But this isn’t to say that there isn’t something interesting going on, there is. Machine learning, data science techniques, large language models and all the other stuff being labelled as ‘AI’ are something public servants need to keep a watching brief on, and carefully experiment with. To that end I’ve been sharing some reading I’ve found helpful with colleagues, and I’ve brought all that into one place here.
Benedict Evans is, to my mind, one of the best commentators and analysts out there and his latest essay is extremely helpful for thinking things through: AI and the automation of work.
I really enjoyed a session on Large Language Models (LLMs) at our away day. So many great discussions delving into the philosophy of knowledge. Two recent articles fed into my thinking for the event. Firstly this one in MIT Technology Review exploring why asking an LLM to complete a test like the legal bar exam, is a flawed approach to understanding LLM’s capabilities. Secondly Simon Willinson posted the transcript of his recent sort of ‘year in LLMs’ talk which really helps to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the current state of the art.
Innovation professor Ethan Mollick writes of his concerns about what the “write this for me” button powered by LLMs means for productivity and meaning. I don’t know if I agree but it’s thought provoking. I have heard that HMRC are already receiving LLM-created letters seeking to reduce people’s taxes with false understandings of tax law. But it still adds to their workload.
Here’s a report of a prototype powered by GPT-4 that lets you draw software that then gets coded for you. What the quality of that code is, I don’t know. But an interesting possible future for our work?
I’m sceptical of the productivity claims being made for Large Language Models (LLMs), but constantly searching for new analysis and insight into this field. Manchester University’s Professor Richard Jones has written a fascinating blog post on this topic, featuring a really interesting example on the use of AI in protein folding for pharmaceuticals. Definitely worth a read.
Milton Mueller, a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, The Basic Fallacy Underlying the AI Panic, is a punchy argument against fears that “AI will take over”.
I write this post with some trepidation. Let me begin with the incantation that this is my personal view and not government policy in any way. So why trepidation? Because I fear I may be treading on some dearly held assumptions that have been core to much work and countless business cases over many years.
Still, let me give this an airing because I know many colleagues feel frustrated when their work in public service digital (or DDaT, or tech or data science, you get the idea) is seen as a cost rather than an investment. They risk becoming relegated to ‘back office services’, or ‘overhead’ in business planning conversations.
When that happens I fear this is a category error – confusing digital work with the likes of estates and audit, with no disrespect for those important professions intended! It is perfectly rational to have a conversation about estates as a cost centre, an organisation could have smaller, cheaper offices or change its desk ratio to reduce their spend on estates. Doing so doesn’t however fundamentally change the core business.
With digital, by coming in hard on the “we can save money through channel shift/reducing paper use/improving accuracy” type arguments we have pigeon-holed ourselves in the same boat.
Do we really think that since the 1950s the public sector has actually saved money through the introduction of digital technologies? Billions are spent running and building these systems. In an alternative world, with no transistors, what would those billions be spent on? I suspect the money would be spent on delivering and administering core public services and the cost of non-digital administration would not have hugely grown. In our reality our spend on digital services, support and all the associated stuff is a major and growing part of public spending. Is that a bad thing? No, because I would argue it is enabling ways of serving the public that were never previously possible. But they aren’t necessarily cheaper.
To put it another way, as Benedict Evans does eloquently in his recent essay on automation, the introduction of spreadsheets did not reduce the amount of accounting or analysis done. Indeed we have more accountants and analysts than ever before, and the spend on them is consequently greater. Similarly in collecting more structured data in public services, whatever we’ve saved on clipboards and pencils, is dwarfed by the growth in data scientists and tools to support them. I would happily argue this is a great investment to better inform decision-making and continuous improvement, but it is undoubtedly costing more money.
I’ve sat on drafts of this post for quite some time, because in some ways it feels heretical to say this when so much of the narrative has been “faster, better, cheaper” and I’ve previously leaned on that rhetoric too, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes there are savings to be made in a tactical sense – with some channel shift here or on-demand printing there. But zoom out and I feel we’re missing a trick if we don’t move away from “efficiency” to the more vital question, what can we do today for the public benefit which wasn’t possible before?
There has been a tsunami of hype recently about Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Bard and so on. To me it has felt quite similar to previous hype cycles, such as with blockchain – “the end of banks” vs “the end for programmers”. For a long time I would get frustrated with people leaping into the latest ‘hot’ technology because I felt they weren’t understanding the hype cycle nor the complexities of how technology really works. However, now I think something more fundamental is going on: In essence, people are consciously or subconsciously, trying to find ways around the long slow hard work of delivering fundamental change (and for me this is specific to work in public services).
Just chucking in some extra technology doesn’t deliver genuine change. Through decades of hard-won experience we know that technology-led change just does not work. It’s only through multidisciplinary teams working in a user-centred way iterating on user feedback that genuine, lasting improvement happens — it is culture change working in step with technology. This is the way set out in the UK service standard, through which we have been able to fundamentally reimagine (some) services and make a positive difference.
I very much know there’s still such a long way to go on the change journey. It is hard yards and we are at the very beginning. It can’t be led by technology, it’s about people and making a difference. When there is so much legacy tech, with poor data models around, I do really understand the wishful thinking that something new could skip the pain of sorting it all out. I know, I feel the pain. But actually doing the hard yards of building the right culture, the right data structures and the right services is what needs to come first.
The tools, technologies and the connectivity of the Internet (a la Loosemore) have allowed us to do public services in fundamentally different ways with a very different cost model, but that alone is not enough. So adding the newest hype technology will never leapfrog lasting change of our culture, behaviours, and imaginations. Indeed, I think the most important shift technological change has delivered is how it has opened our minds to genuinely re-imagining public services for the better. And that is the work. Let’s go.
Last week I was very privileged to deliver a keynote to the annual SOCITM President’s conference. The last time I did so was in 2013, I’m hopefully a bit wiser since then. Also I was delighted to see the conference’s attendance grow both in numbers and diversity since my last visit.
This blog isn’t the presentation I gave last week, nor a transcript of it. It’s the distillation and iteration of those ideas.
How can we bring stakeholders with us into the Internet era for public services?
Computing in days gone past. The ‘computers’ were the people.
I’ve been a council leader, I’ve run a digital agency and I’ve been a senior council officer. In all cases I’ve seen the huge difficulties good people and important work can face when struggling with stakeholders who “just don’t get it”.
For those of us impatient for change, it’s something we have often wrestled with. In many ways it’s an age old issue that goes to the heart of organisational renewal. But, and I know this is (justifiable) exceptionalism, I do think the Internet era we are now in brings a new flavour to this challenge. The conversations we need to have aren’t “out with the old, in with the new” and it would be wrong if they were. What I think we often experience is a fundamental disconnect over what the Internet era means and why it changes things.
An important public service announcement:
We break for a reminder that this isn’t a breathless Wired article where “just add tech” techno-utopias will be entertained. Sadly I think that too often when there is fear or misunderstanding of the Internet era people can revert to simplistic “just be more like Amazon” talk, sprinkling tech as they go. That’s one of the reasons I try to avoid using the term digital without being sure I’m with people who all agree we mean something like Tom Loosemore’s definition of digital. Too often ‘digital’ becomes a hand waving phrase to avoid precision about what we are actually talking about.
Let’s also be clear that “not getting it” doesn’t mean people are bad, it means we’ve got work to do. Now some will be stubborn, lacking curiosity and hard to budge. But in my experience most aren’t. We don’t need 100% understanding from all stakeholders. We just need enough to swing the pendulum.
The end of the heroic leadership paradigm
No heroic leaders please (superhero movies are fine though)
I didn’t know what it was called until I saw Barbara Kellerman speak at Harvard, but now I can proudly declare that I’m a passionate student of collaborative leadership. That is to say that the heroic model of a super-CEO type leader is not one I subscribe to and I don’t think is sustainable in our modern world.
In public services I think that means breaking down the Victorian, militaristic hierarchies in our organisations. It also means helping our leaders to recognise that a mechanistic mental model of how to bring about change is deeply flawed. There may be some levers to pull on, but they aren’t connected to anything at the other end, so won’t achieve the desired outcomes. Quite simply, just because someone has a position high up a hierarchy, Prime Minister even, doesn’t mean the outcomes they desire will happen on their say-so.
“Minister, you may think this lever reforms public services, but it isn’t connected to anything”
Rather I think an agricultural model of thinking and leading is more appropriate. We can’t make a seed germinate. We can’t know what’s going on inside a seed without destroying it. But we know the conditions it needs to give it the best chance of successfully germinating and growing: Fertile soil, water, warmth, sunshine and so on. Creating the conditions for success, in the knowledge that we can’t control for everything is vital to the mind shift we need to achieve. This means nurturing teams, valuing staff happiness and engagement are all even more vital.
How does this help me with stakeholders?
It does. Because there are lots of excellent people, associations, companies and agencies supporting leaders on such journeys to collaboration and systems thinking without explicitly talking about technology. I think that can be an incredibly helpful trojan horse to shifting the thinking.
Secondly, this mindset really can be shifted by a small group of people. It needs resilience and some supporters at or near the top, but this journey doesn’t require your whole organisation to agree or understand before the tide will start to turn with positive outcomes. The Margaret Mead quote hits the spot on this:
So what?
I took the time to set out some of my underlying assumptions about styles of leadership and thinking because they’re important. Launching into why the Internet era is different without first being clear on the necessary common ground is, in my experience, risking a high chance of early failure.
We urgently need stakeholders to think about, decide on and support work in different ways. We need them to fund teams, not projects. We need patient supportive leaders to allow the hard work of discovery, user research and service design to actually bear fruit. We need to bin business cases: They give false comfort with lies about how much will be saved or earned in 4 years if we spend X now. As public servants we need to focus on the wicked problems which, by their very nature, can never offer certainty on costs nor returns in a fixed timescale.
So I turn to US Air Force Colonel John Boyd, a fighter pilot in the Korean War and considered one of the top strategists in modern US military history, who still has academic conferences held in his honour. In the 1950s Boyd developed the concept of the OODA loop. This describes a loop beginning with Observe, then Orient, then Decide, then Act before returning to Observe and so on.
He originated this thinking with reference to aerial dogfights. He suggested that the winner in a dogfight was the pilot who could get ‘inside’ the enemy’s OODA loop – in other words do each of the steps faster than their opponent. The simplicity of the idea, and it’s easy application to much in modern life, has given it a life well beyond aerial combat tactics.
Public sector bodies have their own OODA loops as expressed through their formal and informal decision-making. Too often they are top-down, deterministic and slow. How often have we heard the tragic “I know what the problem is, just find me solutions” guaranteeing that the speaker has no idea of what the problem really is.
In my view we desperately need to change the public sector to have rapid OODA loops which are driven by a focus on outcomes, using analytics and rapid iteration.
And this is exactly what the Internet-era enables. It makes the OODA loops much smaller. Thanks to the low costs and connectivity of modern tools we can build and iterate products and services more quickly than ever before. Whereas a trial service might once have taken 2 years to get the first meaningful feedback to know if it was worth pursuing, we can now achieve the same in weeks.
Not only does this offer us more speed and flexibility, it also reduces our costs and risks. How so?
Usually business cases are built for multi-year programmes of work. The inflexibility of the governance and the resources means it’s only worth mobilising such decisions for big programmes. Yet too often it’s impossible to know if they will really work as intended, so the costs get baked in. So we end up with big price tags, or bigger than absolutely necessary, because of governance and lag. Little and often minimal viable services are a much cheaper and faster way of figuring out what works.
With an agile, iterative approach which funds a team and not a project we can stop or course correct at any time. There’s no shame in it and so we can avoid years of spend if something isn’t working out, we just move onto something else. But if it is working, by going out with the minimal viable service we can gain benefits much earlier. I liken it to the compounding of interest. Would you rather get 5% a year for 5 years or 25% once at the end of 5 years? The right answer is 5% a year as not only is that spreading your risk – you get some return now regardless of what happens in the future – but also you get more overall as you earn interest on the interest.
Example: Monzo
The Monzo app and card
Interest rates are good link to an example I like to use at the moment: Monzo Bank. Other banks are available, but thanks to their culture of being really open about how they work, it’s easy to use Monzo as an example. As an online-only challenger bank lots of people think they’re a tech company, but they’re not. They say it repeatedly themselves: technology is an enabler – a means to an end – not their purpose.
They launched with a real minimum viable product, a pre-paid debit card issued by another financial institution which gave a current account-like experience with their beta app. It was a long way from a real bank account service. Still this helped them to build up a client base, and insight, which they used to start building a real current account and other features as they went on. They also genuinely co-produce their services through their community which should be the norm for public services. If a bank, a trendy new one I know, can do it then so can we.
Maybe the agricultural metaphor and the OODA loop are useful for working with your stakeholders? Please let me know.
I’ve considered and tried many, many ways to attempt explaining why things are different in the Internet era, and why public service leaders need to do things differently as a result. Based on years of working in this sector this is my latest, best effort. Your feedback is very welcome as I know there’s so much more room for improvement.
In my experience there are some key values and capabilities needed to go on this journey, and make it last in public services. They are worthy of several blog posts more of discussion, but I’m just going to put them out there for now. They shouldn’t be outrageous, I hope!
Culture and values:
Curiosity
Openness
Trust
Empowerment
Collaboration
‘Safe uncertainty’ aka risk appetite
Capabilities:
Service Design
User Research
Technology
Data Science & Analytics
Citizen Engagement
Communications
Organisational Design
Finally it’s really worth remembering why we need to do this. It’s because we’re not making enough of a difference to the citizens who depend on us, those who have nowhere else to go. Yes there’s austerity, but we still have huge resources and our outcomes need to be much better. Just shunting transactions ‘online’ is a start, not the end goal. This is about resolving the wicked issues and making a difference for those who have nowhere else to turn.
Ongoing annual losses and a lack of user growth has meant that Twitter has long been considered ‘at risk’ as an independent company. Most recently there have been several reported failed takeover bids from suitors including Salesforce and Disney.
And what is the problem exactly? Twitter has over 310 million monthly active users. For many Twitter is an extraordinary medium for learning, discussing and sharing. I’ve found it to be the one social medium I have used consistently over the years. Yes I’ve had bad times on there – awful abuse which Twitter the company did nothing about, but Sussex Police handled superbly. But these negative moments have been by far outweighed by the positives: Reading things I’d never normally see, hearing different views, meeting interesting new people and staying in touch with old friends. And above all I’ve found Twitter to be a place where politics can become more interesting. As a politician the ability to communicate (and rebut) directly was powerful. Now as a citizen and someone working in policy, being able to see politicians, analysts and journalists working in public is both fascinating and useful.
This all has value. Huge value, just perhaps not the level of monetary value the market seems to expect when they compare it with Facebook’s 1.7 billion monthly users.
And therein lies the rub. Since Twitter floated on the public markets it has been judged against juggernauts like Facebook and Google. Yes they have produced extraordinary revenue streams, which is great for their investors. But not everyone can nor should aspire to those levels of income and growth. Yet I fear Twitter has been hurting itself and its users in a doomed quest to satiate unreasonable market expectations.
Perhaps trying to beat those expectations has been why we’ve seen such a high turnover of executives at Twitter, including CEOs. But it’s unclear to me whether this is a cause or symptom of the problems. Maybe someone will get the real inside scoop one day.
Given the fact that so many of us value Twitter I’d like to suggest that the company focussed on serving our needs first and foremost. I’m genuinely worried we could lose a valuable online community so here are some thoughts I’ve jotted down on a viable way forward…
What features would average users (like me) pay for in a ‘PRO’ level subscription account?
Similarly, given the impact celebrities and corporates can gain from their Twitter presence, how can that be tiered into free and paid-for packages?
I think it’s essential that anyone can post and read tweets for the community that Twitter offers to keep working. So what sorts of features could reasonably be held back for paying users? Some ideas, which probably have been suggested many times over by others before, for features to restrict to paying Twitter users only:
Analytics: Anything beyond basic numbers (how many followers, retweets etc).
Graphics: Ability to attach more than one image or video to a tweet.
API access: This will outrage some, but I think providing access through apps should be a feature which is either paid for by the user or the app developer.
Archives: This already happens to some extent at corporate level, e.g. Google paid for access, but individual access to the full searchable archive and an option to auto-archive media into other services (e.g. all photos you tweet get saved in Dropbox/iCloud/whatever) could be a paid option.
Premium status: A paying customer should get quicker support, faster verified status (if needed) and so on. I wouldn’t want a premium label (a la LinkedIn) to appear on profiles, but I would understand why if it did happen.
How much would I pay for something like this as an ordinary user? I’d guess between £12 and £20 a year. Let’s pretend that would be the only revenue source for Twitter (so forget the bigger bucks corporate accounts and advertising should attract) and model it on 5% of active monthly users signing up at the lower end of the price bracket. In the scenario Twitter would be booking £186m revenue every year. That’s $230m in US dollars. Surely enough to run a sustainable social network on, especially if you throw in the online advertising and licensing income already coming in?
Unfortunately Twitter’s cost base has ballooned from $172 million/year to an astonishing $1.94 billion/year in 2015. Gross income has not kept up so Twitter has been consistently booking a loss, though the gap is narrowing. It’s hard to see what we users are getting for the $800m/year being spent on R&D and perhaps spending on video deals for the NFL aren’t the greatest uses of cash so I’d imagine there’s room to reduce the cost base. I think on its own terms Twitter can and should be financially viable.
The question for me is this: Is it reasonable to be chasing billion dollar revenues to please Wall Street, when a perfectly sustainable business exists ‘down’ in the hundreds of millions level, rather than the billions.
We risk seeing this wonderful community being killed or seriously damaged in the search for ways to turn it into a billion dollar company, when maybe, just maybe, sustainable life was only possible lower down the mountain. That would be a crying shame.
The media is ablaze with analysis with what sites like Airbnb, Uber and others mean for the future of work, our economies and local government mandates over regulated services like hotels and taxis[1. Good recent posts on this include those by Tim O’Reilly, Lauren Smiley, Matt Buchanan.].
Lots of businesses are now being pitched as the ‘Uber for x’ or ‘Airbnb for y’. The sort of network aggregation model they offer is becoming a dominant mental model for many discussions on digital transformation at the moment. So I think it’s worth some further consideration because I don’t think this model in practice is quite as clear-cut as some suggest, though it certainly is disruptive.
In essence the thinking goes that network aggregators are simply making the market more efficient. They connect customers with providers more efficiently than ever before. They lower barriers to entry so that underused resources (homes, cars, drivers etc) can access the market to generate revenue whilst meeting consumer demand. Quite simply the thinking I’m seeing expressed is that they (network aggregators) are like the travel agent matching a holiday package with the customer’s budget and desires with underused airplanes and hotels lowering their prices to attract more demand – but now individuals are the providers using their own cars, homes and time.
Airbnb and Uber often say that they just are making connections between buyers and sellers. They argue that the quality of the service, the accuracy of the service listing, the liability etc all lie with the providers who are categorically not employees of the network aggregator. Yet it’s not quite that simple.
First we have the reviews and verifications these aggregators offer their ‘community’ to assure quality. These can go as far as checking the passports and other identity documents of providers. Then we have the controls on pricing they offer plus the overarching branding they lay on top of the providers similar to a hotel chain or limousine firm. We also have the customer service they end up providing. They try to nudge you into resolving problems directly with the providers but if you can’t then they regularly step in to intervene, to offer refunds and smooth things over, desperate to avoid negative stories sticking to their surging brands[2. I have personal experience of network aggregators forking out hundreds of dollars to leave everyone feeling happy with their brand after things have gone wrong].
So network aggregators aren’t merely aggregating supply and demand, they are building brands and owning customer relationships so much so that they will even extend refunds and credits when the provider won’t. Yet because of their very nature and their legally-driven insistence that they don’t employ the providers they have few ways in which to encourage genuinely better behaviour. We see Uber and Airbnb offering programmes trying to encourage and celebrate their best providers but to me they read like weak cultural change programmes with no oomph.
Because ultimately this comes down to culture, values and accountability. (Well what doesn’t?!) Tom Peters rightly said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Successful hotel chains like Accor know this – their brand is a promise that wherever in the world you are you will get a good night’s sleep, a comfortable bed, a certain kind of breakfast and service etc. If anything goes wrong they train and incentivise their staff in ways to not just make it right but to leave the customer feeling better about the brand than before. Good taxi and limo firms keep their drivers trained up on serving customers with disabilities, on major works happening in their patch, they trial new vehicles and tools for improved efficiency, safety and access. They get to know particular clients with certain preferences and needs.
Now any individual provider to a network aggregator can and does do those things, I’m sure. Most likely they will even get good reviews. But how does this scale? What kind of experience can Airbnb and Uber promise me? Nothing really. Offering a special badge or annual $100 voucher to their best providers is light years away from the organisational leadership, accountability and values a good firm in any sector can provide.
So where does this take us? Network aggregators almost certainly open up the opportunities for micro businesses to reach more customers than ever before. And for now the big ‘unicorn’ aggregators are willing to spend time and money to retain customers even after bad experiences. They are even financing some of their providers, as Uber do with car loans. But that won’t be able to continue indefinitely, at some point either after launching onto the stockmarket or with a private owner, profits will need to be made. The result will have to be far greater control over providers and/or retreat from the level of support offered to customers.
Are there lesson we can take from the network aggregators? Most certainly but we must do so with caution – recognising that they are not proven, sustainable businesses yet and that they aren’t quite the light-touch networks they like us to think they are.
If one applies this to public services then I believe ultimate accountability will continue to lie with public bodies, even as delivery becomes ever more distributed, digital and networked. Agile and networked we should be, but the need for accountability, culture and values can’t be magicked away in a puff of network aggregation.
I recently had the privilege of addressing the first LGA Digital Workshop for council leaders and cabinet members. Held at my alma mater Warwick University, the 2 day session attracted nearly 20 senior councillors. I was really delighted that the event had been put on, with a range of essential voices like MySociety and Emer Coleman participating.
I’d been partly responsible for this workshop happening: When I addressed the Local Government Association’s staff conference last December one of my challenges to them had been to lead the sector’s digital transformation. So I’m delighted that they are rising to that challenge.
Here’s a précis of what I said to the Digital Workshop in Warwick:
As a sector we have to be honest with ourselves, the truth is that we have underinvested in our staff and their training. It has been too easy to trim training budgets every year and whilst focussed on just keeping going. That staff do have digital skills is more down to chance – either they’ve brought them from earlier in their career, or more likely is that their own curiosity has helped them develop skills at home, such as through hobbies and voluntary work.
The scattering of digitally literate staff we have just isn’t going to be enough. Local government, for perfectly rational reasons at the time, has long under invested in technical infrastructure and skills. But moving forward that just won’t do, digital talent won’t just be a ‘nice-to-have’ but critical to our future.
It is far too easy for our conversations on ‘being digital’ to focus almost exclusively on social media. Of course social media is exciting and important, especially for us politicians who are always keen to be seen, but it’s just one small element of the bigger picture.
There is huge potential for digital tools to be transformational for local government. Unfortunately we are behind the curve on this transformation. For example: My last two employers before I became a councillor full-time were completely virtual – no physical offices – we collaborated online daily with only the occasional meeting in person each year. By comparison I find many councils still not particularly comfortable with conference calls, but culturally committed to lots of in-person meetings.
Our citizens’ expectations for our flexibility and responsiveness is continuing to grow. And of course the extreme budget pressures we are under mean we must find new ways of working. I don’t believe we can maintain quality public services in the face of budget cuts without a digitally-led transformation for our councils.
This will require us to maintain skills and leadership on the digital agenda within the sector and individual councils. Many larger private sector firms are in the process of ‘in-sourcing’ their IT staff from external and often overseas suppliers. They recognise that their digital competency is such a critical competitive advantage that they need to keep it close by. Agility, including quick response to changing demands and technologies, are facilitated by in-house talent which you don’t need to spend ages agreeing a contract and detailed specification for. They can try things out, iterate based on the feedback and move on. We need to be able to do that too, whilst still using external support in targeted ways.
in Brighton & Hove our research shows that up to 70% of our citizens would be willing to self-serve online. That’s a huge opportunity for us to do things differently, release resources for those not able to go online and be more efficient. We’ve made some progress on those…
For example our environmental services call centre saw an average 30% drop in calls after strategically using social media and web to proactively inform citizens of service issues and offer advice in the face of weather conditions.
We are also trying to proactively push information out to reduce the demand for getting in touch. So we have launched the first council Freedom of Information site powered by MySociety’s What Do They Know. Responses are published on the site in the name of openness and to help reduce repeated requests for the same things. Also to help with openness I host a regular webcast called ‘Open Door‘ to discuss key issues for the city. These are archived and are regularly referred to online as sources of information.
It’s important to never assume that we know who the audience is for digital channels. In some of our user research a young male construction worker with an iPhone struggled to complete simple actions on the web because he didn’t know how to use it. He didn’t know how to get online from his smartphone. All ages can be struggling with digital or happily surging away, so we must keep that in mind.
Also don’t assume that just because someone put a page on the council website that it’s useful! We’ve removed hundreds of pages of content from the council website with no complaints. The site is now easier to browse and less of a burden to maintain.
Unfortunately the politics of local government and historical attitudes often mean we have a low risk appetite. This failure to support ideas that could end in failure undermines the experimental and agile approaches which are essential to successful digital programmes. We must overcome this, I believe the risks of doing nothing are far greater than of trying a few things that might not work out first time.
Once this workshop is over, we cannot all return to our town halls and scratch around on this alone. We must collectivise our digital action. We must build on existing tools like personal data stores and the government identity assurance programme rather than creating hundreds of isolated ‘My Councils’. We must also avoid ‘divide and conquer’ by suppliers.
The success of the Government Digital Service (GDS) gives some ideas on how to move forward as a sector, including finding ways to attract and retain talent, this will need to include pay. The Local Government Association must be pushed and supported to build the local government sectors’ GDS equivalent.
So in conclusion, the opportunities from digital transformation for our councils are huge. But we aren’t there yet, by a long way. We need to ensure we have the right talent and skills in our councils, we must boost our risk appetites to enable iterative experimentation and we cannot go it alone – we must work together.
Belts are tightening as we get ever closer to the date when the 2011/12 budget has to be set for Brighton & Hove City Council. With £30 million of front-loaded Coalition government cuts to find, council officers are quite reasonably reviewing and challenging every expenditure.
A recent email sent around by the Council’s IT department asks staff to consider whether they really, really need their Blackberry. If not, could they give it up and perhaps live without a mobile phone at all? Perfectly sensible, there may be people who don’t really need their Blackberries but still have one in a drawer somewhere.
What’s interesting are the costs the Council apparently incurs per Blackberry: A device on a two year contract costs £432/year before call charges plus £105 in setup and licence charges. (The monthly breakdown is £19 for Vodafone tariff and £17 for Blackberry & ICT support charges)
So before a single call is made or text is sent, a Blackberry will cost tax payers £969 over its two year contract period. That much of this goes to Vodafone is particularly galling given their tax avoider status.
This is another symptom of the Council’s gold plated approach to ICT. No criticism of the current Head of ICT, this predates him by some time. The Blackberries came in under the Labour administration and carried on under the Tories. As did the huge all-encompassing Microsoft licensing deal. Rather than find good-enough solutions, the approach has been to dive for the big name brands as soon as they offer a hint of a discount from their pre-inflated prices. Then we’re locked in.
A small number of decent Linux servers and any smartphone would meet the messaging needs of the Council perfectly adequately at a fraction of the cost. Why are we paying license fees for Exchange servers and Blackberry servers?
Yes, let’s cut down on the unnecessary issuing of mobile devices and excessive use of costly services (they’re also cracking down on football scores and directory enquiries via mobiles). But let’s reconsider whether the whole architecture makes financial sense too. Almost a grand for mobile access to email just doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
[Note: Most councillors from most parties use Blackberries. As far as I’m aware this is the first time we’ve been made aware of the cost they incur. This is no criticism of councillors for whom Blackberries are a lifeline to keeping on top of Council work whilst juggling their other responsibilities. I personally don’t have a Council Blackberry because I just don’t really like them, having tried an iPhone I couldn’t face going back!]
Two events coming up soon which will be of interest to digital rights type people:
Debating the Digital Economy Act Thur 29th April
I’ll be one of the contributors at this debate, organised by Wired Sussex here in Brighton.
Internet Voting: Threat or Menace Tue 27th April
Jeremy Epstein from SRI International is over in the UK and will be giving a talk at Cambridge Uni’s Computer Lab Security Seminar series. I did one of these a few years ago and it was highly enjoyable – the audience were engaged and very generous with their interest.
My wife’s cousin is an electrical engineer. In his spare time he noodles around with lots of kit. For example he buys broken TomTom satnavs off eBay and fixes them up.
He’s really good at it and in the process he’s discovered something very interesting. Despite the appearance of many different models in fact most of them have identical hardware features. Indeed much of the functionality that TomTom only provide in the more expensive models is there in all of them – they just turn it off in the software.
Think about that – they build it in the device. You hold the functionality (e.g. USB2.0 connectivity) in your hands. But TomTom force you to either pay more or it won’t work. Some will say that’s rife across many industries but I think it’s wasteful and disrespectful.
Imagine if the Apple iPhone 3GS (which has a built in GPS receiver) was sold in two models, with navigation and without. The only difference would be in software. I can’t see Apple doing that because: They like to keep their product line simple, and they (generally) treat customers well.
Something else he’s discovered is that many of the TomTom software updates work fine on old models, they just block them from running with hardware version number checks – forcing demand to buy newer models.
False choices (between the 13 models of TomTom car satnavs currently on sale) are bad for customers and ultimately bad for business: We don’t want to have to make difficult choices between all the versions; we don’t want to realise that we’re being extorted to use hardware features we’ve already bought or upgrade when our existing kit is good enough. Today’s smart consumers aren’t going to put up with this kind of behaviour.
Jason Kitcat 
