Somehow we used to manage without knowing when the next bus was coming, and somehow life still went on. In London, that distant past is less than two years ago. All that time ago, bus arrival information was new, exciting and empowering.
Now, of course, it has just vanished into the background. It is how things are and how they should be. Successful inventions disappear from our awareness. Until, that is, they go missing or stop working.
And the next bus could be anywhere.
You can’t institutionalize innovation. If you could, everyone would do it.
I went to two events yesterday.
The first was the launch of the Government Digital Service, or rather a housewarming party for their shiny new offices. In fine agile tradition, they put on a slick show and tell with short sharp presentations about their work and achievements topped and tailed by Francis Maude, Mike Bracken (who has blogged his account of the day), Martha Lane Fox (likewise) and Ian Watmore. There was an enthusiastic crowd of supporters twittering furiously and other blog posts are starting to appear [added 10/12 - and GDS has now posted the presentation material and links to press coverage] . The dress code was smart casual, with a lot more emphasis on the casual than the smart. There was a buzz, a sense of creativity and spontaneity, of energy and talent unleashed, of an approach which felt a million miles away from both the stereotype and the reality of government projects.
Frustratingly, I had to leave early to get to the second event.
That was a much more sombre affair, closed and closed in, in an anonymous Treasury meeting room. The programme I work on was being reviewed, to check that we are managing effectively and are on track to deliver. There was little that was casual, in dress or anything else. There were plans, business cases, critical paths, migration strategies, decommissioning strategies, privacy impact assessments and a pile of other stuff besides. There was pointed questioning on risks, affordability and resilience. I make no complaint about that. We are spending public money – rather a lot of public money – and we should be challenged and tested on whether the spending is wise and the results assured. The track record of large government projects is not so great that there is room for complacency. But it felt a very long way from the world of GDS.
That matters, because actually the two are very closely linked. They represent, in effect, different ways of thinking about the same problem, and have roots in some of the same people and ideas. And in recognising that, I suddenly realised that I had rediscovered a thought I had first had at a seminar I went to almost four years ago, where both approaches were represented, each largely talking past the other. Tom Steinberg, who spoke at the point of inflection between the two, memorably started by saying that he completely disagreed with everything which had been said in the first half, and that the solution to the problem of big blundering IT projects was to have small fleet of foot projects, not to find a cure for blundering. I reflected on the apparent tension then as I reflected today:
And then the penny dropped. The apparent gulf between the two parts of the seminar is itself the challenge.
We need to apply two different sets of disciplines (in both senses), in two separate domains:
The collective culture and skills of government are much more geared to the second than the first – and the risk is not just that we don’t do the first as well, but also that we can all too easily fail to spot the need to do it all. The first is where there is the greatest need for change, flexibility and responsiveness – and where tools and approaches are available to deliver that responsiveness. The second requires the hard grind of implementing big robust systems which do the transactional heavy lifting as invisibly as possible.
Of course the distinction isn’t an absolute one, and of course each domain needs to incorporate the key strengths of the other. But if we confuse them, we are at risk of getting the worst of both worlds.
My view has changed in the four years since then. I no longer think they are two different domains, they are aspects of what should be intrinsic in any approach (though scale and purpose will drive balance and relative importance). But perhaps there is a risk that big projects are still too much trying to learn the lessons of the last decade and too little trying to anticipate the needs of the next. It is no longer enough for systems to work (though they do, of course, absolutely have to work); they must work well, and work well specifically for the people who will use them. Or, as Helen Milner reported Mike Bracken as saying at another event yesterday:
That makes a lot of sense to me, though only if it is understood that in this context function is an integral part of beauty (as Brian Hoadley rightly challenged).
Conversely though, it is not enough to make beautiful things, though, perhaps less obviously but no less necessarily, they do need to be beautfiul. It is essential that they work and work well too.
Looked at one way, the core mission of GDS (and not just GDS) is to make beautiful things which work well. That means some of the values so apparent in the GDS event need to be more obvious in many other aspects of the work of government. We will have made great progress when discussions about projects in anonymous Treasury meeting rooms are more like the world of GDS. But as increasingly function begins to underpin beauty, it may also mean that the palest shadow of the Treasury meeting room also needs to fall across the sunny loft which is GDS.
One of the key tests of the success of GDS will be that when their turn comes to give an account of themselves in that room in Treasury, their approach is recognised and valued – and the work of every other project is being tested against it. And another key test may be that that room will be a bit less anonymous, with its own wall of post-its and whiteboards.
Archimedes had taken baths before.
[Large companies] fear disruption far more than they do destruction. They push the decision to innovate back because things are OK today.
Everybody who has had much to do with the development of government web services knows that there have been failures of imagination, failures of bravery, failures of technique and failures to seize opportunities – as well as successes in the teeth of opposition and incomprehension. Few have had the opportunity to start from scratch (though those who have have often made good use of that opportunity). So there are inevitably people who will look with envy at what the alpha gov team has achieved and, just as importantly, what it was given licence to achieve. Relly Annett-Baker caught that sense in her recent post:
The frustrating part is plenty of people before Alphagov could see the problems and probably a good few of the solutions too. They were not able to act on them (and many have privately told us of their struggles). And they probably feel like, well, like how everyone feels when the consultants waltz in and say exactly what you’ve been saying for the last however many months. We have been given the utopian blank slate that others have only dreamed was possible. To those people, I can only say this: we aren’t wasting the opportunity.
But everybody who has had much to do with the government web services also knows the complexity of forces which bear down on creativity and design choices, sometimes from undue caution but at least as often from the fact that genuinely contradictory pressures have to get reconciled.
That’s where it starts to get interesting, because Alpha gov is beginning to find itself in this territory. It has come under criticism for the choices it has made about accessibility, for compromising on its approach to UX and even for the amount of white space frivolously scattered about the site. To my mind much more interestingly, questions are also being raised about its scalability and extensibility. One commenter on alpha gov’s about page puts it this way:
It looks good. Vast improvement on Directgov. Alpha seems like a great way to test and design the public face of e-govt and I’m sure a lot of the comments you get will praise the big leap forward in usability on show here. I hesitate to say this, but that’s the easy bit. Does your remit with Alpha go as far as testing the other side of this – i.e the other end of the transactional processes, within the Departments? It’s just as important that that alpha provides Departments with the flexibility, functionality and autonomy they need to adapt and develop their products and online services quickly, as it is to make sure the public interface works well. I suspect this will be hard though – the barriers will be more cultural and political than technical.
Alpha gov is a proof of concept. But what concept has it proved? That there are more arresting and more user friendly ways of building a government navigation site? Definitely. That starting with what users actually want to do, and then helping them do it is a good and (in this context) radical approach? Assuredly. That this could replace Directgov or become the heart of the single government domain (whatever that is)? Well, no. Not because it is clear that it couldn’t do those things, but because that is not what it has been built to test.
So what, then, is this alpha? Is it an alpha gorilla, asserting dominance and superiority? Or is it alpha software, tentatively tiptoeing into the daylight for a short and critical life before being cast aside?
The name is supposed to connote the second. But because of all the doubts, uncertainties and insecurities described above, some will inevitably hear the first. Tom Loosemore is horrified by that possibility. I don’t have a scintilla of doubt in his good faith but objectively, as the marxists used to say, I think he may be wrong. The purpose of alpha gov is to challenge, to point fingers at the past and so, by implication, at those who have played parts in creating that past. The position it is aspiring to occupy is not some marginal piece of unimportant communication to a group nobody cares about, it is to be the new paradigm for the way the whole of government interacts with its citizens. It is to be the alpha gorilla, even if its chosen weapon is the alpha site. Aspirant alpha gorillas have to fight to establish their position. Some succeed, and dominate the pack (at least until the next aspirant comes along). Some fail, and are ejected. What we are seeing is the beginning of that fight.
I don’t think Tom and the alpha gov team need feel apologetic about that. But equally, I don’t think that most of those involved in creating the set of things alpha gov is there to challenge need to feel guilty or apologetic either. That’s because alpha gov is, in one important sense, a sleight of hand. It is proposing a technical solution to a supposedly technical problem. That’s good, but technology is not, fundamentally, the reason why the government’s web presence is as it is. The real problem is not technology but sociology. To the extent that the structure of government has been designed at all, it has been designed to be delivered in ways which can be managed. Government is not fragmented as an accident but as a way – for a long time the only possible way – of getting things done. One result of that, as I have argued before, is that there is no such thing as the government. The question then becomes, how in a world of rich and complicated public services, detailed legal frameworks (often highly specific to the service they regulate), every conceivable combination of personal characteristics and needs, and long tribal histories we can nevertheless make things better by deploying the new and more powerful tools we now have available.
From that perspective, the primary power of alpha gov is not as a solution, but as a catalyst. It does less to provide answers than those who built it might have hoped or thought. But it does very starkly pose a question and demand an answer. Who chooses to pick up that question and answer it may show who is the real alpha in the pack.
This is how conversations work, or rather how one conversation played out on twitter this morning. Tricky subject, no right answer, constructive discussion.* But perhaps most important of all, those issues are being discussed in public for a government proof of concept which hasn’t yet even been launched. It is that which is more radical and, for the long term, more valuable than the issue at hand.
Update 8 May: And then 24 hours later, the same conversation restarted. The very things which make twitter a powerful and immediate communication channel also make it hard to see what has gone before and – I have even more forcibly realised – hard to transcribe and preserve. A few more tweets added below.
* It is the nature of twitter discussions that there was more to it than this, but from what I could see, this was the core thread of the conversation.
Update: The following day…
When I was 17, my first proper paid job was in the public library just down the road from the Elephant and Castle. It was the first time I had come across large print books. They had their own section, and there was a huge demand for them. But though it was much more intensely used, the selection was much more limited, partly because they served only a fairly small proportion of the library’s users, but partly of course because only a very narrow range of titles was produced in the first place. They looked very boring and very distinctive – no money was wasted on design or on attracting readers, the covers were just slabs of colour, and they stood out at fifty paces.
That was a long time ago.
A few months ago, I got a kindle, slightly accidentally – I hadn’t thought I wanted one. To my surprise, it has more or less instantly become my preferred means of reading book-length texts. There are several reasons for that, but this post isn’t yet another kindle-groupie breathless review, so I am going to focus on just one feature which, from what I have seen, had got relatively little attention.
You can adjust the size of the text.
The kindle destroys the concept of a large print book, because it’s not the book which has a print size any more, it’s the reader (in both senses, the device and its user).
That instantly means that I can adjust my kindle to a size which is comfortable for me, which is bigger than most publishers’ default, though much smaller than large print. That’s a really useful feature for me as an individual. But it also has much wider implications. It means that there is no reason why every book should not be available for every reader, it means that there is isn’t a highly constrained choice of books for people with weaker sight, and it means that the arbitrary, binary, and stigmatising divide between ordinary books and the large print list goes away.
All of that makes the kindle a lovely example of technology which changes the context in which it operates.
Most of the borrowers of large print books all those years ago were elderly ladies. I doubt that their successors of today are high on the target list for Amazon’s marketing of the kindle. But their successors of tomorrow could find that an almost accidental characteristic of easy technological flexibility brings a segregated service and segregated customers into the mainstream.
When it comes to innovation, the customer is rarely right. At least, they’re rarely right about what they want next.
Paul Valerio (via Amanda Gore)
The oddest thing is not a gathering of almost 200 people choosing to spend a Saturday enthusiastically debating how they can use their deep collective knowledge of the workings of public services radically to improve them. That is startling enough, but it’s not the oddest thing.
Considerably odder than that is that having spent a day enthusiastically debating how they can use their deep collective knowledge of the workings of public services radically to improve them, so many of them then spent so much of the next day writing about and sharing the ideas that had been prompted the day before.
And oddest of all – or not oddly at all, depending on how you look at it – is that they will all go to work on Monday morning wanting something to be different.
This was the weekend of UKGovcamp an unstructured and open unconference at the intersection of IT, social media, public services and democratic engagement.
Dave Briggs, one of Govcamp’s leading lights, warned participants that Monday would be the most depressing day, as the exhilaration and sense of possibilities of the weekend crashed into constrained reality. Perhaps. But making things better can only start from where we are, and understanding that place is as critically important to successful reform as having the ambition to move beyond it.
If there is a single way of summing up Govcamp participants – and it is one of their many strengths that there is not – I would say it is this, that almost every one is a starry-eyed pragmatist.
Monday morning may not be so bad.
The wordle at the top of the page was created by Sharon O’Dea. It is made up of the words participants used in the introductory session as their reason for being there.
