The big centralised databases of CRM have their limitations. There’s massive reduplication as every organisation seeking a relationship tries to maintain largely overlapping database records about the same person. Data is harvested with varying levels of consent and deception. Often as the data subject understands this process better it appears increasingly intrusive. Unease creeps in; even distinguished public servants treat CRM as a process which should be subverted eg with false middle initials or misleading information about buying power in the hope of making it work more in line with individual wishes.

At best CRM systems record a slice of history. Amazon’s state of the art CRM might know what you bought from Amazon, but not from Barnes & Noble, nor whether the books reflect your own interests or were a gift, nor how your interests have changed. CRM is not where buyers store their future intentions, and buyers don’t tell CRM systems when their needs change. CRM is expensive and the results can be disappointing. As one public servant with a huge customer base put it: “People don’t sit still long enough for us to devise a service mechanism to address them.”

Public services such as welfare, health, education and child protection are increasingly based on centralised databases. These must be universal, as the clients include everyone – there’s no picking and choosing of ‘customers’ in these parts of the public sector. They are often based on statutory requirements (for example to know quite a lot about a client to whom welfare payments are made).  Over the last few years, the declared policy intention has been that such public services should also become increasingly personalised and customer-centric: the one-size-fits-all approach is no longer appropriate. Thus both the security-by-control and the personalised customer services agendas have depended on more data being gathered, aggregated and shared, setbacks such as recent data losses notwithstanding.

The news coming over the hill is that CRM is about to be turned on its head by a user-driven model of relationship data. In this “vendor- relationship management” (VRM) model the individual maintains the one comprehensive and up to date version of the ‘truth’, selectively sharing what they choose to with their preferred suppliers and partners. It avoids duplication, keeps the facts up to date, and can make marketing demand driven and therefore far more relevant and effective.

This is of course not how the world of marketing yet works, but contemporary web developments make it possible and a very strong case can be made that it is a huge and imminent trend. Straws in the wind would include search web sites and personalised health records such MS Healthvault and the Google/Cleveland clinic collaboration.

This change would be a fundamental inversion of how relationships are managed. But that’s not to say that it is universally applicable, that it is entirely “right” for public services or should be “sold” to government either in the political or commercial sense. But it does seem intuitively incontrovertible that the locus of personal data management should lie in many circumstances with the individual, and the availability of new tools to manage that data will be an important development for public services as well as the world of commercial marketing.

This raises deep questions about citizen and community empowerment, identity management, ownership of personal data and how we will successfully deliver personalised services.

A buyer-centric, citizen-centric or VRM approach to public services cannot be a universal answer for many reasons. There will remain a digital divide perhaps for generations. It’s essential that services are seen to be fair and equitable, challenging those who try to play the system, and that the benefits of new ways of doing things should not broaden yet further the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Such an approach is clearly inapplicable in certain areas: we’re hardly going to invite people to manage their own criminal records or history of traffic offences. But it is entirely relevant for any customer-like service relationship where the user chooses. There is a role for independently authenticated fields (eg a valid driving licence or NI number) when an essentially user-managed service is deployed, for example when hiring a car.

We caution against accepting a digital token or data field (such as a CRB check) as a substitute for common sense, whether it comes from a user-managed or a centrally managed system: no certificate of suitability removes the need for basic best practice procedures when working with children. Similarly we recognise that there are very real risks of aggregating data, whether it’s the comprehensive picture one individual needs to manage every aspect of their lives (based on perhaps 3500-4500 fields) or the aggregation of “slices” of data about millions of people’s health, child welfare or benefits.

If we look at the example of health records, some of this is professional confidential data. The data subject - patient - has to accept they should not be able to edit or alter their mental health history. But they may well wish to add subjective data, or share parts of their record with non-NHS care providers. This might give the patient a greater sense of ownership and responsibility over managing their own condition. Asthma sufferers might be willing to share their personal data with government (and other services) in return for helpful information about the weather, the geography of pollution and other knowledge which support self-management of the condition. The DoH might be open to interaction with personal health records such as the Google or Microsoft developments. Clearly there’s a risk of pursuing a centralised NHS approach to care records to the exclusion of what appears to be happening in the market. We could waste a huge amount of taxpayers’ money producing the wrong thing.

We’re grateful to the long-term care lobby for the insight that the risk of differential uptake (ie people moving forward at different speeds) should not stand in the way of progress. These are deep questions, and we saw that they challenged some of our deeply held assumptions about the journey to transform public services. That’s a good sign. And there is specific progress: the Government Gateway is piloting user- centric ID for local authority employees, and working on this with ContactPoint in children’s services.

How significant the potential for VRM in public services is perhaps comes down to how active or passive we see citizens as being. Are public services such as health, education or law & order only something we do to people? Or are these desirable community outcomes in which people and communities should and can play an active role?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if government really wants to see personalised public services, choice and contestability, and increasing numbers of citizens actively engaged in creating and managing their own outcomes, it will need to be open to a more empowered user model. An openness to a user-controlled approach to information (even just in a few defined areas to start with) would also go some way towards restoring trust in government’s handling of personal data (or perhaps removing the requirement for such trust). The potential is great: let’s continue to explore how truly user- driven outcomes are likely to be based on user-driven data.

Then one day I got a business card from Liberata through the door which actually ended up getting lost in the kitchen and covered in food before I found it and realised it might be useful (I might like to add if I didn’t work at Kable I would have no idea who Liberata were and it would have gone straight in the bin). So I followed the biro instruction written on it saying ‘please ring’ and spoke to a nice man called Paul. He seemed to have some idea what was going on and took the details of my property developer. A few weeks later I called him back. Then I emailed. Then I called him back again. I gave him the same details again.

He did at least give me some sort of answer. Apparently it will probably take about 3 months to go through. I will get a bill at some point for a certain amount he thinks.

So 9 months on:

I don’t know how much my council tax will be.

I don’t know when I will get the bill.

I don’t know how long I will be given to pay it off.

I don’t even know who the right person to be chasing at the council is.

WIBBI. Wouldn’t it be better if when a person moved into a new house they were sent their council tax bill, with an explanation of how to pay it and when by? And perhaps in circumstances where this didn’t happen for whatever reason, citizens were offered support rather than feeling like they had to battle to get any kind of information? After all. this is a case of me offering to give them money!

• The unanticipated scale of organisational change which the implementation of a complex system such as ICS brought about.
• Difficulties in system commissioning and contracting by local authorities - a long-standing issue between local authorities and suppliers which was magnified by the size and scope of the ICS.
It highlights the need for greater cooperation between users in managing IT contracts to ensure that what is delivered is fit for purpose and maximises the benefits of having electronic social care records.
• The need for improvements in social work training to ensure that qualified workers are knowledgeable about the research and conceptual base of the ICS, and are enabled to develop their analytical skills.
• The challenge of reflecting the involvement and voices of the children and families themselves within an electronic system.
• The need for greater support for social workers to use the system appropriately with disabled children and, more particularly, to manage the challenge of assessing children who may be at different developmental stages for different dimensions of their lives.

Supporting and in places improving or intervening in the lives of children living in complicated and at times dysfunctional family settings is enormously skilled work. To make a positive contribution to keeping children safe and well, it seems obvious that an electronic record system must support and promote the authoritative but sensitive, nuanced best practice of social work and other professions - not provide a technocratic, un-feeling underpinning infrastructure. It is therefore concerning that the research uncovered disagreement about

whether the quality of social work practice has been promoted by the system, particularly in relation to direct work with children and their families and carers.

How those experiencing public services FEEL is critical to judging ‘success’ - especially in social care. So alarm bells should ring when research indicates some social workers felt strongly that the documents produced using the system, such as the care plans, were not suitable for sharing with service users: being considered to be too long, the language within them inappropriate and complex, and the information within them too dense to be shared. Some social workers complained that the use of the system obscured information about the family context and resulted in the loss of the ‘stories’ of children’s lives. And critically,

some social workers in the study perceived that they spent more time on record keeping in the office and less time working directly with children and families.

In the full research report, one interviewee said it took 10 times as long to do a care plan under ICS, which meant they were being taken away from the “real social work” of interacting with children and families. (Intriguingly, in the sole piece of emboldened text, the DCSF summary highlights that

In none of the cases examined, however, was data entry social workers’ predominant activity.

Community Care and El Reg both pick up the story and highlight the fact that the department’s summary downplays or loses some of the more negative elements of the evaluation. Community Care notes that the full research piece highlights complaints by social workers that the ICS was promoting form-driven social work that could threaten the profession’s values and good practice:

Researchers concluded that the system, based on a series of tick-box forms, was not tailored to individual children, and failed to ask important questions of some children while asking ­others that were irrelevant, resulting in “bland analyses”. The report said: “The process was felt to diminish analysis and risk assessment. There were particular concerns about risk because it was unclear where the information would be located.”

because “the research does not provide a sound basis on which to judge the potential value of the ICS”.

WIBBI we look back in 3 years and can see the ICS was an exemplar of excellence (listening, responding, testing, adjusting), and not a repeat of the problems designed into the CSA IT system.

The 10 quality requirements for digital services are:

1. Choice of Channel - As a citizen I can choose for myself in which way to interact with government. Government ensures multi channel service delivery, i.e. the availability of all communication channels: counter, letter, phone, e-mail, internet.
2. Transparent Public Sector - As a citizen I know where to apply for official information and public services. Government guaranties [sic] one-stop-shop service delivery and acts as one seamless entity with no wrong doors.
3. Overview of Rights and Duties - As a citizen I know which services I am entitled to under which conditions. Government ensures that my rights and duties are at all times transparent.
4. Personalised Information - As a citizen I am entitled to information that is complete, up to date and consistent. Government supplies appropriate information tailored to my needs.
5. Convenient Services - As a citizen I can choose to provide personal data once and to be served in a proactive way. Government makes clear what records it keeps about me and does not use data without my consent.
6. Comprehensive Procedures - As a citizen I can easily get to know how government works and monitor progress. Government keeps me informed of procedures I am involved in by way of tracking and tracing.
7. Trust and Reliability - As a citizen I presume government to be electronically competent. Government guarantees secure identity management and reliable storage of electronic documents.
8. Considerate Administration - As a citizen I can file ideas for improvement and lodge complaints. Government compensates for mistakes and uses feedback information to improve its products and procedures.
9. Accountability and Benchmarking - As a citizen I am able to compare, check and measure government outcome. Government actively supplies benchmark information about its performance.
10. Involvement and Empowerment - As a citizen I am invited to participate in decision-making and to promote my interests. Government supports empowerment and ensures that the necessary information and instruments are available.

This is fantastic. It cuts across policy and delivery (I am not sure how our complicated tax and benefits system could deliver on No3); it highlights choice, shared responsibility, consumer-orientation, transparency, true technology-enabled personalisation, courtsey, privacy, dignity, security, reciprocity and restitution. There is a real vibe of the Dutch government being the servant of the people, doing everything in its power to get things right, keep getting things right, keep listening to service users’ needs and feelings, doing things with or for not TO the electorate.

I’m intrigued to know how the “guarantee of secure ID management” works in practice. But it all sounds pretty user-centric to me. As we reach the second anniversary of the Transformational Government Strategy, I wonder if we could add a similar charter as a coda? How would it change practice in the UK I wonder? 

The immediate view seems to be that all is fine. There’s no single central database. Transformational Government is citizen-centric, about services which may or may not use centralized data to deliver the personalisation.

But there’s a subtle yet important difference between something that is citizen focused, and something which is citizen centric. Centralised systems that do things to people can be called citizen-focused, but the world looks very different from the citizen’s point of view. A central approach to citizen-centric services might involve freeing information and processes, enabling citizens to do much more for themselves. It’s scandalous that essential aggregated information that belongs to the citizenry is kept as a state secret. Such secretiveness encourages the fallacy that government will do everything for and to us. But it’s not MI5/MI6 alone that will save us from terrorists: it’s a change in society. People are the first line of defence and should be treated and engaged as such.

Inside government people are taking the view that the post-HMRC panic and headlines of recent days are driven by an ill-informed media, and that it would all be quite different if only the centre could get its message across. This sounds like “They’re disagreeing with us so they can’t be listening”; but perhaps the centre has forgotten how to listen.

Others in government see the media rightly helping the public understand what is going on, and picking up on a hitherto understated concern that government is requiring more and more of their personal data, but at the same time information is escaping and things are going wrong in manner which feels unacceptable. No-one has yet convinced the citizen that these large-scale projects – health, children, identity management – hold benefits for them.

Government wants to share data so it can be more citizen focussed. The law enforcement agencies can see that the most vulnerable and children are most likely to suffer from violence. But it has not been able to share this insight with the public, or gain a mandate for acting on this desperately important insight.

Personal data is managed using technology, but the question of how it is treated is one of culture and also subject to the law. It’s questionable whether our public services are designed, in a formal sense, for users’ needs. This producer-centric culture is hard-wired into technology systems and prevalent in day-to-day practices. Unraveling something like the HMRC debacle requires understanding of how all these things interact. NAO never needed identifiable sensitive details, but the reason it asked for them to be stripped out was that otherwise the file would be too big. The reason HMRC didn’t strip it out was because that would cost £5000.

One argument says you simply can’t provide citizen-centered or personalised services without large centralised databases. Suppliers argue they can make them secure with technical fixes. Other experts argue that no valuable information can be kept safe in a system to which tens or hundreds of thousands of people have routine access. The point of access is the point of failure, so if it’s usable it’s insecure.

The deeply radical project to turn customer relationship management (CRM) on its head and create Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) challenges this view powerfully. VRM allows a user community to manage their individual identities and resources and to share supplier reputation. They operate on the terms they want. CRM may make the capitalist wheels turn, but it creates relationships which are deeply inequitable and privilege the enterprise at the expense of the ‘customer’. Giving the individual the tools to manage their own relationships and processes, user-centric ID and personal data stores offers a whole new set of solutions for the need for personalised services.

Early hints of this approach exist: my Google personalised homepage feels customer-centric. The Microsoft HealthVault sounds customer-centric - Steve Ballmer isn’t going to leave my health records on a CD if they’re on my PC. We’re told we could create a truly user-centric VRM architecture for ID management and online transactions for around £1m a year.

Thus the innocuous-sounding topic of information management takes us into the question of what sort of democracy we want to live in. There’s an enormous dislocation between the rhetoric and how people are actually treated. Government says it wants to devolve and empower, but centralizes information and decision-making. It claims to be customer-centric, but addicted prisoners are turfed onto the streets with two days’ methodone and no GP to turn to. Nothing will “transform” until public servants can see citizen journeys that make sense.

Local authorities are closer to people and see things differently. Leading councils are identifying those citizen journeys and using an accurate database to release previously unclaimed benefits to the citizen. They offer enough services to offer a trade-off between things that are easy to get with things that are hard to get, and can be much more citizen-centric. Keeping your town hall up to date with your address makes sense when they’re offering you valuable things to which you’re entitled.

Information sharing must involve trust - ethics and standards - between public bodies as well as with the citizen. The gap between local and central government is described as “never bigger”. It’s at the local level that there’s a real opportunity to build trust with citizens. But power and control resides with those (in Whitehall) who have fewest dealings with the citizen. Local government can do so much with its customers, but the overall strategy continues to feel like being ‘done to’. 

Whose information is it anyway? This question deserves a lot more unpacking. We should expect a campaign for the right lifetime ownership of one’s personal data by the data subject.

Of course ethics are not always as clear cut as we might like. At first glance it may seem as though complaint data from regulators should be made public, but when looked at more closely this raises a series of interesting challenges.

Certainly the current review of the HMRC data loss being carried out by security people sends out the wrong message about where the risks lie. As the leader of a series of key database projects admits, ‘Human error will always catch us out’.

Some participants boldly committed to doing things differently:
- Improving dialogue between government, the awkward squad and NGOs
- Making greater effort to sell the case for large-scale information sharing projects to citizens in their multiplicity
- Demonstrating more clearly appropriate stewardship of personal data
- Being bold enough to say as often as necessary, ‘it’s not as simple as that!’
- Get buy-in of the privileged 80% when delivering for the 20%
- Being real
- Repositioning of a supplier as an enabler of policy, and committing to look at all government accounts, endeavouring to support them by presenting reasons why the citizen will benefit from each programme
- Encouraging upwards disruption
- Finding a political narrative abut enabling trade-offs (not assuming a zero-sum game)
- Asking ‘why are we not sharing this information with the public?’
- Engaging as a force for good, continuing advocacy
- Clarification of the VRM proposition, and creation of an organized third sector which enables citizens to own their own data
- Besieging silences – making it my job to open dialogues
- Checking implementation of security on databases
- Couching everything in citizen benefit terms, not ‘do it to them’ terms.

Before the discussion the mood seemed to be that Transformational Government was fine. Afterwards the prevailing voices said it was “fixable”.

Sponsor

Kable Ltd