22 Dec 2006

Reflections on TRUST in e-enabled public services

We can’t say who said this or where, but here’s a note Ruth and I drafted up after a terrific evening’s conversation with friends and colleagues about trust in e-enabled public services. Thanks to all who came and contributed. See you all in 2007; Happy Christmas meanwhile.

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It’s accepted wisdom to say that trust lies at the heart of successful e-enabled public services. But do we know what we mean by trust? Are we all talking about the same thing?

The current “Big Opt-Out” campaign challenges the core of Connecting for Health. Now even if the CfH contractors deliver national electronic patient records the programme fails at the social level on the issue of trust if patients ask GPs not to submit their records, and GPs are sympathetic. The same applies to personalised services based on ID management and the No2ID campaign, or biometrics in schools and Leavethemkidsalone.

The awkward squad is “joining up” faster than government. Government needs them as critical friends.

Trust and usage are like the chicken and the egg: which comes first? Must we prove e-enabled services are worthy of trust before we adopt them (as the Big Opt-Out campaigners suggest)? Or should we go ahead and adopt systems like the electronic record, ID Management and the Childrens’ Index so we can show the fears around these well-intentioned systems are groundless?

The instinctive JFDI (just *** do it) approach of compulsion leads to today’s paradoxical situation where service providers are set to force supposedly “citizen-centric” services on everyone, perhaps hoping the vocal minority will fall into line and drop their objections to centralised and personalised services and data sharing, or perhaps simply not caring what they think because they are unrepresentative.

Service delivery is about human decisions rather than databases. We can either support initiative or require process. We can create databases until the cows come home - and we do. But the Victoria Climbie’s case was one of human failings. Its legacy may be joined up services that we trust. Or it may destroy the trust of a generation of children in confidential public services, which is not what Lord Laming would wish to be remembered for.

A small irony is that, recently brought into the country as she was, Victoria Climbie would not even have been on the new Children’s Index.

One conundrum is: how can we expect people to trust joined-up government when public services are made up of many parts that do not trust each other? They work differently, don’t co-operate, and hold customer data to different standards and for different purposes. This isn’t about technology that doesn’t connect, it’s about a culture of mistrust. Do we have to correct that first, and tackle the enormous culture change of making public services work together as a whole? Recalling Montesquieu’s lesson about the importance of the separation of powers it would probably be undesirable as well as unfeasible.

Volume of usage is no measure of the success of a compulsory system, or one where there is no alternative. But to overuse the word “trust” doesn’t help when it means different things to different people:

The divine Wikipedia points out that
- to the security engineer, the “trusted system” is one you have no choice but to trust. It follows that you want as few as possible. So if the ID System or electronic patient record is a “trusted system” in this sense it’s valid to ask why, and does it have to be? This technical meaning of trust is hard to convey to a lay, generalist audience.
- to the policy analyst a “trusted system” is one which denies people access unless some sort of predictive risk analysis or surveillance based deviation analysis is undertaken. An open society lets people do things and polices the exceptions (cf Beccaria On Crimes and Punishments). But a trusted system uses surveillance and scoring systems based on credit, identity or other risk profiles (cf Foucault’s “carcereal continuum”). Examples are: the no-fly list; credit referencing; surveillance cameras, fences, crash barriers and machine guns around Parliament; and the profiling of children at risk.

Meanwhile customers “trust” brands. We trust Easyjet to be Easyjet and Tesco to be Tesco. And citizens may not like what they get but generally trust the outcome of elections to be fair. The finance director, Treasury or NAO wants to be able to trust in project outcomes. For this you need to measure the benefits, as CJIT did.

If users co-designed and co-created the systems supposed to help them such as the children’s index, health record or ID management, would they be centralised systems, or personal? We didn’t ask. So we may find out the hard way further down the line.

The recent DTI-supported Trustguide work is illuminating on the question of trust online. It introduced groups of lay people to basic cybersecurity issues before conducting focus groups. These found that –

- people don’t trust the Internet
- they know it’s not safe
- but that’s not the point
- they use it because its convenient
- so they rate convenience over trust
- they also want a human face to the things they deal with
- and restitution when things go wrong.

We should take senior officials through that Trustguide research process: we’re willing, and the Trustguide team is too.

If government conceives, designs, builds and measures its services in glorious introspective isolation, it’s hardly surprising people don’t trust it. When services are designed around the end-user, even involving the end-user, trust follows more naturally. This shines through in the Varney report in a way it did not in the original Transformational Government strategy, even though the nature of the web suggests such an approach is the essence of successful contempory e-enabled services.

Perhaps therefore we’d better stop using the word trust for everything good about e-enabled services. And it seems that co-governance, going through this change with people, not doing it to people, is the way to get what we all want.

Posted by William Heath on 22/12/06 at 11:51am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: Co-creation · Foundation of Trust · Ideal Goverment - project

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Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

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22 Dec 2006

Reflections on TRUST in e-enabled public services

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