to [our national rep] on Meeting For Sufferings [don’t ask me why it’s called this] etc

It’s not meant to be gobsmacking, but quietly determined. And don’t mock Godalming. We had the world’s first electric street lighting, plus the brave telegrapher who went down on the Titanic came from here. What two better metaphors could you ask for?

See below for fuller note attached to the Friends’ minute human rights generally and more specifically on the “surveillance society”.

 

US Army in Iraq shows the way for IPS in UK

It’s good for war-torn Iraq, and it’ll be good here. From USA Today

U.S. is building database on Iraqis
Biometrics key part of tracking suspects

By Thomas Frank
USA TODAY

BAGHDAD — The U.S. military is taking fingerprints and eye scans from thousands of Iraqi men and building an unprecedented database that helps track suspected militants.

U.S. troops are stopping Iraqis at checkpoints, workplaces and sites where attacks have recently occurred, and inputting their personal data using handheld scanners or specially equipped laptops. In several neighborhoods in and around Baghdad, troops have gone door to door collecting data.

The rapidly expanding program has raised privacy concerns at the Pentagon, although it has met little resistance from Iraqis. U.S. commanders say the data help to keep suspected militants out of neighborhoods and to identify suspects in attacks against U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. Iraq has no other reliable ID system.

“It helps enormously,” Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said in an interview. “It enables us to identify individuals connected with various activities.”

Perhaps IPS should headhunt Gen Petraeus to quell UK citizens once he’s dealt with the Iraqis. On the street, USA Today finds someone still alive who thinks it’s all a good idea:

Fayath Abas, 41, said he didn’t mind giving his fingerprints at a checkpoint in Fallujah. “We can find out who is bad and who is good,” he said.

Thank heavens she has good fingerprints, nothing to hide and nothing to fear.

I wonder whose equipment and services they’re using. Won’t be long before there the successful case study is all written up and flying around the Home Office (or whatever it’s called now) and Downing Street.

Wibbi (this is a tough one): we stopped putting our faith in oppressive technologies as the way of wining all our wars and tried instead to treat people with respect and tried to act with justice in the hope of living more peaceful lives.

Update: Wibbi also (and this is more achievable) that we can engage with those who see the ID Scheme as essential valuable and helpful in a contructive and respectful manner. I enjoy the comedy (I wonder what Claire at Eclectech is up to?) but if I lapse into being facetious I guess it helps nothing…

 

13 Jul 2007

Sousveillance goes mental: new Home Office guidance asks police to be on best behaviour at all times

Public to use tiepin cams to record police activity

Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Thursday July 12, 2007
The Guardian

As global sousveillance finally becomes a reality the Home Office has issued guidance to officers in forces across England and Wales about how to be filmed by the public at all times. The mini digital cameras, lodged in buttonholes or tiepins of members of the public, are being used by generally law-abiding people going about their daily business who become involved in controversial stop and search confrontations and police violence incidents.

The cameras can store up to 400 hours of footage with soundtrack on their hard drive, with a battery life of eight to 12 hours. The footage can be played back on a four-inch (10cm) screen attached to the person’s belt. Future versions may use a memory card or even live streaming technology to transmit the pictures to a nearby Citizens Advice Bureau or direct to monitors in the Independent Police Complaints Authority.

Since these cameras are now widely used in a new area, the Home Office advises police to behave with courtesy and respect at all times, follow procedures with a good measure of common sense, and to avoid racist taunts and needless acts of violence. Officers are warned that members of the public do not always to wear a tiara with “I am video recording you” written in diamonds.

The guidelines tell officers to get their act together and treat taxpayers with respect.

I may have got that slightly wrong. The original is here.

 

12 Jul 2007

How good do you find your conversation with IPS?

How good is the IPS at communicating? If we’re to have arrangements we understand and can live with we’ll need to feel there’s hinest, substantive, frank and effective dialogue. Leaving aside whether they’re good at buying and building databases, recruiting honest staff, customer service etc they need to achieve some level of empathy with business, NGOs, other parts of government and the public at large.

This thought was prompted by a comment from someone in a major goverment department who said they no longr bothered to speak to IPS because there simply was no conversation. That would be dangerous and far from ideal. I had the chance to ask someone-whom-I-cannot-name-nor-can-I-say-where-I-asked-him how effective they thought IPS’s convesation with the outsie world (business, rest of public sector, outside world) was. Before I share his answer, I set up a one-question survey. Please take it: how good do YOU find your conversation with IPS? Please click Here to take survey.

 
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