WRITTEN ON February 27th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy, Save Time and Money

I dont get this.

The 2011 Census will adopt a similar processing strategy to that used in the 2001 Census.

But this is a £500m deal. And it’s 10 years on. Shouldn’t things have changed more than this?

The Times reported

The ONS has already formed a working group to investigate alternatives to the census. It will present it recommendations to the government after the 2011 survey.

“We’ve started thinking, ‘Okay, what comes beyond 2011?’” said Peter Benton, deputy director of the census at the ONS. “We’ve set up a programme to look at our need for information and the different ways we could meet that need in future.”

What do we do here? Does a bankrupt country want to spend £500m a time on a C19th process? How many Jedi will get recorded, as public trust in government data handling plummets?

But we need the data as much as ever; we need to build and improve the consistent data set, and we probably need more data now and in future rather than less. We need a census for the #PBAge.

ONS says it’s going to look at the sort of stuff that Finland has been doing for a decade. But have they looked at where the future is headed with VRM and volunteered personal information? What chance their supplier Lockheed Martin has been offering “thought leadership” on techniques that would slash the cost of the process (do they care if it were way more effedctive, and privacy-friendly?)

Perhaps when ONS feel sufficiently on top of the 2011 census, they’ll take a moment to look at this sort of stuff.

WRITTEN ON February 25th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy

OK: here’s a big fat post. I havent got this right yet, but there’s something here. Please help me, people.

The British government after the election will have serious and urgent challenges. Government’s IT suppliers are in a critical position. They could prolong the challenges and obstruct attempts to overcome them. Or they could help, and that would require an unprecedented flexibility.

The starting point is far from Ideal in several ways.

First is cost, and there are three orders of magnitude to this. Government IT costs too much, as any small user in a department with a PFI/PPP contract which tries to get a new terminal or a small change done will readily attest. Call this a £3-4bn problem (depending on definition of government and of IT). But there’s a ten times larger problem which is that the administration of public services is far too expensive, and modern technology isn’t doing enough to help. Call this a £30-40bn problem. And beyond that there’s a problem ten times as big again which is that public services themselves cost far too much to deliver, and we dont get sufficiently good results. This is a £300-400bn problem.

Government’s IT and business-service suppliers are charging UK government too much. EDS/HP, Cap Gem, IBM, Capita, Microsoft, BT: tell me it isn’t so. Compare for us the margins you make on UK government business compared to governments elsewhere and the private sector.

But – understandably – they want to be paid for solving the £30-40bn problem, or the £300-400bn problem, not less.

Now: here’s the crux. Britain’s new post-election government may be pretty hostile to its IT suppliers. Whichever colour it is it faces the same problems, but let us assume for sake of argument it is Conservative.

Relations have not improved since the unseemly spat between Intellect and David Davies over ID System contracts. Big IT suppliers and their big bills are definitely seen as “part of the problem” in Tory HQ, as is the trade association, and an ineffectual (overpromoted/overpaid) CIO culture and the excessively big, out-of control IT projects they have cooked up.

What is a smart government IT supplier to do in this situation?

Here’s – for free – my tip.

Smart government IT suppliers need to have a conversation roughly as follows.

Dear Francis (or it may be Jim, or Stephen, or someone else. But let us assume it’s Francis)

It may be that Goverment hasn’t always been that brilliant a customer but, frankly, we as an industry haven’t been brilliant either. We thought PFI’d big systems and more data sharing were the right things to do (to be honest, it was your policy and we were only responding). But if we carry on like this things will be far from Ideal in terms of public budgets, service quality and levels of trust.

The problem is best understood that what were doing together doesn’t look or feel particularly good on the receiving end, and it’s expensive. Also, we’re losing people’s trust. But it could be great, and far better value. And we could earn all that trust back and more, because people in Britain are a half-decent and forgiving lot.

What can we do constructively to help?

Look, we’re businesses and need revenues and profit to survive. But we’re all in this together, and we accept the need for change.

First up, we’ll work flat out to keep the lights on, make sure everyone gets paid their benefit and we minimise delays, cock-ups and further data losses.

We accept that there will be a new transparency about contracts and project performance. While this may be occasionally uncomfortable for some of us individually, we benefit when this same transparency affects our competitors. So overall we benefit more than we lose.

We accept, because we’re all in this together, that there will need to be some variations on long-term contracts, even some terminations. (We might even ask the trade association to operate an arbitration or compensation scheme, so if we need to cancel one of two contracts the loss doesnt fall entirely on one supplier).

What we’re trying to say is we understand you have inherited a very difficult position, that you want to things differently, urgently, and we are prepared to show an unprecedented level of flexibility.

What we want to see from you is that
– any new project is a properly conceived and designed business change project based around real user needs
– you reduce the tendering/procurement overhead as far as possible for all consistent with transparency, fairness and conformance to WTO rules
– you procure outcomes and results so we are able to be innovative where there is a business benefit, without unnecessary contractual restriction.

WRITTEN ON February 17th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy

Most people don’t care that we’re drafting with CTPR an Ideal Government It Strategy, and one or two people are even being a bit sneering about it because they can’t see the point.

It’s going great guns and we’re completely up for it. The reason it’s important is that if you’re frustrated with the status quo of public sector IT you have to do something positive about it, however modest. Otherwise you just go bitter or nutty – like an unwelcome cup of conference coffee.

The CTPR/IdealGovernment approach is to offer a structure, take comments and suggestions, pull together what we want and offer it up to all parties.

And we’re getting some terrific help and support in the process. There’s a stalwart posse of #idealgits who have been meeting and drinking beer together Wedneday evenings. We’ve had offers of propmotion and input both from the trade association Intellect and the Foundation of Information Policy Research. No tent has ever yet been broad enough to accommodate both those two very different bodies. Verily, the “courteous and mutually respectgul dialogue” #CMRD is under way.

And now David at BCS has offered to host and help with the final drafting day, which is set for 11 March, about which we’re delighted. We have a deadline for completion and a place to do it.

So now is the time for your input – suggestions and comments – to the ideal government IT strategy. Anyone who makes any contribution of any sort gets invited to the party. There’s an urban myth that prizes may include signed copies of a new book by HMG’s Data Sharing Czar Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom (though just where he’d find time to write a book given his many other commitments I cannot imagine). We can’t confirm that, but it will be fun anyway.

WRITTEN ON January 27th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Online Maps, Power of Information

My short response to the Ordnance Survey data consultation

I think the phrase “making public data public” says it all. When a tautology is radical it’s an oblique way of saying we’re in the wrong place.

The UK needs vibrant emerging online services built on universally applicable data sets which the taxpayer has paid for already.

The agency “trading funds” rules aren’t particularly helpful to this. It’s not welcome news to anyone who hoped make new fortunes and careers out of privatising the Ordnance Survey.

But it has been clear for pretty much a decade (or 70 “Internet years”) that we need open mapping data and postcodes. Perhaps we should dither for a few more years, and then think about arranging some focus groups?

Hm. Slightly falling short on the #CMRD there. I hope others make more substantive, courteous and mutually respectful contributions. Go do it!

WRITTEN ON January 18th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Uncategorized

Jerry Michalski runs regular conference calls on emerging tech issues called Yi-Tan. I took part in one on participative medicine in December and learned loads. It feels great to dial into a conference line and share thoughts with world experts in a respectful live exchange.

Next Tuesday, Martin Luther King Day, Jerry’s Yi-Tan is about open government, hearing from David Eaves and about his three laws of open government data. This relates to the “public data” part of our idealgov IT strategy #idealgits.

I wonder if they’ll dive deep on that specific issue, or touch on all the other issues we’ve identified in our main headings: including governance, architecture, procurement, personal data and my own hot favourite: design.

Welcome, Yi-Tanners! Avail yourselves of anything that’s here. Leave your muddy footprints everywhere! We’re all in this together…

WRITTEN ON January 10th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Ideal government IT strategy

No public service has ever been formally designed, from intention to execution. Every single one of them should have been.

That was the nub of an Aha-Erlebnis conversation with the late and much-lamented Charles Cox (who at that time was MD of EDS, responsible for delivering more on-line Whitehall services than everyone else put together).

Our government IT problems go deeper than procurement, staff, management, suppliers, contracts, lack of checks and balances. The new services were never designed, in any formal sense, to solve the problems they’re intended to solve for the people they’re intended to help.

This is folly, when we’re constructing more or less from scratch a vast new edifice of virtual public services. It’s doubly regrettable when we have astonishingly innovative and effective designers in the UK, and a world lead in service design.

That’s why we will include a section on design in the CTPR Ideal Goverment IT Strategy project.

Thinking of future public services using the language and techniques of design is more fun and more powerful. The Design Council‘s RED team showed it. IdealGov found it out for itself with ThePublicOffice. It’s clear from Total Place. Matt Poelmans keeps proving it in Holland with BuergerLink. thinkpublic exemplify it. Donagh and I proved it again with the fun we had doing the independent European conference Malmo09.

But design thinking immediately takes us beyond mere “IT strategy”, comments Professor Alison Prendiville in charge of the UK’s first Masters of Design graduate course (at London College of Communication):

…this is less a question about IT and more to do with the service design and the role Government IT plays in delivering that service. ‘Mypublicservices’ is great as it demonstrates the difference that individuals can make through their own personal efforts.

I also think that Government IT should be about empowering citizens, if this leads to incentives and improved feelings about community, less quantifiable metrics, then this can only be good.

My only fear is that ultimately Central Government is very much driven by measurements that rely on quantitative feedback and mechanisms that are very different from the user experience goals that define a good service.

She goes on to ask how one goes about converting them.

We have to welcome the more ambitious challenge.

Free government data (from Power of Info) plus new ways of self-organising make a powerful mixture. We will start to question everything government does. And we’ll believe (as Ivo Gormley showed in Us Now) its possible for us collectively to do almost anything ourselves.

Professor Nutt’s new crowdsourced alternative to the ACMD is this week’s straw in the wind. From participatory medicine via lifelong learning to gritting our own rural roads, we face the prospect of questioning and then potentially redesigning and rebuilding pretty well everything.

That’s why we want a strong section on design at the heart of the CTPR Ideal Government IT Strategy #idealgits.

It’s to ensure we put our efforts and investment along lines which are formally designed to achieve success, from intention, through specification, choice, development, feedback and improvement. We need what thinkpublic call “self-improving public services”.

Of course we hope that involving design expertise in #idealgits will allow us to present the output in a more attractive, comprehensible way of more universal appeal. But it’s about substance, not just style. The main reason is simply it’ll be so much better than any strategy which does not include design thinking. We’ve got to raise the bar.

Afterword: Unlike many other disciplines I’ve come across the designers I know will have no difficulty fitting in with the new “courteous and mutually respectful dialogue” #CMRD. I gather there are designers who are spiky, difficult people but the ones I have met have been a delight to hang out with, full of fun, empathy and creativity. So welcome aboard! Please add your thoughts about design in future public services here.

WRITTEN ON January 9th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy

Wingham Rowan prompts the CTPR/Ideal Government IT strategy to think bigger. In a splendid contribution to the #idealgits wiki he raises the deep, wide question of to what extent we can now rethink public services altogether in the light of what the net makes possible.

In 1995 the music business struggled with the question: “how do we use the Internet to sell CD’s more efficiently?” As we now know, the Internet spawned MP3 downloads which sent CD sales spiralling into decline. But music became more accessible and portable than ever. A better question in 1995 might have been: “how could delivery of recorded entertainment be impacted by new technologies?”

So, it might be worth pausing before asking “how do we improve public services with IT?” Is it possible the whole concept of public services could become unrecognisable because of IT developments?

His own work on slivers of time is a wonderful example. It’s an ambitious solution to a problem so endemic and huge that no-one really dares frame it.

I suspect there may be others: buyer-centric markets or VRM for starters; sustainableliving issues. I’d love to see more of this kind of stuff. Keep raising the bar! #idealgits home age is here. Thanks Wingham.

This IdealGovernment IT Strategy #idealgits project is part of the new Courteous and Mutually Respectful Dialogue #CMRD. Any trading of insults (for example calling people “intellectual pygmies”) will be moderated.

WRITTEN ON January 8th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy, Policies, Political engagement, What do we want?

Ha! The clever old Tories have just raised the bar several notches in our highly specific ideal-gov world. The “makeitbetter” site, where we were all invited to pile in to point out the glaring shortcomings in a leaked draft government IT strategy, has struck an unexpected positive note with the addition of an “our proposed approach” tab.

Makeitbetter+ is in line with the broader Tory publication of its draft manifesto, and crowdsourcing questions eg on the NHS using Google Moderator.

It’s still unusually informal for an official party site, a bit obscure about authorship, but it’s now open to feedback on a draft solution. The attribution is

This document draws on the work previously undertaken by Mark Thompson, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Independent Review of NHS and Social Care IT , published this summer by the NHS IT Policy Review Group (commissioned by Stephen O’Brien) of the NHS National Programme for IT, a programme that has become a byword for “how not to do it”.

Now, of course, this is a doppelganger for the CTPR Ideal Government IT strategy project #idealgits (part of the new constructive & mutually courteous dialogue #CMRD).

So how do we all feel about it?

The answer is: great. We want to make theirs better. We want to make everyone’s better. The CTPR/IdealGov IT strategy project makes no claims about being officially aligned with anyone, though we talk to lots of people.

It does claim, with good reason, to be a big tent (watch this space). And it does have the offer of being presented to all three major parties.

If the UK ends up with a new administration with a rubbish government IT strategy after the next election, it won’t be for lack of ideas, or for lack of effort on the part of the public-sector blogosphere posse.

WRITTEN ON January 8th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, Political engagement

The new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has a consultation up on MPs expenses. Do it, people! If we don’t fill it out now and feed back, we can hardly complain if we don’t like how MPs’ expenses work in future.

It’s a deceptively simple looking web site which is easy to use but pretty thorough in the feedback it invites. Designed, delivered and hosted by our friends at The Dextrous Web – nice one!

WRITTEN ON January 1st, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy

IdealGov and CTPR are crowdsourcing a wise, inventive, experienced government IT strategy to offer all major political parties as they finalise their plans and go into the imminent election.

We’ll blog each major stage either here on IdealGov or on the CTPR blog. And the back end is on the IdealGov open wiki.

You can comment on any post. And you can just register and edit the wiki, or just add comments to any wiki page.