E-GOVERNMENT
15th December 2004
Speech presented to the Institute for Public Policy Research in London
on Wednesday 15th December 2005 at their Conference: 'Is e-Government
Better Government?'
IT professionals now have nearly as big a credibility problem as
journalists and politicians. Few voters believe electronic government
will deliver benefits other than to the IT industry. Most members of
parliament are interested in better government, not "e" government. They
believe the "e" stands for expensive, not for efficient. Meanwhile the
IT industry blames government for not being an intelligent customer and
looks forward to the new Chief Information Officer, Ian Watmore and his
network of departmental information officers ushering in a new age of
good practice and professionalism. But they are civil servants picking
up the pieces after ministers have agreed impossible policies. Ian's job
will be as impossible as that of his predecessor, Andrew Pindar, unless
we can break three cycles of bad practice:
The first is driven by political demands for "big pictures" , suppliers
need for big contracts to cover the cost of selling to government and a
belief that the technology will do anything, without thinking about the
people who will have to use it to do something that is worth doing.
The second is initiativitis, the minister has a speech to make and needs
to announce something, doesn't have to be big, but has to be different,
to get into the press. The result is a flow of consultations and bidding
games, paralysing those trying to deliver mainstream services.
The third is the willingness of IT consultants and suppliers to promise
whatever the minister wants, however impossible, provided they are well
paid for taking the blames when it goes wrong.
All three cycles are driven from the top. The Minister announces a
programme to transform the service. His officials commission a
consultancy exercise involving high paid "experts". The experts rarely
consult front line staff (they are too busy fire-fighting). Nor do they
consult the customers (anyway the public sector does not have customers,
it only has taxpayers, recipients, patients, suspects and victims - none
with any choice). Then there is a bidding game, designed to ensure
no-one still in the department can be held to account if it goes wrong.
Before most big programmes start they are already late, crippled by
compromise and doomed.
The solutions are not new: think big (basic principles and
interoperability frameworks), start small (departmental and agencies'
experiments) and build on success (scaling and linking that which
works).
The pieces are in place to reform the process: Gateway Reviews, e-Gif
standards and Framework Contracts. But most departments are still stuck
in command and control time-warps, resisting external reviews, inventing
their own standards and awarding grandiose contracts to those big enough
to survive the bidding process.
So what should be the benefits of e for efficient government and how do
we ensure they are achieved. I'd like to target three: systems that meet
the needs of those who use them, systems that are usable by human beings
and systems that work reliably.
Government services are used most by the elderly, the frail, the sick,
the unemployed, the disabled and the disadvantaged. Not by the middle
classes who understand how government departments work. Those who most
need help want to visit one place, usually the Post Office, Citizens
Advice Bureau, Doctor's Surgery or Community Centre and get some-one to
do it for them. And if they can't get there, they want their home help
or some-one they can trust to do it for them.
That means one-stop-shop access and data sharing as requested by the
customers, not as permitted or forbidden by the current morass of
legislation. Even the Lord Chancellor admits that the current position
on Data Protection is "almost incomprehensible".
But as in so many areas it is not the "e" that is the problem. It is the
people processes around the "e". And most of the current generation of
IT professionals have had no training in these. I had a researcher look
up the accreditation processes of the British Computer Society. Twenty
five years ago the British Computer Society Part 1 exam included
mandatory sections on organisational behaviour and systems analysis.
Today most Computer Science Degrees are narrowly technical. So we have
all those systems that do everything they say but are unusable by those
who run most public services, let alone those who need to access them.
I hear calls to provide access by text and mobile phone - but how many
pensioners can operate the keys, even if they can read the screen. Why
not save the money and commission organisations like the charity
Abilitynet to advise on how to better use the facilities already built
into Windows and the many alternatives to mouse and keyboard.
Finally voters want systems that work. And I am not just referring to
DWP. If your always-on Internet connection was a life support system,
how many times a week would you be dead.
I came into politics late in life after a career providing broadcast
equipment around the world. I believe in real broadband, not herky-jerky
small screen over a shared 512k pipe, rather like a party line in the
1950 except that it slows down when the neighbours use it rather than
allowing you to listen in. But even if BT were to wind the speeds up and
transition to voice over IP can we afford to be critically reliant on a
single network. Most of our national and international networks pass
through a handful of choke points and most local communities can be
taken off air by a single incident.
We need to pull together government communications spend, as part of the
James and Gershon agendas, to help pull through investment in competing
networks which do not share the same vulnerabilities. This government
recognised the need several years ago but instead of building on the
work of the DfES Regional Broadband Consortia to connect up every
schools and college or the NHS to connect every surgery, they created
another tier of bureaucracy in a different department, the DTI Regional
Aggregation Boards, to collect up the drips that reached the local ends
of the funding drainpipes.
Finally the question of trust. Would you trust an e-mail from a
government department inviting you click for details of new benefit any
more than one from your bank or service provider asking you to click to
download a new security feature. Confidence in "e" has nose-dived over
recent months and there is no sign that this government understands the
consequences of e-crime for its e -agenda despite the excellent work of
EURIM and IPPR in this area.
To recap: the benefits should be systems that meet the needs of those
who use them, are usable by human beings and that work reliably - but
until we have some success stories no-one will believe in the benefits
That means that while we can and should think big, we have to start
small and build on success and concentrate on removing the obstacle to
good practice at every level, including at the top - and by that I mean
ministers and their advisors, not just those tasked with carrying out
their wishes.
And I do not see that change happening under a Chief Information
Officer. It needs a Cabinet Minister with the seniority and personal
clout and credibility to make his or her colleagues listen. In the
meantime, thank you for listening.
