WRITTEN ON September 28th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Here’s the outline, revised after delivery, of my talk in Tampere Finland to an audience of perhaps 1000 public servants from 43 countries at the 4th European Quality Conference. My aim is to start a conversation about the role of IT and the Internet in sustainable, quality public services across Europe and beyond (and exemplify Kable as an approachable, informative and interesting participant in that conversation).

In keeping with the conference theme it’s called Sustaining quality improvement in Europe’s increasingly e-enabled public services.

Happy “International Right to know day” everyone – there are pro-FoI events going on all round the world but no need in Finland, which has had FoI since 1766. We should pay tribute to the wisdom and foresight of the Swedes who were running the country at that time.

My first point is that “Comparisons are odious”. There’s no such thing as “average European government” by size or economy. You can’t average out the different cultures and constitutions. Put 30 countries on a chart comparing spend per head and IT spend as % of total government spend, with a big bubble representing the average, not one country falls within the average. (We did that, but for some reason I can’t upload it)

Five years ago I was knocked out by Pekka Myrskylla’s Finnish stats presentation. But we can’t all be like Finland. If you think about trying you come against the pertinent question “Just how like Finland do we want to be?”. I was equally flabbergasted by that awful presentation in Paris (La France en tete) that presented e-gov as a crude politial race without sensitivity to the values involved. The UK is just as bad, claiming at various times leadership in CCTV and in benchmarking. Some races you don’t want win, indeed take part in.

National comparisons are hazardous. Central targets produce unwanted side-effects. Producer case studies, such as the large volume we’ve all read for this event, dont often tell us much about what the customer makes of it. Yes, we’re all connected now, but we’re not the same. Each of our national and local journeys leads to its own e-enabled destination

As we keep saying, only three things matter
- Customer service (and that’s what the customer thinks, not what you the producer think)
- Efficiency and reducing back office costs, because we work hard to pay our taxes
and Public trust (build it, maintain it, restore it). Countries like Finland who are the best at this constantly reinforce its impoirtance. Here in Tampere no-one locks their bikes (unlike back home, where you can lock half a ton of BMWRS1200 an it gets nicked anyway).

(But note what Mel Dubnick says that we are more than customers and citizens. He starts to explore the meaning of Marshall McLuhan’s notion of “nomadic gatherers of knowledge” to describe how emerging people will want options, immersion and sustainability. Whoa. Comments welcome).

Preparing intelligent policies for an e-enabled society is a problem for politicians, as efforts at policies on software patents, copyright, TV without frontiers and the UK’s ill-advised ID policy show. CIOs have the double challenge of conveying the emerging rules of the new e-enabled world to politicians, and of working with business heads to deliver reform. It’s a lot to stay on top of and things are changing faster than anyone can work out the implications and possibilities.

Suppliers can innovate and fulfil your needs, but you can’t ask them the right thing for the public sector to do That’s for you to work out in a conversation with your clients, informed and invigorate by the discoveries and experiences of exemplary Internet users.

Doug Engelbart showed us 40 years ago the path not to automate but to “Augment” the human intellect. The Augment vision wins hands down: look at the Internet today. Nobody can keep up: don’t worry, enjoy it. But what we need, alongside the laborious official policies and IT strategies, is an unofficial set of principles developed in a conversation with exemplary Internet users.

That’s what we try to work out here at Ideal Government. And the emerging Ideal Government principles, based on our conversation so far, are

- Quick wins
- Beyond design for users: co-creation
- Real, raw feedback, and
- the new foundation of trust

Here are some general examples of each, and some examples that relate to public services:
Quick wins: search, RSS, maps (eg that new NSPCC service), mobiles, Skype and SMS (eg to pay parking fees or tell jurors when their case is due), the blessed £60 DirectionlessGov (which is a better search engine, cheaper than the £50m-odd official version, and more trustworthy because it’s simpler, less self-referential, and has no editorial agenda). Be aware of these, use them where relevant, and don’t reinvent the wheel.
Co-creation: the splendid Wikipedia, the whole Google maps mania world of maps mashups including last year’s Ideal Gov maps mashup competition which was such fun, the world of MySoc, scraping clunky public services like Hansard to give life, immediate and vibrant citizen engagement of exemplary design.
Real raw feedback like the Clustr map which shows where Ideal Gov viewers are from (hey it’s so easy even I could paste that in), the Digg stack and the gorgeous Digg swarm (which I dont really understand yet – what governs where the stories swarm to?), and the world of Zeitgeist – Google Zeitgeist which shows what different countries search for each month (in July 2006 it was Finland: Lordi and Christiano Ronaldo, in France Zidane, Cristiano Ronaldo, coeur, amour and desperate housewives) and in Germany weather, route planning and Cristiano Ronaldo). The WritetoThem Zeitgeist and other MySociety services shine a light on MP’s effectiveness with correspondence, attendance record, register of interests. (The Hungary example I used to like seems to have disappeared, and the Barcelone municipal service site has been hijacked by political spindoctors I gather. So perhaps there is gathering evidence that “official” feedback sites get muzzled, as did the original Number 10 feedback service).

Anyway, the contempory Internet is more than a tool to let public servants tinker with clunky old bureaucracies. . It’s a medium which changes the culture they operate in because it changes people. User content, tagging, co-creation, reputation and feedback point to the nature of that change.

This requires from you something called “integrative complexity”. In the past I’ve expressed this as engaging with critical friends or “”love your enemies”. But this seems the right psychological term for the ability to assimilate and act on quite different points of view. George Bush can’t do it, but for most of us it’s easy and it’s fun!

So good luck, and any comments of feedback are welcome here – just click on the word “Comments“.

William Heath
Tampere, Finland
28 September 2006*or as defined by Stanford: “the degree to which thinking and reasoning involve the recognition and integration of multiple perspectives and possibilities and their interrelated contingencies”