Think Cloud for Local Government - doing digital for Margaret
- Summary:
- A provocative opener to today's THINK.Cloud for Local Government conference at Manchester Central. The message? Think like Uber, but with a public service mindset.
For a generation, local government IT leaders have been baffling their councillors with talk of infrastructure and SQL databases. They didn't really get it, leading them to grudgingly fund IT, but with no special expectation of its value.
Now, local government IT leaders are baffling their councillors with talk of Uber-ization of their business processes and the Cloud. The result is that Town Halls react by looking at what Uber is doing to the taxi trade or Deliveroo to local food marketing, but fail to see a parallel with delivering social services in a time of endless financial Nuclear Winter.
Then, they don't really get it, leading them to grudgingly fund some digital service transformation IT project, but with no special expectation of its value.
Plus ca change etc.
Still think that billion quid website you bought was worth the money?
Welcome to the peculiar, disconnected world of local government IT, 2016, as expertly delineated this morning in Manchester by ex-local gov staffer and current digital design strategist Dominic Campbell, founder of FutureGov.
Kicking off the THINK.Cloud for Local Government conference, Campbell painted a compelling picture of possibility and danger confronting the sector. In terms of possibility, he said:
It feels like 1998 and the Internet just taking off.
While clearly behind nearly ever other industry, and after some disastrous mis-steps ("I wonder where the guy is who sold us that billion pound website we bought under New Labour. The Caymans?"), there is a real sense, he told delegates, that change is finally possible.
It's change at big risk of stillbirth, though, he warned:
If all we do is make a pretty front end to a Hell on Earth service, we're not doing anything at all.
The charge is that too many local government 'transformation' projects are really doing little more than a screen-scrape of disconnected, Byzantine back-end processes. There's a long way, after all, from talk of housing allocations, adaptation budgets, benefits and grants to a 'I've got MS; find me a place to live' service, after all.
Campbell drew on a powerful private sector analogy to make his point:
Too much local government Web work is what HMV did with online - threw a bunch of money at the problem and delivered a crappy digital service, one foot in the past, one foot in the future. It ended up being disrupted by a few Swede bros who developed a much nicer service with a much better business model - Spotify.
Who's to blame - the techies with their blather about '3D printed unicorn robots,' as he once famously joked on Twitter, or the Town Hall bureaucrats? Campbell implied more the latter, give the endemic indifference in the sector to IT as anything other than a cost-cutter.
Everything can be disrupted, especially government
Meanwhile, out in the real world, two things are happening. One is that the private sector Silicon Valley cohort, who are of an age now where their parents need to get serious healthcare or get into a rest home, are appalled by what they see. That has public sector implications, said Campbell:
Don't assume that government has a monopoly on anything. Everything can be disrupted and worked round, and social services and healthcare could easily be targets.
But there's something else here. That is, local government IT leaders who are really tying to stop the server hugging and actually dealing with what an Uber philosophy is about. That means going back to fundamentals and not putting digital lipstick on a big but starting again.
One such leader is Emma Collingridge, Digital By Design Programme Manager at Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council. Collingridge talked frankly today about what digital change actually looks like on the ground:
We are very used to initiatives that are all about big projects that solve today's problems, just about, then stop being up-to-date six or even three months after implementation.
Collingridge and her team are veterans of big procurement processes that are about managing today's crisis.
But in its own Uber moment, faced with a constant sea of change and budget cuts and now the need to participate in Greater Manchester Devo, the team decided to think and act differently.
Inspired by Agile philosophies and some of the thought leadership of the Government Digital Service GDS), the council is invested in a £7 million change program that isn't a 'transformation' push, but rather an attempt to build a platform that will be able to cope with endless change. This is characterised by a Agile-friendly commitment to be ready to release improvements on an on-going basis, for example, not in big step-points.
The first fruits of this new way of thinking is a summer rollout of a new children's social services app. Collingridge explained that Agile thinking is just a much better way to work with stakeholders and design the sort of systems they actually need in today's circumstances:
Waterfall just doesn't map onto that at all well.
There's a mindset shift that goes on here, as Collingridge noted:
We are trying to start to think like a lean tech start up, looking at ways to use cloud, open source and digital to fundamentally redesign processes and make better choices. We are learning to discern fact from fiction in the vendor sales pitches and stand by our red lines, too.
My take
This is the kind of thinking that digital and design activists like Campbell want to see - IT leaders who have accepted that this Internet thing isn't going away to leave them to "stroke their servers quietly in their corners," as he quipped. Leaders who see Silicon Valley as both a model of change and a warning of what could come and 'HMV them' out of existence.
But in a final qualification, be clear that the Campbells and the Collingridges of the world don't want to 'Uberize' social services at all, actually. Why? Because they don't want to see old people in rural areas who don't economically matter to such disrupters get left behind.
As Campbell warned:
Uber and such firms operate on the 80-20 rule. They only care about where they can make money. But you guys [in local government] have to work on the 20-80 rule - you have to help 'Margaret' in rural Surrey, who doesn't live close enough to town to be attractive to an Uber mindset.
Thus the FutureGov recipe for sustainable change and exploitation of digital is to think like Uber/Spotify and look to break things up with radical process redesign, pushing down the silos and joining up the service dots.
But do that with a public service mindset, looking to build that 'Find me a place to live' app that really helps the vulnerable.
Or as Campbell finished his presentation with:
Do it for Margaret.