Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth 2.0
From the truth about Sir Humphrey to IT-enabled constitutional change.
In a post earlier today, I mentioned that it may be the case occasionally that IT-enabled change puts real control into the hands of business leaders, and that might be the last thing the business needs. Today, I went to an event called 'Gov 2.0, or Truly Transformative Government' that made me wonder about the effects of change in another sphere...
It could be argued that the Elizabethan era had a major impact on our society. The issues that Shakespeare grappled with - love, politics and the human condition - are much the same as the ones we deal with today. From Henry V to the Merchant of Venice, we can easily provide modern parallels. Queen Elizabeth I gave us the foundations for much of our modern institutions.
From a constitutional perspective, Elizabeth 1.0 via Victoria (change for the District and Circle lines) to Elizabeth 2.0 charts the evolution of our constitution thus far. It has evolved into something where a great deal of debate and faffing about and re-drafting and discussing and consulting and re-drafting again and discussing for the millionth time take place before anything really radical can happen. If that sounds like a bad thing, then think about the various times and places where radical constitutional change occurred, and whether or not on balance the net effect has been good.
Coming back to the event, it included presentations from notables such as Martyn Thomas and Jim Norton, which were very much along the lines of the BCS/RAEng report on the challenges of complex IT projects from 2004. Hopefully the link to the seminar details above will contain copies of their presentations shortly - worth a gander. Ross Anderson, from Cambridge University, presented on why none of this is listened to, in a way that was straight out of Yes Prime Minister. Apparently this was based on a study of public sector economics, but it was a pretty miserable view of the public sector. It was along the lines of Ministers want to get in the media and re-elected, and that the best thing they can do is flannel people and not take decisions. Sir Humphrey would, I'm sure, have expressed this more subtly, but would not have disagreed. Together this left me wondering in a depressed sort of way if we would ever see any effective IT-enabled change in the public sector.
Thankfully, I've seen plenty of evidence that it does exist, so I wasn't too depressed.
However, the next session included presentations from William Heath (one of the founders of Kable, and blogger at the Ideal Government Project), who gave a witty, insightful presentation into how to get real citizen-centric public service delivery, and Tom Steinberg (from mysociety.org which is behind theyworkforyou and the No 10 petition site) who basically said STOP DOING LARGE IT PROJECTS loudly, and repeatedly. Jerry Fishenden from Microsoft also gave a presentation. Together, they were so enthusiastic about how IT-enabled change could affect democracy, policy... well, more or less everything... that it left me feeling a bit odd. I'm not used to such unbridled positivity. The effect was that they had me worrying about what would happen if we *did* see effective IT-enabled change in government!
Using IT to enable more effective public service delivery, for engaging citizens and voters and all that good stuff is relatively non-controversial (relatively, I say!). However, putting big levers in the hands of policy makers (which is what one of the presenters described) is exactly what our constitution prevents. It got me wondering how far down the road of IT-enablement would be a bridge too far.
I guess the real lesson learned is how much my emotional state is affected by presentations on IT and transformative government. Perhaps it is time to go for a walk...
Search this blog
Comments (3)
Leave CommentTransparency would be the best principle for government IT projects, doing away with the 'commercial secrecy' defence under which so many monstrous failures have been hidden. Ultimately of course this leads to open source development, where anyone can discuss the weaknesses and anyone can offer solutions. With transparency, the CSA might have been replaced by a few tweaks to the tax code and child benefit systems, the ID card catastrophe-in-waiting by a simple universal ID number, massive loss of personal information from government databases averted etc.
Report Comment
Richard - the model you're suggesting is an interesting one, and it is very much in the mysociety.org vein of project delivery. I think there is much to be said for it, but it also has its drawbacks. Perhaps procuers are using the shield of commerical confidentiality overmuch, but there may be times when it is needed. Trouble is, how can you tell? Most of all, the pressures exerted on businesses delivering in the public sector, officials at various levels of seniority and the politicians are all complex and not immediately apparent. What I struggle with is that solutions that look clear from one point of view look like madness from another. How then, when nobody has a perfect view, do you carve out success? I'm not sure...
Report Comment
Not sure about the applicability of the open-source model to government IT. I've worked on several large govt IT projects, and none of them have failed over technical issues, but over catastrophic mismanagement, failure to identify requirements throughout the lifecycle (one project was implemented three times and they still had not managed to identify their requirements), failure to manage changes to requirements, failure to recognise that the whole damned thing was a bad idea from the outset, failure to "KISS", basically. All the things that experts have been saying for years, in other words. The problem is not transparency, but the fact that there are huge vested interests - political and business - in maintaining the momentum of a project once it starts, so that the Concorde fallacy rapidly comes into effect: It's seen as "cheaper" (not financially but in terms of cost to political/commercial prestige) to carry on regardless than to stop throwing good money after bad. Personally, I think there should be a moratorium on all govt IT projects above a certain financial threshold, and all responsibility for financial and project management should remain with the public sector, who can be held accountable, at least in theory. Large consultancies should be used purely as body shops to supply additional skilled staff on an individual basis, with the selection process also controlled by the public sector managers. Maybe then we'd also see an end to profiteering by consultancies who import inexperienced and sometimes incompetent foreign staff on third world rates and charge them out to government clients at over twice the going rate for an experienced UK-based contractor, for example.
Report Comment
Post a comment