5 ways digital government needs to change for the 21st century.
Joe Potter
07/10/2020
Doing more with less
For every Civil Servant walking round Whitehall today, there is an undeniable, looming uphill slope ahead. It is arguable that even before the coronavirus pandemic, government and public sector bodies have never felt more under pressure to deliver, with ever shrinking resources available to them. The UK is not alone. It’s a similar story to many of our EU colleagues, where in many western nations it is simply not possible to afford the high level of public services demanded by the public without such a high ratio of public spending- it will inflict damage to the economy. Yet the problem for civil servants is becoming even worse. Current pressure is not just to maintain services, but actually improve them, by offering more, in a more convenient, more transparent and ever cheaper, faster way.
To even have a hope of realising this, it is known, and has been known for some years, that we must turn to digital. However, in government, there has always been the problem of political vision vs operational digital ability. UK government is littered with digital failures - NHS patient records abandoned at £6.8bn cost with nothing to show, Universal Credit requiring an entire rewrite 4 years in, immigration e-system contracts written off at the cost of over £300bn, the list goes on.
Happily, the story has changed in recent years with the embracing of agile ways of working, common digital visions and leadership from the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service (GDS) and more services being delivered on time and near enough on budget than not. However, whilst the corner may have been turned from the shocking early days, there is still a long way to go. Less than a fifth of public sector organisations are satisfied with their software suppliers and digital vendors 1 in 2020 , and while nearly 2000 government web services have been combined into gov.uk, with over 14 million visits per week, most operate in total isolation to each other, and take longer to share information between them than 1990s paper and fax methods.
This is hardly surprising. Our government system was designed for an industrial empire, with a centralised and undemocratic model that is not really fit for the modern age. Digital offers a new alternative. We need digital, but as we start to see it work, we need to make fundamental structural changes in how we operate.
1. Close the data gap
In the UK, 21% still lack basic IT skills to use online government services. Of those 21%, 8/10 are in the poorest quartile of society. Often, this group requires the digital services most, and in order to understand their life experiences, we need to collect data about them, and not just rely on what our analysts tell us. Without this information, what seems perfectly reasonable to civil servants and digital professionals often overlooks many hidden realties and hardships faced by disadvantaged groups.
We are becoming better at this. We now collect more data about what our users need, rather than mandating processes, better than ever before. But often, we don’t break this data down to account for protected characteristics, such as gender, race, socioeconomic background and religion.
The rationale is easy to understand, we are treating everyone equally, and do not want to discriminate. But in order to understand areas of society most impacted by our services and increase digital social mobility, we need the data that shows us where systematic discrimination, however accidental, is still occurring. It’s estimated by the Tinder Foundation this may cost £876million. Yet the benefits to operational services could be over £15bn each year purely in monetary savings terms, whilst the social impacts of properly funded research into systematic discrimination are all but vital to improving the society we live in.
The second part is then what we do with this data. One of the first things that’s inducted into civil servants is information management, and classifying almost all documents at or above OFFICAL. This creates a climate of fear around sharing, exactly what government needs to do to make digital services more democratic, open and available for others to help improve, share and understand in a transparent way. In order to be better, we need to be accountable, and openly publishing our findings, methodology and research, is the only way we can continue to iteratively improve in the 21st century.
2. Use immutable architecture
We are already seeing cloud giants like Microsoft Azure and Amazons AWS becoming semi-state, quasi instruments of government, such is the technological reliance governments have on there infrastructure. 2 or 3 companies dominate in modern web hosting, such is the hold they have on the industry. This poses the question whether, to some extent, private cloud platforms have become critical national infrastructure. Whilst it would be naïve to assume we can replicate Google’s technology or Amazon’s R&D budget, a hybrid mix of government and industry cloud is required, where all departments can securely sit, and be properly legislated across government.
We also need to consider the challenge of security for government. WannaCry demonstrated how serious attacks on government can be and how deeply it can affect services we rely on. At the same time the stakes couldn’t be higher; Government holds more data on us than anyone else, along with highly classified information that makes a tempting target for anyone from script kiddies to state-actors. This means we need architecture with as few vulnerabilities as possible, more so than even industry requires, given the level of classified information government must deal with.
In practice this means we must move away from patching and software updates as is standard in industry and instead, move to immutable infrastructure - every time a vulnerability is discovered, that version is torn down and replaced with an entirely new, securer version. A government cloud would offer a feasible option to achieve this, along with a unique set of challenges. DWP and HMRC account for nearly half of all gov web traffic and have near constant levels of traffic. Contrastingly, in times of an election, or as we have recently seen during the coronavirus pandemic, a civil emergency, Cabinet Office and other government departs like DHSC can see huge peaks that overtake all other parts of government on specific occasions. We would therefore need a cloud that could handle these peaks, whilst remaining cost effective in times of relative stability. This is something currently only private companies with thousands of clients can do cost effectively. The answer therefore is likely to live somewhere between a public and private cloud. Government controlled datacentres, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google software built on top? Whilst it may be too early to fully say, governments must start considering this now.
3. Reusable components available across governments
We’ve already made great leaps forward in standardisation since the dark days of the early 2000s, where each department hosted its own style of services in a complex web that would make any spider jealous. But while an agreed upon style and design process with common elements and css styles are a great start, the air of complacency creeping in must be stopped. Actual underlying services - the mechanics and code that processes citizens information is not nearly utilised as much as it should be.
Neither Treasury, DFID or any public bodies currently use common components, and MOD only has 3 of its 76 services using them. Many other central government bodies aren’t much better. Gov.Notify and Gov.Pay (the governments alert and secure payment systems respectively) are early examples of how this can offer great savings when done properly, while other elements, without a proper centralised library or repo, have failed to be as widely embraced.
Indeed, one of the early flagship common components, Gov.Verify, heralded as the government’s identify checker to end all others, warns us not to be too complacent. Verify has only been integrated into 21 services -all of them central government and less than half the governments original target. There are many reasons that could be sited for this, but chief among them are other departments failure to take on board ‘other peoples code’, embrace it, modify it and work on it.
Gov components only work when lots of teams use them and invest in them. Gov verify could have been great but, as the public accounts committee damningly termed verify, it was “badly served, and no-one was willing to fix it…so it would never be fit for purpose”.
If we are to create a true government ecosystem that will serve citizens, departments and services , we need a library of stock components they can trust and easily use. These could be plugged int services like a giant lego kit, rather than each department trying to make a plastic injection moulder of their own.
4. Involve users as stakeholders earlier in the design
Users need to interact with government how they want to, not how government deems to be the simplest user process. Reaching out more directly to the user groups who typically shun digital services is key to doing away with refining processes and helping us solve problems instead.
We have made progress. Moving from tackling processes to user needs, was a step change that has improved government, but it still revolves too much around old department systems and structures. For example, services may improve existing processes, but NHS doesn’t let DVLA know that you’ve had an accident that means you can’t drive. It should.
Our next step to be truly efficient, has to move away from department services and improving them for users to building around users entire lives. While this may sound rather big-brother, it simply means breaking down unnecessary processes and making obvious connections, so that citizens will have problems taken care of without cumbersome manual interaction. This will in turn, speed up our feedback loop, which in the 21st century is crucial for constant iteration and improvement of government services. In order to progress further we must do away with our processes and look at improving peoples lives, before they even sit down at the computer.
5. Become better digital citizens to make effective online legislation for future generations.
Perhaps the most fundamental change that’s needed is the civil service itself. The system of departments is built for a paper age that worked in very different ways to todays governments and crucially, to how government saw its role to the people.
For the 21st century this means a less hierarchical and more networked mesh civil service across departments, linked by skill areas not grades, is needed. Conversely, to make this a reality, it will require far stronger digital leadership from government, both in GDS, and DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport), the other government body vying for digital control of government. In truth neither can win, as it requires a full bodied investment in digital, from No.10 downward, but a stronger, clearer vision of how this will look is needed from one of these.
Currently, much of this vision for the public sector revolves around trying to be a service industry. It takes bits from banks, retailers and specific software companies and creates online electronic forms that while an improvement, won’t really work in the long run. Government services aren’t the part of government that need digitising anymore. The underlying policy, the way of working, the mindset at the top, needs to change to be digitally driven. In short we don’t use technology to enable policy, we integrate technology into the policy and design policy for digital worlds. The civil services DNA needs to fundamentally change, from policy to digital.
References:
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/whitehall-monitor-2020/digital
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk-verify/introducing-govuk-verify
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmpubacc/1748/174802.html