As the IHBC extends the reach and application of our NewsBlogs into new areas of reporting, our Research Consultant Bob Kindred offers his personal informal summary of a recent event on ‘Digital Public Services: Reshaping, rethinking and rewriting services’ held in London on 1 July last.
Bob Kindred writes:
Attendees needed to be familiar to some extent with the project management methodologies used for big projects in the public sector: PRINCE 2; Agile and Waterfall.
‘PRINCE 2’: is the acronym for PRojects IN Controlled Environments) a de facto process-based method for effective project management and used extensively by the government as non-proprietorial best practice guidance on project management aimed at a focus on business justification; defined organisation structure for the project management team; a product-based planning approach; and emphasis on dividing the project into manageable and controllable stages.
‘Agile’ management or agile project management is an iterative and incremental method of managing the design and build activities for engineering, information technology, and new product or service development projects in a highly flexible and interactive manner. Also known, apparently as ‘extreme project management’ and a variant of iterative life cycle where deliverables are submitted in stages. Both iterative and agile methods were developed as a reaction to various obstacles that developed in more sequential forms of project organization e.g. as technology projects have grown in complexity, end users have tended to face difficulties defining the long term requirements without being able to view progressive prototypes.
‘Waterfall’ is a sequential design process, used in software development, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through the phases of conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, production/ implementation and maintenance.
The presentations of several key speakers are summarised below:
Daniel Thornton, Institute of Government stated that Government has an ambitious agenda but has a long way to go. The digital transformation is aimed at everybody (in government) to reduce costs and reduce the size of the civil service. All unprotected government departments will be cut by 15% and local government will face a further round of varying cuts.
Running new (digital) services can’t simply replace existing ones but must run in parallel before the old ones are turned off and this equated to greater (short term) costs. Having enough money and people is not enough; the civic service must be more agile (or ‘Agile’ – see above). Transformation has to be done by the same team from inception to completion primarily using Prince 2.
Civil servants may be acting in an agile way but are not interacting directly with customers so project management is not fully effective. The Treasury uses ‘Green Books’ to evaluate projects (latest version Nov. 2014) but at the same time is relying on decades-old software, for example COBOL (common business oriented language) first introduced in 1959! This will not help deal with huge projects with immense lead-in times and challenging organizational and budgetary issues such as Heathrow Expansion or HS2.
Projects need prototypes before a full business case is submitted, making clear the complexity of the issues and what the deadlines are. Q: What does a prototype look like? A: Given the analogy of a car, its not just a bumper and a steering wheel but must be at least a vehicle capable of moving.
The new mantra is ‘if you are going to fail, fail fast’. There needs to be unfettered access to resources and contact with customers and suppliers and a need to understand, literally what was done yesterday and today with the intention of having real conversations with customers.
Robin Vicker, Digital Life Sciences/NHS said that big systems need to be integrated with real-life experiences (‘understanding customer journeys’). The world has plenty of good information services but they don’t actually do anything specifically for you. However, Uber is an example of a safe and personalized service for both sides of the transaction: supplier and customer. Other examples include catch-up TV and web-streaming versus traditional time-specific broadcasting (with the commensurate decline in conventional TV viewing) and QR-code type, personally downloadable airline tickets.
In the NHS the same conversations take place over and over again with different groups but only 25% of advice is tailored to the needs of individuals. Much of this broad-brush, hit-and-miss approach could be replaced by e.g. on-line interaction via Skype, with long-term self-support via access to experts without direct face-to-face contact.
Customer relationships should become personalized and transactional (e.g. the Babylon personal healthcare app)
David Robinson, Texthelp stated that 80% of government interaction is with the bottom 25% in society. There is a digital divide and those who can’t get on-line for jobs, services and goods find life much more difficult. There are major problems for those who are not IT literate or have no access e.g. the elderly and the 4M in the UK for whom English is their second language. The problem of no digital access is that it affects 20% of the UK population and those that may need it most can least afford it including those with no money and/or a disability (including a print disability).
Robinson stated that there is no point in saying ‘we want to be all digital by 2020’. There needs to be a much better user experience now, understanding it, and all its faults and working from there. Websites need to be much more accessible e.g. for example by screening to address issues of dyslexia.
Carl Haggety, LocalGovDigital has been setting up a local government ‘pipeline’ with 85 local authorities so far, sharing information on tangible matters and ways to improve customer experiences by digital means. He has established a web-based ‘un-mentoring’ arrangement where 120 individuals are matched per month for 30 minutes for one-to-one conversations about digital user needs, and a usability dashboard is being developed by Birmingham CC.
Mark Thompson, Senior Lecturer in IT Systems at the Judge Business School, Cambridge & authority on digitizing government made explicit the government’s need to move to open source standards. This principle gave us the standard concept of 240volts for all electrical appliances in the UK, but we now need a sort of ‘(Apple) IOS app environment’ – (‘the take up of Apple apps is something the government would die for’) by encouraging many providers for services and consolidating the demand by making some provisions open source. Should the government own the standard or hold the ring to enable the market?
The government IT strategy has been about delivery of services by commissioning, but it is starting to think a lot like Apple IOS and in terms of kick-starting innovations (and indeed Apple is itself going increasingly open source for app developers). However the government can’t decide whether to develop platforms or ecosystems for digital development and one without the other ‘is like clapping with one hand’. Is government an enabler or a builder of digital service delivery systems? It ‘has got to do better than just listen to the user, its what it does after that is going to count’. One emerging issue is ‘de-verticalisation’ where the partners to government do part of the work and as this proceeds more partners emerge and join in.
c. Bob Kindred MBE
