If you care about how citizens, businesses or public servants experience their daily lives then this book is for you. If you are proposing, designing or delivering public policy this is a vital read.
This is the most important book for public services in years. It might look like it’s meant for technologists, but it’s not. This book is about the future of public services. It sets out an architecture for how more effective, proactive and empathetic services can improve lives. It’s a map for how public services can be better.
We need policy makers, organisational leaders and all those who influence them to read and understand the power of what this book is setting out: That Internet age thinking and technologies can radically improve public services.
That may sound obvious. It many ways it is. But the reality of how to do that in a practical, ethical and secure way has often been lost in the detail. So I mean this as the highest compliment when I say Richard Pope has built on the work of others to put together the clearest ever map of the future we should build.
This book unlocked and connected so much of my emergent thinking. It was beautifully clarifying. Two examples:
We love to talk about data sharing in public services. How, if only we could do, then we would do wonderful things. Then we bemoan how very hard it all is. Richard slices right through this by calling data sharing out as merely bad photocopies of data. In fact, we need data access for the vast majority of use cases. In other words simple access to the specific pieces we need and in many cases just check point access to a credential (via APIs if you will) to ask “is this Bob?” Or “is Alice in education?” That shift in framing alone is so powerful. And then Richard builds around this to set out how transparency and accountability can fit into a broader trust landscape.
Another is Richard’s exposing the ‘efficiency trap’. He calls out tendencies to make the status quo easier and cheaper for government with digital, without making anything better for the people it’s supposed to serve. Reducing burdens for users, and improving things for them, should be the north stars we follow.
It’s such a clear and helpful book filled with deep insight. It’s a message from the future that we need to grasp right now.
As Richard writes, the heat death of the universe will happen before we complete “transformation” at the current pace of form by form or service by service working. A shift in thinking and approach is needed. This is it.
Jason Kitcat 