Interesting elsewhere – 22 December 2010

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Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • Sphereless: Tis the Season To Be Open In other words, it is not enough to use transparency to justify decisions already made, and to prevent bad decisions being made in future through the threat of later accountability. Openness in data needs to go hand-in-hand with an openness to change – to influence new ways of contributing, of collaborating, and of voting for those who we trust. Even new ways of thinking and feeling about why the decisions are being made in the first place.
  • Achilles and the Tortoise do Identity Management – honestlyreal
    T: But that sort of “hard identity” stuff makes sense for things involving money – especially where someone might steal some from me (or steal details that would help them pretend to be me and get money diverted that should come to me). It just seems like complete overkill for finding out when my bins will be emptied.A: Quite possibly – but you wanted all your government business in one place, didn’t you?T: Did I?

    A: I thought you did. Somebody did. All I hear about is “make government more like Amazon”, “make it all simply accessible in one place” blah blah blah. You mean that might not be the requirement?

    T: So far, Achilles, we’ve piddled around changing the requirement through a massive spectrum of parameters including data richness, hardness of trust, ease of use, and personalisation. I’m beginning to suspect that people blithely use this concept of “easy access in one place” without actually thinking through what sort of requirement that implies in practice.

  • moreopen We encourage, support and connect people who want to make the UK public sector more transparent about its work, more open to new ideas and more creative about how it works together and with others.
  • Stephen Hale – A wonky gene and the web – my son and my job If my son had been born 10 years ago, his medical treatment would have been largely the same. But I would have been far less informed about his condition, and it would have been much harder to make contact, or stay in contact, with anyone else with the same condition. I am much better able to care for him because of the web.This sometimes seems quite a long way removed from my day job. When I am working on finding better ways to publish policy documents, run effective online consultations, or communicate the proposed changes to the health and care system, it’s difficult to imagine how any of it will affect my son’s life directly. But of course, that’s really what it’s all about, and I often think about his life, and the lives of others like him, when I’m wondering about the point of what I do.
  • Software thinking for political decisions « Curiouscatherine’s Blog There are some really strong parallels between the pressures that have moved software development from an engineering / waterfall type model to a RAD or Agile method that could be used to discuss the changes need to the policy forming process to both involve citizens more directly and also to speed up the process. One big barrier to this is the get popular acceptance for the idea of a non-perfect policy enroute to a good one – ie that mistakes can happen – but as people grow up with a digital footprint of youth indiscretions we will have to get more tolerant of ‘mistakes’ on public life generally.
  • Crowdsourcing or crowdpleasing? Thoughts from #fdem10 « Curiouscatherine’s Blog And this is where I think we really need to consider what crowdsourcing means. Government is an age of enlightenment exercise that assumes a huge amount of rationality from its participants. Crowds are not rational. It may be a great idea to involve as many people as possible in setting the agenda but this is not going to work for policy formation which needs to actively involve experts – problem solvers as well as problem owners – in a process of design and reflection which is then democratically evaluated and adopted/rejected.And just one other point – there is a tendency in the narrative around this stuff to ignore or discount the expertise of civil servants in favour of the knowledge of the crowd. I think this veers from shortsighted to insulting and I think we need to value our experts a little more.

Service design is not the same as system design

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Good services depends on good systems. But good systems do not guarantee good services. The distinction is all too often overlooked, not least by designers of systems and services.

The London congestion charge is a fascinating case study of a superbly engineered system supporting a service which has some important deficiencies. I was told a couple of years ago by somebody who was on the development team that the service they built was defined by the statement:

Every car which enters central London and does not pay £5 by midnight should be charged £40.

I love the economy and precision of that statement. And there is no arguing but that the system does exactly that (albeit now with rather higher prices). But it completely misses out that the thing they built is a service. There is no customer in that statement, and so no customer relationship. The congestion charge is seen as a penalty capable of partial mitigation rather than a fee, the payment of which should first be facilitated and only then if necessary pursued. As I observed when I first ranted on the subject of the congestion charge:

HMRC has very deliberately chosen to assume that most customers want to be compliant.  It follows from that assumption that if people become non-compliant, they need encouragement and help rather than punishment.  Of course HMRC can turn nasty if it needs to, and if it puts its mind to it, it can turn very nasty indeed, but that’s not where they start from. TfL assumes from the outset that non-compliance is an attempt at evasion and its first response is to impose punishment.

There is no obvious reason why TfL could not instead send polite reminders that a payment is due and keep the penalty charges for those whose further inaction suggests an intent to avoid paying.  But something quite subtle about how they saw the problem they were trying to solve has sent them down altogether the wrong path.

What’s particularly odd about that is that in other ways, the congestion charging service was quite innovative – paying by SMS, for example, hardly rates a mention now, but was then the result of impressive creative thinking and customer insight. I find that useful, but only because the developer of a third party app has made it simple, and it speaks volumes that it should take a third party to produce the most straightforward way of completing what should be a trivially straightforward transaction.

Now, years later, there seems to have been a change of heart. From 4 January, TfL is introducing ‘Auto Pay’, with an equally admirable concise and precise description:

We’ll automatically record the number of charging days a vehicle travels within the charging zone each month and bill your debit or credit card each month.

That’s a milestone worth celebrating (and in my case at least, worth signing up for), but it’s the hook for this post rather than the point of it. Despite possible appearances to the contrary, the point is not to knock TfL or the congestion charging scheme. It is to recognise that it is easy to mark success by the achievement of technical completeness, while missing something subtle but critical about quality of service.

That is something which should concern all of us involved with the design and delivery of public services. I am trying to find a simple way to express this as a contrast between a system led approach to design and a service based approach. It’s work in progress, because it is too long and lacks the elegant pithiness of the one liners quoted above, but in its current form, it goes something like this.

The traditional approach was to start by designing the systems and processes to deliver the outputs we wanted, and only then to design the front end experience (in the broadest sense, this isn’t just about IT). That meant that the front end was compromised from the outset, but it didn’t matter because the only people who had to use it were staff who had no choice because that was their job and who could be sent on lengthy training courses.

Now we need to start by defining the user experience and outcome we want the system to support, and only then design the tools and processes needed to deliver that support. There is any number of reasons for doing that, but there are two which matter particularly. One is that we want and will increasingly need customers to be users. We can’t send them on training courses; they can walk away or, worse still, find expensive and inefficient ways of making contact if they don’t like the look of what we offer. The other is that unless we do it that way round, there is no way of knowing that the resulting service is as efficient and effective as it can be.

I would have been proud to have been part of the team which delivered the congestion charge: it’s a remarkable achievement.  But I would have been more proud to have been there and said that it wasn’t being designed to be good enough.

Interesting elsewhere – 10 December 2010

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Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • Caterpillar, cynic, evangelist or diva? « Clear message No-one seems to deny digital these days, but many pretend to acknowledge it, whilst harbouring deep seated pessimism and clinging to the notion that the web is an add-on to what we do, rather than integral. Not to be ignored, but far harder to catch than caterpillars. Send them your ideas and offers of support. The email may be printed out before it is read, but you have to try.
  • WHAT’S THE RETURN? | Engine There’s no doubt that return paths are about to change forever. And something we can all look forward to is a world where searching for information is more sensory, more immersive and more creative than ever before.
  • Faster Future: Publishing possibilities now and beyond: Revolution requires Government thinking that understands the web It’s time we adjusted our thinking away from driving people online to deliver services more cheaply and instead use the advantages of online to develop new models in keeping with the network. Ones that make better services with less waste and deliver new services with those who need them. And everyone can join in that revolution.
  • Newspapers are dead as mutton -HG Wells, 1943 (No, they’re not) – Boing Boing The experiment that we are presently conducting as a society is aimed at discovering what kind of information and transactions are really and truly “newspaper material” and not material that we stuffed into the margins of a newspaper because we needed it and newspapers were the only game in town. It may be that there’s nothing left when we’re done, that there’s a better way of delivering every word and every picture in the newspaper than to print it … in which case, newspapers may die, or they may end up being the territory of newspaper re-enactors, the equivalent of hobbyists who… re-enact the Battle of 1066.Or it may be that newspapers do have a small and important and moving clutch of information and stories and images that really, really are better on paper. Maybe the audience for that will be too small and specialized to support a large business, and maybe the audience will club together and treat newspaper like a charity, the way that opera … functions today.
  • Webmaster blog » Guess what? Digital tools are not a panacea for inefficient public services Digital innovation in the public realm requires all sorts of other skills, and links across lots of policy areas. In order to for the impending upheaval of public service delivery to have any positive impact, in my opinion, the decision-makers in that process need to be careful not to become blinded by the promises of well-meaning but often excitable digital enthusiasts.
  • Enough of the stupid – honestlyreal We can mitigate the fragility of systems either by reducing our use of them to a safer threshold within their maximum capacity, by increasing that capacity, or by providing extra resilience. Unfortunately we’re not very good at this.

Petty annoyances

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The links below have two things in common.  They don’t work. And they should.

http://hmrc.gov.uk

http://met.police.uk

http://parliament.uk

http://civilservice.gov.uk

http://hmg.gov.uk/ (though for so grand an address, the results to be found are sadly inconsequential)

Distinguishing a web server from gopher, telnet and the host of other application protocols which jostled for supremacy as they emerged from the primordial swamp of the early internet was important once.  But now it’s not. Now it’s just irritating.

And in a slightly different category, there is really no need to make people remember your preferred hyphenation style.  So this one doesn’t work either.  And it should.

http://hmtreasury.gov.uk/

I am not alone in these thoughts. And other people have been annoyed enough to think about a solution for routing round the damage, though there is no sign that it progressed beyond the original idea. But the time has surely come just to make this right.

Interesting elsewhere – 30 November 2010

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Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • Banking on the Channel Shift — Transform One lesson (of many) that we learned is that it’s not just about systems and technology. It’s very easy for any major organisation to become convinced that multi-channel integration is a massive systems investment programme that is just too scary to take on. The reality [...] is that if you start with a focus on creating integrated customer experiences it is possible to make real headway ahead of the infrastructure challenge [...]. But it starts when you choose to define multi-channel as a priority and break out of the organisational channel silos. [...]
    There are plenty of examples of branch redesign but not much evidence of anyone really reshaping the question. I think the real channel shift challenge is this: should my bank have two teams thinking about a) the role of the branch and b) how to drive direct/digital banking or should my bank be crashing these questions together and thinking about how to deliver an integrated multi-channel experience for customers?
  • How do you operationalize knowledge? So, my point is simply this: KM is the abstract doesn’t help anyone.  There comes a point where you have to drag the theoretical into the actual.  You have to  take knowledge from this abstract plane and operationalize it so people can get some use out of it.
    Put more simply: at some point, you have to write it down and distribute it.  How much thought have you put into this part of it?  Understand that, and you’re halfway there.
  • The New Rules Of Email | Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image I’ve come to accept that my inbox is just one big, never-ending game of Tetris – where the email keeps flowing down into my inbox. In this strange race against time, I’m competing to respond and move the correspondences over into their appropriate file folders. Unfortunately (and much like Tetris), the emails keep stacking up and increasing speeds to the top and it’s, essentially, “game over” for me. It doesn’t end and they are no bonus rounds or extra lives to save me.
  • Don Tapscott: New York Times Cover Story on “Growing Up Digital” Misses the Mark But the evidence suggests that many young people today are using technology to become smarter and more capable than their parents ever could be; and, like Vishal, to accomplish important, perhaps great things. Rather than kids losing their attention spans there is a stronger case to be made that growing up digital is equipping today’s youth with the mental skills, such as scanning and quick mental switching, that they’ll need to deal with today’s overflow of information. The superior performance for many of them, as evidence by university graduation rates show they know when they have to focus, just as the most intelligent members of my generation did. They may think and process information in a different way than most boomers do, but that doesn’t stop them from coming up with brilliant insights, new models of doing business, new ways of collaborating; or, for that matter, creating a carefully edited film as a teenager.
  • Premise: Open Data: How Not To Cock It Up We should celebrate the fact that the political classes are paying attention to open data. And we should celebrate the fact that we are starting to get information that many of us in this room have been clamouring for for years. But we should also realise that the current situation is extraordinary, and if we don’t work together to manage it quite carefully, it could crash from extraordinary to ordinary with considerable speed.And that’s why the title of my talk today – a talk which is addressed to each and every one of you in the audience – is Open Data: How Not To Cock It Up.

    What do I mean by cocking up open data? I mean making making mistakes that result in the flow of data we think is so valuable either drying up, or never starting in the first place. And when I say mistakes, I mean mistakes that we can make – those of us in this room right now, not the politicians.

  • Why Is Everyone Worried About Attention Now? | DMLcentral In times of great technological change like our own, when many of us feel challenged by new ways of responding to the world, it is natural and normal and good that we worry about what the change is doing to our children.  But their video games and texting are the best possible preparation they could have for their digital future.  We have to unlearn old patterns before our neurons lead us sleekly and rapidly to an effortless interface with new technologies
  • Public sector approaches to public cloud have to relax – In-Depth – CIO UK Magazine There’s been a deafening, almost messianic, chorus of “cloud, cloud, cloud” at recent events exploring the future direction of public sector IT. Yet one question remains unanswered: what will happen when the elephant snoring loudly in the wings awakes? You know the one – it’s sporting an ill-fitting straitjacket marked Security.