Public Strategist

One of the more interesting breakout workstreams was on ‘the trust cluster’ – which unfortunately was not the one I was in.  I did though have a very interesting conversation with one of the presenters in that group. Malcolm Crompton, who was until recently Australia’s privacy commissioner and is now the MD of an outfit called Information Integrity Solutions.

Malcolm’s paper for the summit is well worth looking at, both for its content and for its comprehensive links to other sources. His argument is that ‘With care, vigorous debate, and a lot of hard work, we will still have private lives in 20 years from now and inconceivably good government services.’

One of the things Malcolm is currently working on is setting up a private sector provided identity management arrangement for Australia through the banks which draws on the BankID system developed in Sweden.  they in turn describe what they are doing as:

The Swedish Government has embarked on a programme to support the development of so-called “24 -hour authorities�, and is working with its own departments, municipalities and other authorities to facilitate the introduction of this service. This service generally presupposes a secure electronic identification and signature system, such as that offered by BankID.

For example, Rikskatteverket (The National Tax Board) and Riksförsäkringsverket (The National Social Insurance Board) websites are now fully operational, and both offer their customers access to BankID.

There is increasing interest in the facilities offered by the BankID concept and provided via the member banks.

Members of the public can identify themselves and sign documents from authorities, companies and other organisations on the Internet by using BankID’s electronic identification and signature system, the customer’s identification having been previously guaranteed by the member bank.

Authorities, companies and other organisations can check the customer’s identity and signature by using computer software developed by a specialist company working in conjunction with the member bank.

David Osborne wrote Reinventing Government over ten years ago, and has suffered the fate of many of his ideas becoming received wisdom, without any particular recognition that he had them (or at least gathered and published them) first.   His current big theme is The Price of Government, the core idea of which is that government is in permanent fiscal crisis – and that even more than before, traditional bureaucracies will not be able to survive in this changed world.

IT, he says, can make things a little faster – but that just makes the customers frustrated faster.  More holistically, he has five Cs which need to be addressed:

• Core – purpose
• Consequences – rewards and threats
• Customer – empowering and accountable to
• Control – moving power away from the top and the centre
• Culture – changing habits, hearts and minds.

To get to the core, his solution is a radical approach to public sector budget setting, moving away from questions such as what to cut and what to tax, which tend to ignore the vast bulk of spend, and get answers focused on managing pain before the next election.  Instead, he suggests a four step process:

• Decide how much revenue to raise – easy to identify what citizens are willing to pay from historical data.
• Identify which outcomes matter most to citizens
• Divide the money between outcomes – on the basis of how much they are worth,  not how much they cost.
• Deliver the outcome
  • Experts go to buy the outcome, based on key indicators and a cause and  effect map
  • Challenge is to improve the outcomes at a set price

In effect, this is a slightly specialised zero-based budgeting technique.  David was pretty gung-ho about existing institutions having no right of continued existence, and no presumption that they would get all or any of the work.  The technique has been applied in a dozen or so US jurisdictions – state, county and municipality.  One example he gave was that lifetime health outcomes are only 20% attributable to healthcare (lifestyle is by far the most important determinant), with implication that budgetary provision should be massively switched to preventative measures.  It wasn’t clear how this addressed the needs of people whose life had already been unhealthy and who therefore needed medical intervention, not how acute care worked in this model, but the state of Washington was said to be very happy about it all.

I asked him how he thought this would work in practice where budgets were committed as a result of long-term contracts in areas such as IT and buildings. Perhaps not surprisingly, he didn’t really have an answer, beyond suggesting shorter contracts.

Laurence Millar, the New Zealand government CIO said that NZ had been doing this for years, and felt that they had got most of the efficiency benefits from improving outputs – so the question was now how to improve outcomes.  Osborne effectively said the approach didn’t change, to which Millar responded that outcomes were often multi-causal and involved a number of different agencies, and that identifying and apportioning the contribution of each was far from straightforward. NZ hadn’t yet cracked that problem and was looking for help – but I don’t think Millar thought he was getting any.

Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prove your point. PowerPoint is a terrible tool for making written documents, that’s what word processors are for.

- argues Garr Reynolds in a post on his blog, Presentation Zen.  Lots more good thinking to be found there, including some splendid excoriation (with illustrations):

When you are one of the most powerful business figures in the world, it’s better if your presentation visuals do not resemble a cereal box.

Mark Say has his doubts:

On a couple of weeks reflection, and a few conversations with people around Whitehall, my initial impression of the Transformational Government
paper is unchanged: the success of the strategy will depend largely on
what the customer group directors and the Service Transformation Board
do to break down the old silos.

I’m impressed by the intentions, but believe this can’t be done without
a few heads being banged together, and I’m not convinced that the paper
gives them the authority to bang those heads.

The customer group directors are responsible for “cutting across the
organisational boundaries�, i.e. telling different government bodies to
share information, give outsiders access to their systems and spend
money on systems that would be used by other organisations.

If they hit resistance they can take it up to the Service
Transformation Board. In turn, its members have the rank to lay down
the law in their own departments. But what if they are not inclined to
do so? It’s one of the enduring characteristics of government that the
players are happy to agree with something in principle, but then decide
that it’s not really practical in their own neck of the woods.

The strategy document says the board can “challenge inconsistency or
deviation from agreed standards or best practice�. I can’t help
thinking that “challenge� does not give it the power to kick dissenters
up the rear end. It’s the kind of language that’s common in government
documents, promising much, but just fuzzy enough to provide a way out.

The question of authority is compounded by the role of a minister.
These efforts are only going to stick if there is someone at Cabinet
level ready to chuck their weight around. In the few years that the
Cabinet Office has been in charge of central e-government we haven’t
seen a lot of ministerial enthusiasm. John Hutton made some encouraging
noises for the strategy’s launch, but he was literally gone (to the
DWP) by the end of the day. Two weeks later he hasn’t been replaced,
which reinforces the impression that nobody in government takes the
Cabinet Office position all that seriously. Whoever gets the job is
unlikely to be one of the heavyweights.

I’ll acknowledge that this comes from a journalist’s perspective, and
most of us hacks have a cynical streak running through us, but I need
more convincing. And for the record, I would also be delighted to be
proved wrong.

Q:  What’s your view of the National eBenefits Project?

A:  Should I roll on the floor laughing?

Glyn Evans, who provided the answer, is in charge of IT for Birmingham, one of the largest local authorities in the country.  Even more significantly, he has a well-earned reputation both there and from his previous job in the same role at Camden as an innovator in customer-focused IT-supported services – he is no luddite.

His more considered response was that this was one of several of the national projects where the real value came from learning from the experience, rather than from the products developed during the experience.  Which says it all, rather neatly.

I went to the launch of the final report of the Work Foundation’s research project on public services and ICT.  There seems to be less substance to this one – and a bit more setting up straw targets in order to knock them down again.  Some of the earlier material they produced had more value – all three reports in the series are available here.

What they did have was Michael Bichard as a guest speaker -  the first Chief Executive of the Benefits Agency, and with a more recent interest in information sharing from his role as chair of the Soham inquiry.  In his view

1. IT projects need to meet a business need
2. IT innovations are always as much about cultural change as about technology
3. IT projects tend to have too broad a specification – there is an attempt to solve too many problems by a single system, which then can’t be delivered
4. Staff who are users are not sufficiently involved in design
5. There are not enough business leaders who understand the potential of IT and who have the confidence to deal with IT professionals.  Conversely, there are not enough IT professionals who can deal with organisational issues.  The two together result in a "chasm of miscommunication"
6. Organisations have not come to terms with the importance of information sharing and information management.  Information management is seen as boring, and the systems (or the absence of systems) which support are not understood by senior management.
7. Organisations are not doing enough to develop the skills needed to deliver personalised services through service design and re-design – there is a need for a School of Public Sector Service Design.  IT is being used to improve efficiency, not to transform services.
8. There is a shortage of project management skills – not surprisingly, since they have been undervalued in the public sector for thirty years.

In the discussion which followed, Glyn Evans suggested a couple more, notably that change management needed to be distinguished from project management; most project managers didn’t understand change management.

Claiming a pension, 1908 style:

An application for a
pension begins at the Post-office. Here forms of claim may be obtained,
and if you cannot write very well or are not a good hand at
understanding print the postmaster will help.

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Just found from a time capsule.

A seminar at the Berkman centre at Harvard was billed as being about:

how Germany’s transition to offering welfare services online has created new responsibilities for German citizens

David Weinberger provides an account here.  Some interesting implications for integration between services – and so for the boundary issues which need to be addressed in each of our information, channels and business strategies.

There is something oddly beautiful about this animation of flight patterns over the US, with the Europeans arriving like a meteor shower just over half way through.

(Small print – it’s a 9 meg Quicktime movie, so it won’t work on DOI)