Putting the social back into security

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DWP has launched a YouTube channel.  It’s not the first for a UK government department – No 10 and the FCO at least were there before.  And there is no easy way of telling whether it is the first government use of YouTube as a campaign channel – that’s one of the problems with emergent classification – but it’s a brave attempt to explore new ways of communicating.  This isn’t about grand policy or prime ministerial speeches – it’s about helping and encouraging lone parents to find their way back to work.

Various thoughts come to mind when watching them:

  • This is very much niche entertainment:  one video has been up for six weeks and has been viewed 1,400 times, the other has been there for a couple of weeks and has been watched 400 times
  • There is a nod to the amateur ethos of YouTube:  the earlier video in particular has shaky camera work and a self-referential knowingness – “say hello to the camera”.  This is not the style of public information films, but also doesn’t quite get past the professional trying hard to look slightly amateur.
  • There is a deliberate blurring between staff and customers.  In this video,
    the Jobcentre Plus lone parent adviser reveals that she is herself a
    lone parent and a past beneficiary of the support which she now gives others.  This is government trying to act like big sister, not look like big brother.
  • YouTube is in many ways a social network – it is about sharing and contributing, not just about passively watching.  Government hasn’t quite worked out how to do that yet:  on the lone parent videos, comments are disabled.  This is still, in its post-modern way, a monologue  not a conversation.
  • But YouTube is more subversive than that.  The conversation is going to happen anyway.  Looking at the videos on the YouTube site, rather than embedded  here, is a different experience.  From this page, there is a splendidly anarchic list of “related videos” – starting with Jobcentre Wierdo and followed by a number of others which don’t quite toe the official line.  It is a success of social engagement of a kind – I suspect the FCO doesn’t have many related videos with their customers setting their experiences to music.  And indeed, looking at Haydon Warren-Gash, British Ambassador in Colombia  sitting behind a desk speaking straight to a static camera, his head framed by the British and Colombian flags, the semiotics point in a very different direction.  Yet even here there is a conversation to be had – viewers can add comments if they want to, though so far none of the 136 viewers has chosen to do so.

One stop security blanket

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Bruce Schneier applies consistent good sense to questions of security, on line and off, both through his blog and his book.    The trouble is that there is lots of good stuff, but it’s hard to find scattered across several years of blogging.  Now he has done a Q&A with readers of Freakonomics, which is both good in its own right and, as a by-product, acts as a useful index to some of his key thoughts.

Congestion tax

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Time. perhaps, to find something positive to say about HMRC and their approach to customers and their data.

Income tax is a system within which people accrue liabilities to pay money to government, which they meet either by not seeing the money in the first place because tax is deducted at source or by paying money directly.  When money is due to be paid, there is a bill and a due date.  If the due date is missed, reminders follow – no doubt getting increasingly strident as time passes.

The congestion charge is another system in which people accrue liabilities to pay money to government.  Money is due to be paid on the day the liability arises and, more recently, can also be paid on the following day, albeit at higher cost.  If that payment window is missed though, there are no reminders, there is simply a penalty.

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There are two differences here.  One is that HMRC behaves as though it is operating a debt collection system while the congestion charge behaves as though it is operating a traffic offence penalty system.  That’s odd to start with, since there is a pretty big difference between parking on double yellow lines or driving through a red traffic light and driving into central London.  The first two are inherently things which should not be done and for which there are penalties, the third is a perfectly legitimate thing to do but for which a payment is required.  So the first problem is that Transport for London – or a least the congestion charging bit – is in a different business from the one it thinks it is in.

The second problem massively reinforces the first.  It is that 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.

Of course this moan is triggered by having to pay £50 for having forgotten to pay £8, so I may not be taking a wholly balanced view.  But two further ways occur to me of not needing to inflict that pain:

  • I live not much more than ten minutes’ walk from the edge of the congestion charging zone, so I, my car and crucially, my record of compliance are all know to TfL.  So if I pay five times and fail to pay the sixth, there’s a pretty obvious assumption to be made about the likelihood that my reason for not paying was dishonest
  • Another bit of TfL runs the oyster card.  The pay as you go version permits small overdrafts, in effect, if the journey to be charged for turns out to be more expensive than the amount stored on the card.  Someone in that position could avoid paying the shortfall by throwing away the card and getting a new one – but TfL clearly assume that most people won’t.  A little bit of leeway reduces congestion at the barriers and probably has a vanishingly small impact on lost revenues.

In other words, there are opportunities to design compliance in, given a willingness to assume that at least some customers intend to be compliant.  Instead, TfL has assumed that non-compliance has to be dealt with separately.  There are all sorts of lessons there for service designers.

Scale fast, fail faster

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"Think big, start small, scale quickly" has become one of those mantras so widely used that the origin has become impossible to discover (where "impossible" naturally means "takes longer than twenty seconds on google").

"Think big" is easy:  there are plenty of people who like doing it and will churn out ideas at the drop of a hat.

"Start small" is also easy:  there are plenty of people – though largely people different from the first group – who relish making a practical difference on the ground and who will deliver the proof of concept or make the pilot happen.

"Scale quickly" is very hard.  It’s hard partly because the problem is recognised but often wrongly identified.  It is seen as a question of rollout:  how do we plan  and deliver the process for copying the change from one location to dozens or hundreds. The answer to that question is good project management.  The harder question is how to reproduce the conditions which made the pilot successful, and to do so reliably and repeatedly.  The answer to that will include good project management but will need to go far beyond it – it’s about leadership, culture, motivation, rewards and more.

Megan McArdle thinks that the difference between starting small and scaling fast is not well appreciated in the public sector:

You get a pilot program: a curriculum, a teaching method, a high-intensity
preschool program (such as the Perry program) for disadvantaged kids. You do a
rigorous study of that pilot. It produces terrific results. Naturally, we should
roll it out everywhere!

Not so fast. That pilot program has a huge administrative staff whose sole
incentive is to ensure that it is meticulously carried out. In the real
world, that curriculum will be put into place by an administrator whose priority
list is crowded with everything from mollifying the latest lunatic on the school
board, to ensuring that she gets out of town for a three day weekend with her
new boyfriend who she really thinks may be The One.

…

The pilot program has buy in from all participants; schools, teachers or
students who don’t like it, don’t believe in it, or don’t want it anyway, have
already naturally dropped out of the sample. They will thus be striving to
actually put it into place as closely as possible as described in the
prospectus. In the real world 60% of everyone will think this is a moronic idea,
and most of the rest will strenuously resent the intrusion on their
autonomy.

Result: what worked beautifully in pilot will generally fail miserably in
wider execution.

It’s worth reading the longer version.

Service Transformation and the First World War

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Each year on 11 November, Teresa Neilsen Hayden writes about the first world war – a compendium of thoughts and links which bring home the enormity of the horror.

Last year, she reported a conversation with a friend:

We were talking about the way the military on both sides kept trying mass “over the top” charges into the no man’s land between the trenches, and taking staggering losses. Doing that a few times would have been bad enough, but in WWI, both sides  kept it up for years.

I said, usually if a general plans and conducts a major battle that winds up taking a pitifully small amount of ground, and gets hundreds of thousands of his troops killed, he’s relieved of command.

Mike said, after a while, all the generals had fought battles like that. If you went on doing the same thing, at least it was something you knew. You wouldn’t do any worse than any other commander. But if you tried something different and it didn’t work, then heaven help you.

Commenters on the post (and this is a blog which is unique in my experience in attract huge numbers of comments while maintaining a meticulously civilised discourse) were quick to draw comparisons with other areas of life.  One, also recalling a past conversation recalled that:

He observed that, in your typical publishing company, if an editor does the things conventional wisdom says he or she should, and they fail to make the company money, that editor has a good chance of being forgiven. Whereas if the same editor tries something different and it fails to make money, the editor’s in trouble.

This always seemed to me a pointed argument against the idea, fondly advanced by business people everywhere, that profitability is the only metric of performance. In fact unprofitable performances are constantly forgiven, provided they’re delivered with unimpeachable conventionality. Businesses like to–need to!–make money. But businesses are also cultures, and cultures need to enforce social norms. Over the years I’ve found that this explains a great deal of institutional folly.

Others made the point even more simply:  “Nobody ever lost his job for buying from IBM”.

Meanwhile, William Heath is frustrated by the ponderousness of change in government:

Who tells CIOs and the IT community what they need to know about customer service, co-creation and human rights? Accenture? Liberty?

It’s not happening. Many of our CIOs are at best pretty Web 1.0 and at worst (in the words last week of a Whitehall big-hitter) just overpaid project managers with poor track records. Meanwhile, who is communicating effectively at Board level about the impact and potential of contemporary technology? Some clunky old management consultancy whose people are too busy defending the old discredited business model to be worth their £3-5k day rate? I don’t think so.

I think there is a connection here.  I have seen projects in government, intended and designed to be small and agile, get effectively destroyed by being captured by the standard ways of making things happen.  Worse still, it is the value that is destroyed, not the cost.

So that gets us back to the question of how to protect and nurture innovation.  That may mean that government departments need to find ways of rewarding failure – so long as it is the right kind of failure.  The barbed wire and the machine guns are real:  there is no excuse for not having learned that cavalry charges don’t work.

The General Theory of Not-Gardening

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The General Theory of Not-Gardening

A Major Contribution to Social Anthropology, Ontology, Moral Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Political Theory and Many Other Fields of Scientific Investigation

Those who hate gardening need a theory. Not to garden without a theory is a shallow, unworthy way of life.

A theory must be convincing and scientific. Yet to various people, various theories are convincing and scientific. Therefore we need a number of theories.

The alternative to not-gardening without a theory is to garden. However, it is much easier to have a theory than actually to garden.

Leszek Kołakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, Chicago:  1990.  Theories of not-gardening then briefly expounded are marxist, psychoanalytical, existentialist, structuralist and analytical philosophy.

With thanks to William for inadvertently reminding me of the existence of this gem. The application of the approach to public sector change management is left as an exercise for the reader.

Growing up in Facebook

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The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and My Space is beyond question.  Their significance – for those who are part of them and for society more generally – is less easily understood.  Whether explicitly intended or not  (and ‘not’ seems much the more likely), they entail an approach to managing identity and personal presence and to the concepts of friendship and relationship which are new and uncharted.

Ben Hammersley, a savvy bloke who clearly understands some of this stuff, has made a programme for Radio 4′s Analysis series, With Friends Like These, exploring "whether social networking sites have changed our notion of privacy and if so, what the consequences for society might be".  You can listen to or download the programme – but for inscrutable BBC reasons, probably only for another couple of days – or read the transcript.

It’s a slightly odd experience.  Right at the beginning, Hammersley talks to some LSE students who all tell him that they live their lives on Facebook.  The rest of the programme is all about how if they really understood what they were doing, they probably wouldn’t do it – threats to privacy, the risk of identity theft, the formalisation of not being somebody’s friend any more, the oddity of knowing a lot about somebody without ever having actually met them all get covered.  But as I listened, the image kept coming to my mind of western social anthropologists studying and trying to describe primitive tribes in New Guinea, with participant observation always keeping an analytical detachment.  The question of why, despite all the risks and dangers being described, so many millions of people persisted in using these networks was left unanswered because the attractions and benefits of being members – and above all the voices and opinions of the users – were absent after the first few minutes. 

The point of all this is not to get at the programme – it’s an intelligent piece, well presented and well worth listening to.  But it prompts some thoughts on both content and process:

  • ‘Online’ never was a single place, but it is becoming an ever more varied one.  Crude measures of internet access and internet use do not begin to capture the richness and variety of people’s engagement.  Designing for the lowest common denominator is unlikely to be a winning strategy.
  • Attitudes to identity management and data sharing underpin approaches and attitudes to many public (and other) services.  Understanding how those attitudes operate in other contexts and how they might be changing is pretty important.
  • Customer understanding comes from understanding customers.  Thinking and talking about customers is important and necessary.  But it isn’t sufficient.

The billion a week habit

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In September this year, the BBC reports that text messages were being sent in the UK at the rate of a bit over a billion a week.   That means that as many text messages are now being sent every week as in the whole of 1999.

Text messaging remains an interesting example of discontinuous change.  Even over a much shorter period, one of the top texting days of 2005, A-level results day with 99.5 million sent, is way below the current daily average of 173 million.

Perhaps we will all look back in another year or two or five and find that slightly odd – in the same way that the rise and fall of the fax machine is beginning to feel like ancient history – because twitter, or pownce or jaiku will have taken that market over.  Or perhaps the direction will have changed again.

Shifting to new channels works better if there is a new channel to shift to

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Genealogy and e-government have long had an unfortunate relationship with each other in the UK.  The great triumph of putting the 1901 census online in January 2002 was followed within three hours  by demand overwhelming capacity and within five days by its being withdrawn altogether for a bit of a rethink – a pause which in the event ran until the following November.  Or as the NAO put it a couple of years later:

The service was designed to provide access to 1 million users, with a peak of 1.2 million users, in a 24 hour period. However, by midday on 2 January 2002, 1.2 million users per hour were attempting to access the site from locations across the world. Between 2 and 6 January 2002, the site continued to experience 1.2 million users per hour, overwhelming the site. On 7 January 2002, the Public Record Office and its contractor, QinetiQ, agreed to close the site to general Internet access to allow QinetiQ to undertake a technical investigation. The website was released to the public on a limited basis on 6 August 2002 and was made fully available to the public on 21 November 2002, since when it has operated effectively.

Now the next row has broken out over the withdrawal of access to paper records of births, marriages and deaths last month, slightly anticipating the online availability of those records which has slipped from "early 2008"  to "mid-2009".  I have no knowledge of what lies behind all this, but on the face of it the gap is an unfortunate one.  There was a lot of talk in late 2001 that the then imminent 1901 census site might work as an encouragement to people to be interested in online government services more generally, even though nobody knew then (and I am not sure that anybody knows now) whether cross-selling in that way was feasible, still less how we might set about doing it.

I doubt that there are any such wider repercussions from this latest issue, even though it does allow the further reinforcement of the idea that all government IT projects invariably fail.  It is also a very public service response:  the hiatus is acceptable because there are no competitive consequences because, in turn, there is no alternative source of supply.

Online genealogy is worth thinking about for more positive reasons as well, though.  Genealogy overall is said to be among the most popular hobbies (though on a quick search I couldn’t find any data on that), and a lot of it now done online.  It seems a fair bet that this is one of the relatively few areas where over 50s are disproportionately highly represented, so prompting a couple of interesting questions.

In what other areas of activity do people use government records (albeit indirectly) for fun?  What other government or quasi-government service might be imagined to have any influence on people’s propensity to get online or do different kinds of things online?  What opportunities (if any) might that create for service development more generally?

But there’s no getting away from the fact that channel shift is difficult without a channel to shift to.