No need to tell us once: we know already!

Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom writes:

As a seasoned blog-caster - I think I might now without hubris now describe myself as such - I am now content to agree that these new technologies have something to offer us in Whitehall.

This new e-press cuttings service is a good example. It has now saved 3m sheets of paper since the Wednesday morning group took it up last month. Everything I wanted was just a flick or two away, allowing Patricia to print out all the things I need to read in the car tonight. Howell’s GICS Islands of Innovation Messaging team is starting to click. There was an excellent story about Poole Borough Council’s innovative application of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to ascertain whether or not a family lived within a popular school’s catchment area. That’s the sort of innovation we need to applaud and celebrate, and a powerful example of my 7th C - Customer Insight (see my earlier blog-cast).

Progress can be extremely rapid once the best minds are applied to the nation’s problems, can it not? In the very next clipping I read that the entire Metropolitan Police force is to be electronically tagged, with microchips in radio headsets so we can pinpoint them to within a yard or so across the Met’s 620sq mile patch.

Marvellous. And it’s just a start. Let’s apply it to tackle benefit fraud, welfare entitlement, freedom pass qualification, for example. These devices can be put in the foot or ear. If we routinely establish where citizens are at all times, we would have the data *already* whenever we needed to find out anything.

Imagine the efficiencies. We’d meet the Service Transformation Agreement target on avoidable contact in a jiffy. And - let’s not tell David - it would render the flagship Tell Us Once project - of which he seems inordinately proud - quite redundant.

People wouldn’t need to tell us once: we’d already know!

Of course whenever leading thinkers - such as myself in this instance - break new ground, everybody else pretends they saw it all along. Leigh was going on just the other day about some gadget his people have got that listens in on phone calls and can spot when people are being untruthful. Applied to hoi polloi - the unemployed for example - it allows us to turn their claims down before they have even made them. How’s that for response time?

Of course we must ensure there is no intrusion of this sort on the Whitehall network. That would be an intolerable breach of confidence and the privacy of hard-working public servants. It would undermine precisely the system of mutual trust on which we have depended since 1854 and Northcote-Trevelyan.

Published by Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO on 01/05/08 at 8:37pm

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