The little yellow book

Posted by Public Strategist

Once upon a time, smaller employers (which was most of them) sent the tax and NICs they had deducted on behalf of their employees to what was then still quaintly known as the Inland Revenue. They wrote a cheque for the amount due and put the cheque in an envelope (kindly supplied by the very helpful revenue people), together with a payslip to ensure that the money was credited to the right account. The payslips came once a year in a yellow book – and seemed to be known as The Yellow Book.

Sometimes, no payment might be due. The system could cope with that within the standard process – the payslip simply recorded no payment and was sent off as normal (a cheque for no money did not seem to be required).

Then things began to change. Smaller companies could use internet banking to make payments electronically, and the still very helpful Revenue provided helpful reference numbers to make that possible. And so the little yellow book, like its little red predecessor, fell victim to the passing of an era.

But there was a problem. It is not possible to send a payment of nothing through the banking system, so what had become the standard process could no longer handle the exception process. In the early years of the wild electronic frontier, it didn’t seem that anybody had thought this through – all you could do was not pay, and then resist the temptation to be irritated by the snarky note that came upbraiding you for having failed to make a payment which wasn’t due. Later (I think – certainly much later in my knowledge), a phone number was provided through which it was possible to tell the Revenue that you weren’t going to give them any money. That was more cumbersome, and jarred with the core process rather than complementing it – and it certainly didn’t have the pleasing zen-like quality which went with sending nothing through the post.

The obvious missing tool was the ability to provide a simple online notification that no payment was due. It took a while, but without any fanfare (and so without my being sure quite when) it has surfaced on the HMRC website. The really striking thing about it is the level of security: there isn’t any. That’s entirely sensible – it’s really quite hard to imagine why anybody should seek fraudulently to represent the absence of a debt, except just possibly those running the business, who would have secured access anyway. Sadly, that level of sensible and pragmatic risk assessment is nowhere near as universal as it should be.

There is something of wider importance lurking behind all this. Graceful exception handling is in some ways made harder by making the core process self-service. It is often argued, for some good reasons, that the attempt to bring the exceptions into the core system is a big driver of cost and complexity, resulting in greater cost, slower delivery and greater risk. A good solution is to find something simple and helpful which, critically, goes with the grain of the core process approach, rather than jarring with it. It has taken a while, but on this small issue, HMRC seem to have done just that.

Blogging for Britain

Posted by Public Strategist

David Miliband has returned to blogging in his new job as Foreign Secretary. Much more interestingly, he is not the only one – the FCO blog page has six shiny new blogs, four by officials and two by ministers. It’s early days – so far the only one of the six with more than one post is Miliband’s own – but it will be a fascinating test of how government adapts to conversational communications.

Buried in an about page, it turns out that this is part of a wider initiative being evaluated as part of Digital Dialogues – "an independent review of ways in which central government can use
information and communication technology (ICT) to enable and enhance
public engagement", commissioned by the Ministry of Justice and carried out by the Hansard Society.

The second phase report has just been published. There’s 160 pages of it which I haven’t had a chance to read yet. The conclusions are a bit anodyne, but the recommendations make up a useful looking set of principles:

Continue reading →

Credit where credit’s due

Posted by Public Strategist

Connecting the bits

Posted by Public Strategist

I need to get a tax disc. In order to be allowed to get a tax disc, I need to get an MoT certificate. That’s simple – the motoring bit of Directgov has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the most useful areas of the site.

Step 1 – Look for MoT information – and easily navigate to an information-rich page.
Directgov MoT page
It is ready to tell me what an MoT test is, when I need one, what actually gets tested, and what to do if I am unhappy about it. What it doesn’t tell me is the one bit of information I want to know: where I can get one done. A little light googling finds several commercial websites purporting to provide this information (though with suspiciously similar backends). It is completely unclear whether the information they provide is either comprehensive or up to date, and there is nothing remotely as useful as opening hours. One site offers an online booking service – but has signed up all of thirty testing stations across the country, which is not much of a dent in the total of 18,300.

Step 2 – Actually find a testing station. It turns out that the most straightforward approach in this bit of south London is simply to follow railway lines, since railway arches seem to be the MoT tester’s natural habitat. I hit the jackpot with three different testing stations in adjacent arches. Only one of the three is in the database – and all of them are closed.

Step 3 – Go back when they are open. Test done by efficient and friendly Maltese mechanic who turns out to be bosom buddy to the Maltese builder who does odd jobs for us. I get my MoT certificate – and I also get an advisory notice telling me that there is wear on the brakes. Friendly Maltese mechanic tells me not to worry and that there is not the slightest urgency to do anything about it. The advisory notice doesn’t seem to be very sure what it is. It is printed on a VOSA form, just like the test certificate itself – but the rubric says “They are the personal opinion of the Tester and are not standards set by the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency”. The result is that I am precisely no wiser at all than I was before. Reading the rubric is itself a bit of challenge, since it is printed in orange ink on an orange background.

Step 4 – Go back to Directgov and get a tax disc. The cross-reference to the new MoT certificate is automatic and the whole process takes seconds. It’s a good service in its own right – and of course dramatically better than the alternative of queueing up at a post office. Even so, the final confirmation page tells me

Should your tax disc not arrive after 5 working days, then please phone us on 0870 850 4444 and choose option 4 then option 1 and be prepared to quote the Reference Number.

So what’s the point of setting all this out in mind-numbing detail?

Even here, in one of the slicker services, the product and provider based approach is not far below the service. The MoT providers are private garages, mostly very small businesses. The strong impression given is that they are seen as being outside the government system and process (particularly odd given the level of integration at the back end). That’s a distinction which is wholly uninteresting to me as a service user. I am very glad that step 4 has been so much improved – but it would be even better if 1 to 3 worked better too.
Although the test itself is unavoidably physical, it is the arrangements around the test which create the sense of hiatus, not the test itself. It’s an information problem, which ought to have an information solution.
I was surprised at how confused I was by how the regulatory and advisory elements came together.
Putting the reference to the “where’s my tax disc?” service at the end of step 4 is a smart move – but if it’s worth mentioning, why can’t it be a dedicated phone number, rather coming at the end of a menu tree? There’s an idea which floats around that fewer telephone numbers is good, more is bad. But this seems a pretty clear example of why that’s just too simplistic a way of thinking about it.

So plenty of food for thought – and I have only had to pay HMG £230 to prompt the ideas.

Black wires

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Chris Anderson has two network cables:

On my desk at work I have two ethernet cables. One is black and one is white. The black one is connected to our corporate network. I use that one when I want to print things. I could also use it for Internet access and stuff, but I don’t because the corporate network blocks a number of ports, including those used for Skype and Second Life. It’s also pretty slow.

The white cable, meanwhile, is a standard consumer-grade DSL connection to the Internet, with nothing blocked at all. Our local IT staff installed it by popular demand, possibly without checking with headquarters (we love our local IT staff!). It’s fast. I use it all the time.

These two cables are a handy metaphor for the two worlds of corporate computing: end users and the IT department. The chasm between them has never been greater, in part because the tools available on the wide open web have never been better.

I have only one – the black one. Except that it’s grey, which seems significant, somehow. Living in a black cable world is an odd existence. It isn’t just about the connection to the outside world – though what is allowed and what is blocked has a strange capriciousness to it, for me it’s more the frustration of not being able to control quite basic elements of my working environment.

Of course that’s not without reason – as Chris fully acknowledges. Those reasons are good and compelling. Inevitably, though, trade-offs are made. The problem is that the weighting doesn’t put any value on the time or energy – let alone the frustration – of end users. In other words, producer capture is almost automatic, which makes the social part of the problem just as interesting as the technical part.

Update: Jeremy Gould, a Whitehall webmaster, has also spotted Chris Anderson’s post and seems to reach a similar conclusion. He in turn links to a pithy post on the risks of not offering controlled access to the new stuff – which is essentially the old saw that the internet and its users will route round damage and that censorship (in any form) is damage that will be routed round. And to complete the chain, a commenter to that post links to a broader argument that the internet-immersed generation will just walk away from organisations which do not recognise their communication needs and preferences – and that smart companies will embrace their characteristics, not reject them:

Born between 1977 and 1996, the Net Generation grew up immersed in a digital world. The internet dominates their personal and social lives, from instant messaging to peer-to-peer filesharing to virtual communities. They publish and participate in online social networks and swap ideas as easily as they swap songs and videos.

So what happens when one of these fresh college graduates joins a firm and finds a staid, traditional intranet with a tightly controlled publishing model?

They hate it.

This is a very real problem for companies trying to attract and
retain new talent. These twentysomethings operate on principles of openness, participation and interactivity. If a company’s technology infrastructure, including the intranet, does not encourage free communication and collaboration, it misses a big opportunity. Worse, it alienates these younger, internet-savvy employees.

This issue is obviously bigger than just the IT department. It involves the culture of the entire organization.

Betting on the future

Posted by Public Strategist

There are many metrics of channel shift, but in some ways advertising spend is among the more interesting. In some crude way, it represents a collective judgement by a group of people with a strong incentive to make good judgements about the way attention, interest and importance are shifting.
In effect we are looking at a prediction market in progress.

The numbers tell a strong story:

In 2006 £2.016 billion was spent online by advertisers targeting the 31 million (GfK NOP) people connected to the internet. The growth has increased the internet’s share of all advertising revenues to 11.4%, up from 7.8% in 2005.

The results reveal that expenditure on the internet overtook
advertising in national newspapers, which last year recorded growth of
0.2% to £1.9 billion and a market share of 10.9%. In 2006, the internet
was just over half the size of the TV advertising market, which
experienced a fall of 4.7% to £3.9 billion.

In the beginning were words

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In what was, for me, the early period of e-government, I remember sitting in an attic in Whitehall (quite literally), reading the Cluetrain Manifesto which had been published a few months before, in April 1999. It was an important book not because it marked the beginning of something – the internet and e-commerce were no longer new – but because it captured some of the critical characteristics of what was to come.

Its authors were not shy or self-deprecating. They thought they had seen the future – and in many ways the future has shown them to have been right. They started the book with 95 Theses - these were the first dozen:

Markets are conversations.
Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

“Markets are conversations” has since become a cliché, but it is a thought which is no less important for that. In government, though, it has yet to become a cliché, because the power of the thought has barely been recognised at all. Government still tends to default to monologues, not to conversations.

That happens at (at least) three levels. The first and most obvious is in the delivery of services by government as service provider to users of those services (government as instantiation of the democratic will is a slightly different issue). To be fair, most commercial service providers aren’t very good at this either, but enough do it well to show it can be done.

The second is in the design and delivery of services – again between government and service users. Trying to get a deep understanding of what people want and need and of how they want and need it is also still relatively immature in government.

The third conversation is the one among the designers and deliverers of services – and is in some ways the least mature of all. There is no possibility of joining up services without the providers of the separate services talking to each other. There is no possibility of developing a shared understanding of the customer as a precursor to addressing the full range of their needs without those who have fragments of that understanding having a conversation about how to fit different pieces of customer insight together.

It is that third conversation which is the prompt for this post. From the outside, central government can look monolithic. From the inside, it can often feel balkanised. The conversation fails to start, or starts and quickly peters out because the forces of fragmentation are greater than the forces of integration. That has real and important consequences. It leads to the endless proliferation of websites and the consequent lack of coherence or critical mass. It leads to solutions which are seen as competitive rather than collaborative and the consequent cost of repeated reinvention of wheels.

That’s not a new insight, nor, I suspect, a particularly controversial one. There has been a number of attempts over the years to address the problem, some more successful than others, but none so far which has made systematic and sustained progress to the sense of common purpose and endeavour which is arguably the only possible foundation for addressing the symptoms.

Those who seek to facilitate the third conversation are therefore making a contribution which they may not understand themselves and which is unlikely to be fully appreciated by those whom they seek to influence. It may be easier to facilitate the conversation as a challenging outsider than as a reforming insider – though in the end it is only those who are or who become insiders who can deliver the necessary change. So the challenging outsider can be an invaluable catalyst, allowing the bigger reaction to happen.

All of that takes us to Ideal Government – an inspiring mixture of the faintly despairing and the fundamentally optimistic. It is a thoughtful examination of ways in which government is not working well mixed with constructive suggestions of how it might do better. It has generated the Public Office, which seeks to take the conversation from the third category to the second. And it is wondering where it should go from here.

My answer has two parts. The first is pretty obvious from what I have said so far: it’s the conversation. The conversation has started and is a powerful one but even now has not yet fully broken out into the mainstream (as another Ideal Government post illustrates with horrible clarity). So the second part of the answer is the adoption curve. In the terms of the classic diffusion of innovations approach, we are moving from the innovators to the early adopters, but it’s hard to argue that we have reached even the early majority. Until that has happened, it isn’t surprising that decisions, policies and systems are still being based on the foundation of the traditional approaches not the new ones. There is bound to be a lag, and it has strong tendencies to be a long one.

So what does Ideal Government – and all those interested in government being more ideal – need to do?

continue the conversation among themselves – but more explicitly for the purpose of creating energy and enthusiasm for taking the conversation wider
recognise that even now, all this is still a minority sport – which means that working out who falls in to the next few percentiles (and then the next and the next and the next…) is pretty important. Focusing now on the 98th percentile will lead to tears – ours, not theirs
recognising that some interests are shared – but not all are. Suppliers to government, for example, often have great insights (because they too stand outside in a potentially helpful way), but also have a huge investment in the current model. Theirs can sometimes be an overlapping conversation – but it is not the same one.
receive the thanks of a grateful nation. But they might have to wait a bit for that.

Government IT disasters

Posted by Public Strategist

The Guardian reports today:

High street banks have delayed the introduction of a new payments clearance system that would reduce the time it takes to move money between accounts from days to seconds.

The Office of Fair Trading and the Treasury had put pressure on the banks to replace existing three-day payment clearing, which dates back to the Victorian era, with electronic age speed. But the banks – which earn interest from customers’ cash while it is stuck between accounts – said yesterday that the scheme was delayed by six months.

Apacs, which represents the banks, promised in December 2005 that the faster payments service would go live in November this year. But Apacs said yesterday that while the main infrastructure was working, the trials between banks and between each bank and the centre were more time consuming and more complicated than anticipated.

The faster payments service was originally due to cost the banks £50m to £65m including distributing millions of hand held “chip and pin at home” machines to ensure online account holders could authenticate transactions. Now it is expected to cost substantially more.

Which is, of course, not a government IT disaster at all. In fact, there is nothing in the article which suggests any kind of disaster, though no doubt it’s a story Apacs would prefer not to have to see.

Seven years ago, Intelligent Finance was going to be the trendy new online version of the Halifax – and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. That was a tad embarrassing, since the advertising campaign was already underway. It finally creaked into life five months late. But some Inland Revenue people were understandably irritated that it was planned system downtime for their new online tax filing service which got coverage in the news pages rather than in the business section.

Two or three years after that, I remember watching Peter Gershon lambasting a conference load of IT company executives with data showing that IT projects were generally late, over budget, and under specification – with little difference between those in the private and public sector.

Government IT disasters continue to be a problem. But government IT problems still seem more readily to be disasters.

There is more than one clear desk strategy – part 2: The revenge of the trees

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From The Economist, 19 December 2002 (accessible here, but you probably need a subscription to read the whole thing):

Knowledge workers take notes not in order to store information, but because the process of note-taking helps them to learn. Once taken, notes are rarely reviewed. According to a study of research workers reported in “The Technology of Team Navigation”, a paper by Edwin Hutchins, a psychologist, while 64% kept their notes for years, 44% hardly ever referred to them.

The relationship between workers and their clutter is similar. People spread stuff over their desks not because they are too lazy to file it, but because the paper serves as a physical representation of what is going on in their heads—“a temporary holding pattern for ideas and inputs which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use”, as Ms Kidd puts it. The clutter cannot be filed because it has not been categorised. By the time the worker’s ideas have taken form, and the clutter could be categorised, it has served its purpose and can therefore be binned. Filing it is a waste of time.

Some random supporting data for the previous post

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Four years ago pretty much to the day, on 5 August 2003, I bought at 64Mb data stick for £28.99.

A bit less than two years ago – on 15 November 2005, I bought a 1Gb data stick for £35.99 .

Today, exactly the same 1Gb data stick is available for £7.99.

Cost per megabyte has dropped by over 98% in four years.

In June, I was given a 64Mb data stick at a trade show. It had quite an interesting presentation on it. I have looked at the presentation. I will throw the data stick away – it has no value.

Extrapolate four more years, and 1Gb would cost 16p. Assuming that nobody would bother to sell one of those, £7.99 would buy 50Gb.

Data sticks are a pretty expensive way of buying storage. A 750Gb hard disk already costs less than 20p per gigabyte.

*
As it happens, on 9 August 2004, I bought a 160Gb hard drive for £68.99, or about 43p per gigabyte.

And on 5 October 2006, I bought a 500Gb hard drive for £139.99, or about 28p per gigabyte.

Extrapolate that four more years, and you get to less than 5p per gigabyte.

Whether a lifetime’s data will fit into something the size of a speck of dust probably doesn’t matter very much – being a few orders of magnitude out and ‘only’ needing a sugar lump sized things doesn’t really change the implications. Price is going to be a more important driver than physical size.

To extrapolate four years’ data in a straight line over seventy years is self-evidently complete folly.

[small print: All prices exclude VAT. And no, I am not so sad that I remember any of this, but I buy most of this stuff through an outfit which still has every transaction back to 2001 online.]