On Tuesday, the UK government’s Chief Technology Officer, Liam Maxwell, posted a blog on Rebalancing technology across government. He set out a clear vision and statement of direction for government technology, founded on three guiding principles:

• focusing on user needs, ensuring that technology becomes so good that our colleagues, citizens and businesses want to use it
• putting outcomes first; such as reductions in cost per transaction
• using ‘openness’ to our advantage – open data, open standards, open source, open markets

His blog post accompanied the release of Government Service Design Manual guidance aimed at supporting Chief Technology Officers and related technology functions across the public sector. It followed on from earlier and ongoing changes to governance, discussed in Mike Bracken’s March 14th blog post. Liam’s interview with Kathleen Hall in Computer Weekly is also worth a read.

The Resources for Chief Technology Officers consolidates expertise in contemporary technology practice and reflects the best of what is happening in both private and public sectors. The guidance will doubtless be added to and enhanced over time (since the whole approach to the design manual is — sensibly — to make it a living, breathing practical set of guidance informed by experience and best practice). In the meantime, the guidance already covers numerous aspects of effective governance and implementation, including (in no particular order):

• Creating a culture that supports change
• End user devices
• Government as a platform
• Security as enabler
• Service integration and management
• Spending controls
• Technology architecture
• Technology code of practice

The guidance further empowers CTOs to help transform the role of technology in our public services as they continue working alongside their users, digital leaders and chief operating officers. I expect some of it may appear quite radical to those less close to current best practice — the guidance on  Creating a culture that supports change provides insight into the level of reform happening in government technology and the changes required to some of the older, less successful approaches.

As if all of this were not enough for one week, last night saw the announcement of the 2013 CIO100, in which public sector CxOs featured strongly. From James Thomas, CIO at UCLH NHS Trust at No 1, to Liam Maxwell at No 10 and a whole host of others — notably in local government, where meaningful improvements are being delivered in some very challenging financial environments — it was a timely reminder of how the right talent and leadership in technology helps transform our public services in enormously beneficial ways.

A video of UCLH’s Macmillan Cancer Centre is below — showing what happens when users (patients in this case) are placed at the centre of design. It’s a small taste of how our future NHS, and the wider public sector, could be — if we ensure the right talent, people and leadership are in the right place …

Transparency declaration: … I am on the judging panel for the CIO100.

For the next stage I thought it’d be interesting to see what could be achieved with the commercial Kinect sensor and SDK.

For an installation environment (such as a digital gallery or museum exhibit), I particularly want to explore what works — and what doesn’t — in terms of gesture control with techniques such as the palimpsest slider and palimpsest lens. It will also provide the opportunity to start exploring how to handle multiple users experiencing the same work at the same time.

So, early work with Kinect has started — shown in the video below. Early days, but I’m impressed with what it’s possible to achieve relatively simply with the Kinect. Of course, I may regret saying that as I get into the more detailed work ahead ….

I’m now at the stage of taking some of this research “into the wild” — building out early apps via our company VoeTek. Although that doesn’t mean the end of research — far from it: the journey to understand and improve the user experience, and hence the techniques and interfaces used, will build upon both the lab-based usability testing and online usability testing. Feedback from the various app stores will be used to continue to refine and improve the apps, to find out what works best and what doesn’t.

The PhD part of this research was just the beginning — I’m looking forward to what is yet to come.

Tokyo by night

Just back from an enjoyable (first) trip to Japan, a wonderful mix of high-tech and traditional culture. And a rich and varied feast for the stomach.

I’ve posted a random selection of snapshots over on flickr for those with time on their hands. The soundscape was at least as interesting as the landscape, but without my audio gear with me, I failed to record any samples … the perfect excuse for another visit …

A couple of practical sites I found particularly useful both before and during the visit, in case these are helpful for others:

- if you need a data SIM card or something similar (I wanted a local 3G card for my iPad whilst travelling), the b-mobile service worked well. Ordered in advance the micro SIM was waiting for me at the hotel when I checked in

- Japan’s impressive public transport system was made even easier to navigate courtesy of the Hyperdia site. This includes information about which platforms trains arrive and depart from – useful when there is less than 10 minutes to change trains with a manic dash between platforms

Cynthia has taken original video footage of moving Favella plankton by Elizabeth Harvey from the lab at the University of Rhode Island. Using her basic filming as a starting point, Cynthia’s video shows tracks of where the individuals are going and where they have been, creating new meaning out of the original video. Music by me.

You can learn more about this collaborative project at ‘Plankton Portraiture – a blog about the ongoing collaboration between Cynthia and oceanographer Susanne Menden-Deuer.‘

The Sunday Times ran a piece last weekend stating that:

“Apple and Google are avoiding up to £800m a year in tax in Britain despite sales here worth billions of pounds”

Only a short time before, Facebook was criticised for apparently similar behaviour:

“Facebook pays only £238,000 in corporation tax on UK earnings of up to £175m”

These companies are not alone: many businesses choose to headquarter themselves wherever the tax impact is most beneficial. They would doubtless argue, with some justification, that their corporate and shareholder obligations require them to optimise tax management, and hence profitability, using whatever legal means is available to them.

Such tax “efficiencies” are not confined to consumer-oriented technology companies. Take a look at a list of the historic top IT suppliers to government for example – just how many of these adopt similar tax efficiencies?

(source: “Better for Less”, using figures supplied by Kable)

With such large sums involved, it would be useful to know, both for these and all major suppliers to the public sector. More up-to-date and comprehensive supplier data should become available in the future as a result of the government’s transparency agenda, making it easier to identify those companies who do and don’t declare their full UK revenues here. Ideal material, too, I think for a creative Rewired State mashup …

The whole taxation model is anachronistic and somewhat Alice in Wonderland – with company earnings not consistently taxed where income is earned. It’s all very Janus-like: with one face the companies involved claim that the revenues were not really earned here in the UK; but with the other, they bonus their UK staff on revenues driven here in the UK – something which requires them internally to keep accounts showing very clearly what was earned in the UK. I’m uncertain how EU legislation enables companies to declare earnings from one member state as if they were earned in another – input from specialists in this area would be most useful.

Whilst this taxation issue is not restricted solely to IT providers, the problem is compounded in the IT marketplace by the nature of the distorted model that has arisen in the UK public sector. Its historic concentration in the hands of a small number of mega-players was referred to by the House of Commons Parliamentary Administration Select Committee as an “oligopoly” in its report “Government and IT – “A Recipe For Rip-Offs”: Time For A New Approach“.

This unusual market concentration is also aligned with atypically high public sector IT expenditure. The historic UK government spend on IT has seen some 1.93% of UK GDP spent on public sector IT, rising to 2.23% based on findings of the “Operational Efficiency Programme” undertaken by Dr Martin Read (a former chief executive of LogicaCMG, who led a 2009 Treasury review into the costs of IT and back-office administration).

This is much higher than the average for advanced industrial companies, whose governments typically spend between 1% and 1.5% of GDP on public sector IT (Dunleavy et al). The consequence of this is that a disproportionately large percentage of GDP is being spent on the IT supply base to government. If, as appears to be the case, that supply base contains a number of companies avoiding paying significant amounts of taxation on revenues earned from UK taxpayers, this represents a significant double cost to both the taxpayer and the wider economy.

Still, some of the companies involved at least acknowledge the problem:

“Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, has blamed the Government’s weak tax laws for the fact it has paid just £8m of corporation tax in Britain despite making more than £6bn in revenues in this country in the six years to 2010.”

I’m not sure how much this is a UK government issue and how much an EU one. If we accept that declaring revenues from one EU member state as if they were earned in another *is* permitted (as it seems to be), then perhaps the UK government should at least factor the additional total cost of ownership caused by such tax avoidance into its assessment of bids from any companies operating this model.

After all, the government would normally see some of its expenditure effectively returned to its coffers when companies pay their corporation tax and other business-related taxes here in the UK. For those claiming to have earned some or all of their UK revenues elsewhere however, this will not be true as it will be their nominated member state that collects any business taxes due – inflating the true costs of goods and services in the UK significantly. It also has much broader and significant macro-economic impacts, given the increased net outflow of money offshore and its investment in businesses abroad rather than those here in the UK.

This Wonderland taxation model also impacts other areas, such as the release of public data and its associated intellectual property rights. The government rightly wants to release as much public data as possible into the public domain – so that, for example, innovative companies can build exciting new businesses around the likes of Ordnance Survey maps, or real-time travel information. All good news in terms of generating economic growth. But if the companies that take the data and generate new, multi-million or multi-billion pound companies don’t pay their taxes here, it’s obviously a very different prospect for economic growth than if the companies do pay their taxes here. These things matter and it’s time the current business taxation model was properly reviewed and improved.

One problem in objectively assessing the true scale of the cost of the existing approach is the dearth of analyses of these complex macro-economic issues, despite how central they are to a whole host of debates – from the true total cost of ownership of government IT systems to the best licensing model for public data. According to the Sunday Times the Public Accounts Committee is about to examine the whole issue of corporations and where they pay taxes on their UK revenues, so perhaps some much needed progress is about to be made.

In the meantime, the government’s commitment to increasing transparency remains a strong card in protecting both government’s and taxpayers’ interests. This is one area where much greater transparency would enable us to understand more clearly the scale of the current taxation issues, their true costs to the UK economy and their impact on our potential for improved economic growth.

Sources

• “Apple avoids up to £570m in British Tax”. Simon Duke and Dipesh Gadher. Sunday Times, 14.10.2012.
• “Facebook pays only £238,000 in corporation tax on UK earnings of up to £175m“. Gideon Spanier and Jerome Taylor. Belfast Telegraph, 11.10.2012
• “French tax inspectors search Microsoft offices in dawn raid“. Peter Sayer. ComputerWorld, 04.07.2012
• “Google says it would pay more tax in UK“. Katherine Rushton. The Telegraph, 27.08.2011.
• “Operational Efficiency Programme: back office operations and IT“. May 2009. HMT.
• “UK Public Sector IT“. October 2009, Centre for Technology Policy Research
• “Better for Less: how to make government IT deliver savings“. Liam Maxwell.

It includes a piece by Ted Nelson, which, some 42 years on, largely reads as pertinent now as it presumably did then.

I’m posting a copy of the Nelson piece below without comment: I’m sure you can spot what remains pertinent today, these many years later …

UPDATED 07.09.2012: see postscript

The paper I co-authored with Mark Thompson is now online – “Digital government, open architecture, and innovation: Why public sector IT will never be the same again”.

This appears in the advance access section of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART to its friends) – for which, unfortunately, you will need a subscription.

It’s an interesting model of course – where the authors research and write in their own time and at their own expense, and someone else takes the income. Roll on open academic publishing!

If you can’t or don’t want to pay, the article now seeing the light of day was the one covered by Mark Say in his piece for the Guardian last August. Unlike Fleet Street, academic publishing moves at a sedate speed all its own: our article was originally submitted in July 2011, some 14 months ago and accepted in January 2012.

For those of you able to access and read our article in full online, you may need to partially adjust your mindset given that the world of IT reform in Whitehall has certainly not stood still. In particular the UK government’s cloud strategy has manifested itself in the CloudStore, a notable effort to move commodity services onto common platforms and away from the current expensive and highly fragmented model.

Mark and I will be doing some updates and further work in this and related areas – although we may find a conduit that is more open, timely and accessible in the future.

POSTSCRIPT: We’ve now had URL’s provided with free access to both the HTML and PDF versions of our paper. From the guidance provided by JPART/Oxford Journals – “Single copies of the article can be printed and distributed to interested colleagues who wish to use the article for personal research/study purposes only. For those wishing to make commercial use of the article, please direct them to journals.permissions@oup.com”. So now you know.

My recent CIO column “Whitehall zeros in on cost” touched upon the radical, and welcome, impact of zero organisational IT and user-centric computing services. I’m going to explore here what’s happening – and its implications – in a little more detail.

One of the key tenets of a CIO staying relevant to their organisation is knowing when to let go of old, outdated practices and to embrace the new and improved instead. It’s also about having the skills and experience to manage the transition from old state to new state. The role – perhaps now more than ever – is one of learn, adapt, reinvent, or succumb to built-in obsolescence and remain about as useful as yesterday’s gadget. So it’s a sad irony that some IT departments, once seen as the enablers of productivity and competitiveness, are now just as likely to be the direct cause of reduced productivity, inflated costs and complexity.

The contrast between the old and new worlds is telling. New organisations frequently set up with little if any in-house IT infrastructure, obtaining required capabilities from a range of commodity components – from utility end-user devices to cloud-based services. The starting point is a zero IT mindset, making smart re-use of existing devices and services wherever possible – with bespoke or niche requirements only acquired and implemented by exception. This approach is a direct inversion of the operating model of many existing organisations, who have grown up with the idea of the ‘enterprise’ IT department sitting like a plump spider at the centre of a web, acquiring and owning everything, either directly or via contractual arrangements with key systems integrators. The ‘one size fits all’ mindset of many enterprise IT departments was never sensible: today it’s an increasingly  expensive indulgence.

In the commercial world, businesses will either transition to this new model quickly and effectively, or find themselves up against competitors and new market entrants with operational costs as much as 80% lower than their own and with far higher productivity. Whilst these competitive dynamics are not directly mirrored in the public sector, the economic environment and the need to provide better public services at less cost provides an equally compelling driver of change.

This is not only a significant shift in the nature of devices and platforms that users utilise, but also the way they work. The prevailing model of the 1990′s and the last decade is rapidly becoming obsolete. Remember for example when users emailed documents around to each other for review? And each user then sent it back with their comments for the originator to assimilate into an updated version … which they then sent out for review and so on and so on? And each user had to have a PC with a local email client and a local word processing package to edit the document? How so very 1990s. And how terribly inefficient: it was an era that merely substituted a digital form of document exchange in place of the paper equivalent that previously existed: it was not a successful transformation of working practices.

Today’s commodity platform approach has transformed “documents” into online collaborative workspaces, where users simultaneously work on the same information. The “document” is no longer emailed around ad nauseum and hence no longer forks and chews up pointless cycles of in-box handling bandwidth and offline processing. Editing is done through generic end-user device tools, most frequently web browsers, enabling users to access and work on key information wherever they are and through a variety of devices, including their own. The need to move information around, with all that productivity-sucking impact, is rapidly reducing, as is the need for printing out ‘documents’. It’s a semi-realisation of Jaron Lanier‘s comment about Ted Nelson:

“… I think that Ted Nelson‘s first thought was a best thought … that there should only be one copy of a digital file, controlled by the owner”

albeit applied to the workplace rather than the consumer space.

We have passed through an era where the norm became the specification of particular products or service providers, with the ‘enterprise’ IT department acting in god mode and deciding which product or provider to select on behalf of all its users. All too often the IT department did so without any analysis or real understanding of the actual user requirement: ask many IT departments today as they are about to sign or renew a contract what user requirement the good/service meets and what alternative options have been evaluated, and I’m alarmed by how rarely the question can be convincingly answered. This out-dated approach – either automatically renewing incumbent products or service providers, or at best swapping them out to make a like-for-like substitution with self-similar products or suppliers – has become lazy business as usual, with inadequate thought given as to what capabilities are actually required and how those capabilities might best be provided.

Today the focus is swinging rapidly away from specifying products or suppliers in the arrogant belief that “One Size Fits All” to concentrate on user requirements. Where once only ‘enterprise’ features, under the monopoly control of IT departments and their select suppliers, provided the necessary capabilities, today consumer technology has commoditised important ‘enterprise’ requirements such as disk and folder encryption, the ability to remotely wipe a device, real-time device remote tracking and dual-factor authentication and revocation. The irony is that some major ‘enterprise’ product vendors, perhaps too busy cosying up to their favourite ‘enterprise’ IT departments, have completely missed this major gravitational shift. Such features remain notably absent from their own consumer offerings, leaving them badly placed to survive the current transition.

One of the biggest obstacles to genuinely user-centric and effective ways of working has always been the vexed issue of security. Yet this historic over-dependency on IT departments and expensive bespoke suppliers masked an essential reality: that security is not a function solely of technology, but one of people and HR and legal practices. It is the user who is ultimately accountable and responsible for adherence with organisational policies. Embedding such policies into user-hostile technology may have become an accepted way of working in many organisations, but it is not a solution in itself. Indeed, the experience of some organisations suggests that by making technology the main focus of ensuring the security of data and devices, users have abrogated their own responsibilities. “People, process and technology are all part of security” is the standard mantra. So let’s establish just such a balance instead of throwing technology at the problem.

In the early days of the internet there was often one touch-down machine in an office where the internet could be accessed. No other devices were allowed to connect to the new fangled interwebs. Now something similar is happening once again, but almost as the inverse of that earlier approach. For their routine needs, users are making use of commodity services and devices equipped with high quality consumer security. Yet when they need access to particularly secure material they can use a secure touch-down machine in the corner of the office. The era of commoditised, utility computing has inverted the security model. All those earlier unnecessary and expensive practices – such as buying top range new PCs and then sticking glue in their USB ports; or putting custom security software onto them that meant the PC took 20+ minutes to boot before it could be used; or tying users to particular locations and forcing them to work in specific, unproductive ways; or making users print out more secure documents and carry them around on paper; or {fill in your own example here} – are heading the way of the hay wain.

This emphasis on users in place of the ‘enterprise’ IT department is a belated recognition of the reality that most users have fairly lightweight routine needs that can be met by simple email and word processing facilities – and security requirements that can be met through the best of what the commodity world has to offer as standard features.

Apple Macs for example, if they are lost or stolen, can be remotely wiped of all their data and contents by their user, without requiring the insertion of an ‘enterprise’ IT department into the mix. Remotely wiping a Mac removes all data and also locks it down, making it unusable without a set passcode.

Device security itself is increasingly less of an issue anyway. Many business services are now accessed through web browsers with little if anything actually persisting on the device. A service such as Google Drive does not physically copy your docs to your device. Where secure on-device protection is required, whole drive encryption or selected folder encryption can be enabled all under the control of the user. In addition, standard features in hosted services such as Google Apps include two-factor authentication and the ability for a user to revoke a device’s access permissions in the event it is lost or stolen. The majority of software is now self-updating and self-correcting – making redundant yet another of the expensive roles once played by central IT departments and their suppliers. These modern, consumer-friendly tools are finally empowering the user rather than the IT department.

The move to devices making use of open standards is helping remove the previous ‘enterprise’ IT endorsed lock-in to specific products and technologies. By concentrating on the right standards for interoperability and a user-based definition of functionality, future moves between service providers become simpler and a huge swathe of costly and time-consuming infrastructure and bureaucracy can be removed.

For those who cannot or will not rise to the challenge, I’d advise them to read and consider the observations that the Leading Edge Forum made in its report “Preparing for a Post-PC World” (August 2011):

“It would be counter-productive, and even dangerous, for IT executives to deny what is happening and refuse to engage in these post-PC change debates. The inevitable result would be that employees saw enterprise IT and its policies as out of touch and increasingly irrelevant”

CIOs need to refocus on their role as the optimisers of business processes and information handling, and as effective agents of change. They need to demonstrate their capability to reduce costs and improve user satisfaction and productivity. Their biggest challenge is to lead this transition from old mode to new – or otherwise they’d best beware the LEF’s prescient warning above…

I included this mock-up of how this might look when citizens are submitting their data into the custody of an organisation, echoing the look and feel of Creative Commons licensing:

So, what progress in the meantime?

In terms of the thinking around how we treat personal data, I think there has been good if slow progress. The recent work on the draft identity assurance principles shows a growing maturity in learning the lessons of the past – and what makes for well designed, or badly designed, information systems.

But I’m not sure there’s been enough progress both in terms of being explicit with citizens and businesses what permissions they’re granting to third parties – nor in terms of making very clear to users in those organisations what rights they have to the personal data entrusted to them.

Alongside the visualisation of the rights associated with data, we need the underlying rights enforced computationally. Ultimately too we need to realise that ensuring the right data is available to the right people at the right time can be done in a secure and trusted fashion – and does not require the potentially dangerous legalistic approach of enforced “data sharing” (with all the security and privacy problems that produces), but rather the better design of our information systems. Achieving this much needed re-design I suspect still remains the most significant challenge.