WRITTEN ON September 12th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Here’s the text of my talk to the 40th ICA conference. Sorry about the “Whole of Government” acronym – I’ll try to point out to ICA that it doesn’t work well in British English. I’ll try to steer things towards Holistic Government. Thanks Pete and Adriana for the data, and critical friends R&R, Liz and Zig for their keen eye for hyperbole

1. Automate or Augment? Doug Engelbart’s vision in 1968

Imagine we were discussing the future of computing 40 years ago. It would be quite clear to us that our punched cards and paper tapes would take us marching in orderly ranks down a path towards artificial intelligence and automating the jobs of human workers.

[SLIDE] DOUG

This man Doug Engelbart had a quite different vision. He was convinced the role of networked computers was not to automate but to augment the human intellect – to allow people to become more than they were before, and not treat them as ciphers.

He spent the 1960s creating an oNLine System (NLS) funded by ARPA at Stanford.

Here he is in 1968 treating an astonished audience to “the mother of all demos” on a prototype giant video screen.

[SLIDE] CO-WORKER

He shares files, messages and hyperlinks in a live video conference with a colleague 30 miles away.

[SLIDE] CW2

Each drives a cursor (or bug as he called them) on the same screen

[SLIDE] with a large wooden mouse. [SLIDE]

After a standing ovation there was some bad temper from conventional computer scientists who felt blindsided. Their squarely rational view of the future left no room for this display of innovation and empowerment. They just didn’t see it coming.

[SLIDE] DOUG2

Engelbart’s Augment vision, rooted in the California counterculture of mind expansion, spoke to the aspirations of the human spirit and accurately foresaw the essentials of the user-friendly, interconnected and e-enabled world we live in today.

[SLIDE]

And he was right. Today over 1bn of us can see the 90 minute film of that mother of all demos over the Internet, along with half a trillion other versions of the human story. As Kevin Kelly said, it wasn’t in anyone’s 10-year plan. It’s even spookily God-like – the unfolding of a collective human will.

2. ICA’s “Whole of Government” conference theme

AGENDA

I’d like to explore how the triumph of the Augment vision, coupled with the fact that the best conventional wisdom available at the time never saw it coming, plays havoc with the ICA’s agenda today.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a CIO is that they are asked to have a strategic vision of the technology they are deploying. The role of a CIO is about far more than implementing individual IT projects. As such CIOs have to develop and deploy their own understanding both of how technology can be used and of how it should be used. This is not a value-free process which is why I will keep returing to this notion of values and to the Augment example.

I’d like to argue that we need a clear set of values to underpin the techological and managerial developments and changes discussed in Frank McDonough’s “Whole of Government” article

[SLIDE] INDEX

Frank and Martha asked me to speak to the agenda “Whole Of Government – Filling The Holes” prompted by research into shared services and efficiency done by my company Kable Ltd.

Before I read Frank’s article, that brief was making me rather nervous, indeed I contacted ICA members I knew already to share my fears. I wasn’t sure I understood the notion of Whole of Government, and if I did I wasn’t sure I was entirely in favour of it.

[acronym]

For example:

[SLIDE]

i) Of course you could consolidate and centralize in heretofore unimagined ways. But why would you want to? This great work will succeed if its through and through about serving the customer. It’s equally possible to decentralise, switch over to self-service and abolish large swathes of the centre. The question is which will best serve the cutomer.
ii) governments resist the whole of government approach and horizontal management. I’m not surprised, We’ll discuss the resistance we found in the UK, and front line staff, advocates of consumer interests and human rights specialists would have a great deal to say about this if they could be with us here today
iii) Public administrators and students of government …conclude that the whole of government approach and horizontal management are inevitable because they allow better service and save money. This sounds fatalistic. I’d rather say that society faces deep choices and as it makes them the voice of the CIO must be heard. My question is: if we get to that situation, what are you going to say?

When we choose the architecture that will govern future relationships in civil life this can’t be based simply on cost and service quality. Of course value for money and better services matter. These are both important dimensions.

But it’s of fundamental importance that the people in this room should not ignore the role that the architecture of our administrative IT systems plays in the quality of public trust in e-enabled government and public services.

Let’s face it: there’s a CLEAR DANGER that we could consolidate central government in a way that seriously undermines trust in the state. But it’s not INEVITABLE that we make that mistake.

SLIDE – INDEX

Governments will face distractions and provocations – such as the events in New York of five years ago. There will be environmental challenges and natural disasters. But we must not let them divert us from the professional job of bringing civilian administration into the information age based on sustainable values of respect and justice.

One ICA member said to me we’re like rats in a wheel – never enough people, skills or technology to do the job. Do you see yourselves racing aimlessly, carrying out instructions to automate hierarchical systems of control? Or can you help government adapt to an appropriate role in a dynamic world of augmented people? To what extent is that role a deliberate choice of political leadership, and to what extent is it your choice?

There’s much talk of professionalisation, but at the end of the day you need to deliver projects that work. What works and what doesn’t isn’t just a technical matter, nor even a matter of what business change you can successfully manage. It’s about what works socially.

Ease of use, customer focus and service design all contribute to usage levels.

And so too do your underlying intention and values. If people don’t like what they think you’re trying to do they won’t want to have anything to do with it.

[SLIDE]

Let’s talk about money. The countries represented here today spent $285bn last year on administrative IT – that’s the civil government IT expenditure on equipment, software, comms, services and staff in justice, health, education, transport and administration IT.

That’s a big pie, broke downhere by country, and it’not surprising that suppliers beat a path to your door and sponsor your gala dinners. It also makes a lot of sense that, by and large, you keep them at bay.

[SLIDE]

Here are those estimates of administrative ICT spend expressed as a % of total civil government spend, and per head of population.

The horizontal measure of ICT spend as a % of civil government expenditure can be taken as a measure of of a country’s commitment to using ICT as a lever for government change – Canada, Poland, Taiwan, the US

And the vertical axis showing government IT spend per head of population gives an idea of the resources available for each person you have to serve – Japan, Norway, Denmark, Australia

The size of the bubble represents the ICT spend.

We’ve centred the axes around total figures to give four quadrants. No-one is average…

• Top right (Japan, Australia, US, Canada are resource-rich countries committed to ICT investment as a lever for change
• Bottom right (S. Korea, Thailand, Poland, Singapore) are also highly committed to ICT investment, but relatively resource constrained
• Top left (Scandinavia) are resource-rich spending a lot on ICTs, but high social expenditure pushes it down as a proportion
• Bottom left are the countries with limited resources to invest. S. America and the E. European countries are quite committed given their resources, while southern European countries have reasonable levels of resources and rather less commitment to ICT as a lever for change..

The figures show that country investment policies are more susceptible to regional than to global comparisons. UK spends a lot but sees itself as the poor relation of N. America, Australia, and Canada. Portugal, Greece, Hungary etc, may see themselves as the poor relations of Europe and invest accordingly, while Poland behaves as the technologically advanced neighbour of Russia and Ukraine.

I’m happy to share and validate any of these figures with you for individual countries, and I was going to suggest it might be helpful if we undertook a checked and annually updated version with members.

We’d be happy to facilitate that, I know ICA is considering a wiki and that would be the right way to do it. Kable produces the figures for suppliers but there’s undoubtedly value in having international context and comparisons available for your planning purposes. And as long s they remain Kable figures, they’re politically deniable if they prove inconvenient.

Influence over spend at that scale makes the ICA potentially a very formidable body indeed.

But after a year or two, what difference does that $285bn make? It’s spent, depreciated and quickly forgotten.

Far more important than the money you spend are the values your work embeds and the relationships it creates for the 1.1bn people living in the countries representee in the ICA. Good values embedded in our government information architectures could support healthy relationships for generations.

But if people don’t trust or like systems, however logically conceived, they wont use them and they’ll fail as completely as if they never worked. That may lead in a few years to project failures – the UK recently gave up on its monolithic and centralised Child Support Agency – or it may embed a sense of injustice that festers to create tension and conflict over generations.

[SLIDE]

Code is law, Lawrence Lessig tells us, and programming is political. None of this technlogy develops in an ethical vacuum – not the Internet, Google, personal computing with graphical interfaces, or crypto. All these things were developed based on a passionate commitment to a certain view of the world and how we relate to each other. We need to understand these systems of values when we deploy them.

[SLIDE]

Engelbart’s vision for future computing was rooted in a different set of values and a different intention from those prevailing at the time. Richard Stallman explains his free software movement, which has given us open source, Linux, Apache and the Creative Commons entirely in ethical terms.

[If he were here….]

Have we got the right values for sustainable and holistic e-enabled government? Where do we discuss this and who gets to decide? It’s not a subset of the customer-supplier relationship.

[Say you like the values of open-source software but your systems integrator puts forward a strong business case for Microsoft…is that because it’s more secure and flexible longer term and good for the skills base in the country, or because senior executives are incentivised to deliver Microsoft? ]

Suppliers are predictable in their motivation. You can ask them to do a good job but we can’t ask them how to do the right thing.

You might say it’s the Minister’s responsibility. And of course there is a political dimension to this question. But how can it be a Minister who doesn’t know his SOAP from his AJAX?

There Minister needs to understand implications but hardly wants to have to deal with the details of technology. We’ve evolved mechanisms for dealing with the political need to deliver these projects. Sometimes we call in all external expertise. In others traditional civil servants have been given the roles.

But increasingly, it’s seen to be sensible to employ a CIO to provide them with strategic oversight. This creates a novel relationship for politicians.

[SLIDE] – HACKER

There are few areas where the expertise gap between Minister and official will be as wide as in ICT. At the same time the CIO will be making decisions on projects that are both very costly and critical to achieving the Minister’s political objectives.

There’s an unprecedentd depth of significance in the CIO’s relationship with their Minister – what it’s like in practice, and what might be ideal. I even suggest, and ICA would like to take this up, that this relationship across your 30 countries is worthy of formal research.

I suspect in many countries there are unresolved issues here which place superhuman demands on ICA members, and offer significant opportunity for professional growth.

If you recall the fault line on which in the Yes Minister TV comedy was based Sir Humphrey’s task was hard enough without having to explain to the Minister the impact of Web 2.0 on the whole of government.

3.

UK “Efficiency”: a W.o.G stage one case study

I was on holiday in Peru when the Financial Times carried a huge story about the UK’s plans for efficency and consolidation based on shared services and smarter use of technology. It would save $30bn a year, cut running costs by 16% and reduce headcount by 84,000, cutting bureaucracy and red tape for government and business. It’s classic W.o.G stage one as described in Frank’s article.

The moment I got back we launched a research study into how senior public servants would react when asked to do this. It was quite clear that nobody would say “no”, but much harder to work out what they would mean when they said “Yes”,

[SLIDE] WDTMBY

so that’s the title we gave to the work which led the Programme Committee to invite me here.

Can I just say how pleased I was to be invited, by the way. When I first heard about the ICA I made a private resolve to do my job well so that you might invite me to join you one year. That was iin 1988, so it makes me very happy to be here.

When Kable researched the UK efficiency and shared services plans we found

- everyone said huge savings were possible
- everyone felt consolidation and shared services made sense
- but everyone said cutting budgets was bad for customers and for public services

Consumer organisations said that existing service problems, already blamed on lack of staff, would get worse under the plans outlined. And the month the plans were finally published – what we’d been researching was based on a newpaper leak – they closed the JobCentre in the Prime Minister’s constituency for reasons of efficiency.

Public servants are fine about shared services on their own terms – they’d like their in house team to take on more outside work. But they resent central initiatives imposed on local service providers. Only a full-blown financial crisis creates a sense of urgency. These always lurk, but all too often never really come to a head.

I was editing this report, immersed in what can be centralised and when do shared services work, and why people find these efficiency savings so achievable in theory but so daunting in reality when I took a call from my friend Jade in North London.

Her life is in chaos. She’s appearing in court because she’s fallen into debt and couldn’t pay her local tax. She didn’t understand the interest rate on an emergency loan and her housing benefit had been denied, because she had signed the wrong piece of paper when made redundant.

She didn’t understand it. She felt helpless. The agencies wouldn’t talk to each other, and those who were meant to help were overwhelmed. I felt helpless and overwhelmed too, and at that moment the talk of efficiency drives, shared services, and the promises about how marvellous public services should be after decades of investment in technology, outsouring and consulting services felt pretty hollow.

In this light “Whole of Government” stage one suddenly felt pretty soulless. We use the word efficiency until it becomes a cliché, but nobody offered Jade the efficient service she needed.

Holistic government will be entirely customer oriented.It will place people’s dignity, and their rights to good service including respect for the private sphere of their lives first and foremost.

[SLIDE]

This customer oriented approach, which we see in countries like Canada and agencies like the UK Pension Service is brilliantly summed up by one of our UK NGOs in the National Consumer Council’s “Playlist for Public Services”. In a dozen short pages it spells out how to put your organisation on the path of doing just what your customers need and nothing else. It’s a very powerful prescription for efficiency.

4

How to think about ideal, e-enabled government

Around that time a conversation with Ian Watmore, Britain’s newly appointed first, led me to set up a blog to reach out to people who were most excited about the possibilities of the contempory Internet, and also most frustrated or concerned by the progress and direction of government IT.

It’s called Ideal Govwernment and the theme was “Let’s tell the people who can actually do something about it what we really want from e-enabled government”. We spend all this money on government IT but didn’t have the sort of clear user requirement which every good project should start with.

Open to all, it aims to capture naïve accounts of “What’s it really like” and “wouldn’t it be better if”…

As new Internet blurs the boundaries of what we’re calling the “Whole of Government” it changes what is possible, which in turn changes the priorities in the CIOs work.

The Ideal Government conversation quickly settled around three themes:

- Quick wins – things you don’t need to do anymore, because they’re done for you
- Design & co-creation – easier and better ways to do things
- And the Foundation of Trust – the really hard and important thing to which the online community feels most countries are merely paying lip service.

The contempory internet, semantic web or Web 2.0 offers quick wins in abundance. Free search engines bring government services to our desktop faster than the government portals in which we’ve invested tens of millions of dollars. We read about the efforts and resources invested in FirstGov or the UK’s DirectGov. This service Directionless Gov[SLIDE]

was set up in 75 minutes for $100. It just serves up .gov.uk returns via Google, but if you’re feeling unlucky you can have the results from the mutimillion dollar official portal. When placed side by side three quarters of users click a Google link and a quarter the official link.

Offering RSS feeds is a quick and easy way to create a flourishing ecosystem of government data. No need for mass mailings for consultations or legal and regulatory updates. You don’t have to pay to offer comprehensive offerings on your integrated portal. Your customers integrate it on theirs. New Zealand was early on this. The CIO in Utah used to keep a list of government RSS feeds, but he got overwhelmed by mid-2005, so much was happening.

There are now first rate and beautifully designed services for mapping, address lookup, research surveys, 3D modelling, photo and video hosting. There’s a whole ecosystem of blogs and wikis based on generic tools. The homebrewed podcast called TWIT – The Week in Technology – has a higher circulation than many of our our once proud national newpapers.

Google Earth brings satellite views to our desktop, integrated as of last week with British Airways’ online flight bookings.

Why recreate any of these when you can mix, match and recycle them?

The second theme that emerged in our Ideal Government conversation was design – designing for users and the benefits – especially in Web 2.0 – of a spirit of co-creation.

The original mantra – design public service systems for users, still holds. But the contempory Internet offers excellent building blocks for people to create and customise services for themselves and each other. Google offers an object lesson in how to benefit from this.

[SLIDE]

It launched Google maps in February last year. The interface was reverse engineered the next day. Instead of prosecuting the hackers and closing down the innovation Google published its API, inviting co-creation. So Ideal Government was able to hold a public sector maps mashups competition. Here are British primary schools on a Google map, traffic jams, weather reports brought to you by a caravan company, news stories from our public broadcaster, speed cameras around Manchester.

There’s no government procurement behind this, and no plan. These are enthusiasts who want to prove their skills and win a lava lamp.

Co-creation is well described by Eric von Hippel in his book Democratising Innovation. It’s great fun and the possibilities are open-ended. Consumers innovate better than producers because they know what they need and like, they appreciate form as well as function, have immense energy and diversity, and are happy to share their work.

Government can make life a great deal easier for itself and all of us by making suitable data available and navigable, and avoiding debilitating copyright, licensing and patent policies.

The third Ideal Government theme is the one giving greatest concern. That is the need to establish e-enabled society on a properly thought through Foundation of Trust. The perception is this is something to which many governments merely pay lip service, waiting for serious problems to occur before doing something about them. It’s a fear that government IT strategies, and indeed the preliminary ICA conference programme, do not necessarily allay.

There is excellent work going on into how we could build something which people would be right to trust. I’m a big fan of the Dutch approach to constitutional issues generally, and in particular the e-Citizen Workbook created by Matt Poelmans.

[is there also now an Irish eCitizen Workbook?].

Marit Hansen from Schleswig Holstein and others are woking on an EU funded privacy and identity management project – PRIME – which is establishing powerful principles for how on-line services could respect people’s personal sphere.

Far-sighted technologists are coming with answers to questions before Ministers even seriously pose them.

Identity Management is a major issue that governments are grappling with. Getting it right is critical to avoiding the crisis of trust I have referred to. It is challenging and complex but there have been some really interesting developments that point to how this might work.

Credentica, for example, is set up by another Dutchman, Stefan Brands, to roll out his theoretical work that allows for anonymity and pseudonimity in a complete range of complex transactions without the accumulation of a central database of population control. But if you try to do a fraudulent transaction or use a revoked credential the whole pattern of your activity is revealed.

Jeff Jonas, whose Las Vegas-based company SRD was bought by IBM, proves how you can identify suspects from characteristics stored across different databases. The tools exist to deal with exceptions – the suicide bomber, the child molester – as exceptions. Wholesale data sharing is unfeasible, he argues, and his work proves that it is unnecessary.

An interesting case study in why you need a Foundation of Trust is the 180deg change in Microsoft’s approach to identity management. Seven years ago they decided to fill in the holes in their “Whole of World” vision with Net, MS Passport and the proposed “Hailstorm” achitecture under which all our credentials and all merchant accounts would reside on Microsoft servers.This would put Microsoft at the heart of all our online activity. MS Passport was so successful, they even suggested, that it would make a neat rplacement for national passports.

Competitors like Sun were outraged, customers didn’t want it, online services like eBay rejected it. Microsoft saw the error of its ways and is now instead proposing industry-standard, customer friendly, privacy friendly identification. This is based on principles explored by their identity architect Kim Cameron, whom I know some of you have met, in a blog cross fertilised with many others including Ideal Government.

[SLIDE]

Instead of one monolithic panopticon we see industry working towards an identity metasystem for the Internet which
1. only reveals identifying information with the user’s consent
2. reveals as little as possible in order to be sustainable long-term
3. shows ID data only to those with a necessary and justifiable place in the relationship.
4. supports both “omnidirectional” identifiers for public entities and “unidirectional” identifiers for private ones
5. works across multiple technologies run by different identity providers, including government if it wants to
6. works with and is usable by real people
7. And feels the same across multiple operators and technologies wherever and however you use it

[slide]

It couldn’t be more different from Hailstorm, which sought to control and exploit people through automated identity. Even if that had worked technically it was never going to work socially. It was destined for commercial failure.

Instead, to use Engelbart’s term, we could say Cameron is developing a vision of augmented digital identity – a user-friendly and sustainable way of allowing people to be more themselves on-line.

What happens when your government has an idea as bad as Hailstorm, where the technical architecture threatens social failure?

This technology holds temptations. The idea might be that total surveillance, mass data retention and using artificial intelligence selectively to deny services such as travel will make us all secure. Or it could be that universal personalised services based on the mother of all CRM systems, with wholesale data sharing and the sort of predictive profiling Tony Blair promised just last week will deliver universal social justice.

If your government came up with a bad idea for an IT based project which contained the seeds of social failure, what would be the circumstances in which it would recognise and accept its error?

What would be your role as government CIOs in understanding it and making Ministers aware of the implications and alternatives? Is your advice listened to, on the basis that you mostly understand the technology and they mostly don’t?

How do you first spot the problem? How much time do you spend listening to critical friends, customer advocates and service design specialists? Do we need an ICA training course called “What every member needs to know about human rights”? Or “How to learn from the criticism of citizen activists and NGOs” – you can keep such people at bay indefinitely, but you can’t get rid of them. What you can do is to learn from them.

The design skills are there to make e-enabled services really customer friendly. The solutions are there to create e-enabled services which isolate dedicated enemies of society and at the same time protect people’s personal space.

I’m intrigued, and I pick this up from Frank’s piece, by what the final boundaries of the professional responsibility of the government CIOs such as yourselves will turn out to be. Someone has to spell out the consequences of technology policies that treat people like ciphers, or will fail because of indifference or wholesale resistance, and the benefits of quick wins, co-creation, and living in a connected world of constant online feedback. As your professionalism evolves, does it become your responsibility to find a way to do that, even if you’re not invited to?

We’re all in this together and we may have some difficult years to get through.

5

So what next for the ICA?

Here we have a voluntary membership body whose collective view, should you form one, is potentially of fundamental importance, almost at a constitutional level, to many people for a long time – to 1.1bn souls, a sixth of the world’s population for two generations.

The ICA is your retreat, your lab, the place you can distil the essence of your collective thinking. I hope you can grow the membership without diluting the essence. Less is not more.

But at the same time if the ICA is to have a good, healthy, strong, effective culture or spirit it must be outward looking – it needs empathy and intuitive understanding with all those people who matter but who aren’t here.

The journal Political Psychology recently reported research by the Univeristy of California into the intelligence of US Presidents and other historic figures. George W Bush’s IQ, they report, appears perfectly adequate for the task. The problem lies with openness to experience, fantasy, aesthetics, actions, ideas and values.

Jefferson scores 99 on this, Lincoln 95, Kennedy and Clinton 82. But Geroge Bush 2nd scores zero. He can only see things from one perspective – his own, and his low score on what they call integrative complexity is comparable to extremist Islamic fundamentalists in the Taleban and Al Qaeda leadership.

ICA members will need to do rather better than that.

To think in terms of the entire “Whole of Government” you must embrace the rest of government and the wider public sector. To create fully holistic government you need empathy with every other discipline that matters – customer advocates, politicians, lawyers, designers, psychologists – people familiar and comfortable with the full complexity and chaos of humanity.

It’s great that you can support each other once a year in this holy of holies. But throughout the year you need to reach out and embrace those who are least like you.

Summary

I’ve argued that the direction of progress Frank describes can’t be taken for granted.
What we do has to work socially, as well as technically and managerially.
Yes we spend money and that is rightly scrutinised
But this work is inescapably based on values. They’re much more important and they too will eventually be scrutinised and challenged.
I’ve suggested the ICA might
• Research the relationship between the CIO and the Minister
• Share the sort of expenditure context I showed you to help members with planning
• Offer support in human rights and how to learn from one’s critics
• And you’re more than welcome to use Ideal Government as a place for conversation and to engage with critical friends

There is a choice, a clear fork in the road for each and every one of you, just as there was a choice for computer science in 1968.

You can offer to deliver to Ministers technology for an automated agenda of what Frank in his article calls population control. This might be a hierarchical top-down structure based around single identifiers, large centralised databases, full data sharing and data retention coupled with real-time surveillance and movement control.

There’s a Dr Strangelove-like promise in offering a world where behaviour can be monitored and predicted by the good guys for the greater security and peace of mind of all. Much of what we’re doing, in an accelerated manner now for almost exactly five years, fits into that pattern. It may or may not work technically and managerially. In social terms it’s acquiring the characteristics of a colossal disaster waiting to happpen.

Yet its proponents seem as oblivious to any contrary view as the 1960s proponents of artificial intelligence and automation were to the idea of distributed and networked user-friendly computing augmenting human intellect – the vision of Doug Engelbart.

The alternative is you can choose to base everything you do around respect for people’s wants, needs and true human nature, including respect for their personal sphere of life. You can set data free, design systems for users, invite co-creation wherever possible, engage with critical friends and build professional systems which work technically, in business terms and socially.

Since it’s my tax paying for it (which it is, and yours) we should feel fully entitled to say which we’d rather see.

If I had to live with the consequences (which we all will, all 1.1bn of us in the ICA countries) I know which path I’d prefer to see you take.

What will you advise Ministers as they transform public services and plot the path of government in an e-enabled society? You have the potential fundamentally to change the delivery of public services to 1.1bn people for the better – it’s hard to think of a more exciting and important responsibility.

I’ll be very happy to take your questions and feedback.

Ends