Category: social exclusion
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Book extract (work in progress)
My book exploring digital, data and technology—and how politicians and policymakers can understand and use them more effectively—is (slowly!) taking shape. It’s currently around 270 pages, but that’s before I give it a severe haircut. Anyhow, here’s a short draft extract from work in progress … I’ll post more raw samples over coming weeks and months.…
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Back to the past with government identity
The Government Digital Service (GDS) has a generous £400m budget to develop “One Login”, a single sign-on and digital identity system for government services. But it comes with a nagging sense of déjà vu: although billed as a fresh approach, it’s remarkably similar to the solution implemented in 2001 by an earlier Cabinet Office team at a cost…
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What can politicians learn from Universal Credit?
The unfortunate saga of Universal Credit is a powerful reminder of the repeated failure to successfully integrate policy making with technology. A failure that comes with profound human consequences and suffering, not just a financial cost. Universal Credit (UC) aimed to deliver a radically better approach to welfare benefits, one that would provide: “A dramatically…
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Integrating technology and policymaking
I’ve written before about the need to better integrate technology and policymaking — in 360-degree policy making, policy making in the digital age, and many earlier pieces going back over several decades, such as my 2006 co-authored paper The New World of Government Work. Governments have been keen to take advantage of digital, data and…
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The elusive pursuit of outsourced digital identity
Remember when UK banks were innovative, leading the world and always at the top of the polls for brilliant customer service? No, me neither. Actually, that’s not entirely fair. There have been brief flashes of innovation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the UK government hoped that banks would become trusted providers of digital…
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Digital government and asymmetric justice
Governments are acquiring and sharing more of our data on the basis that it will improve efficiency, personalise services, and reduce fraud, error and debt. Data acquired for one purpose is often used for another, whether the citizen agreed for this to happen or not – perhaps most notoriously our health records or children’s data.…
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Improving identity assurance and trust
We may live in a digital age, but paper documents – notably passports – are still the most trusted evidence to help prove who we are. It’s not surprising that one of the most common requests made of Government is to provide a secure service for checking the validity of passports. An online Document Checking…
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Data Privacy Day musings
Consider this on #DataPrivacyDay. For more than 60 years now, organisations have been trying to understand and manipulate the way we think, as the first in the series of quotes below illustrates: “Many of us are being influenced and manipulated — far more than we realize — in the patterns of our everyday lives. Large…
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The political opportunity—and threat—of better public services
Hard to believe I know, but we’re approaching ten years ago – 4th June 2009 to be precise – when Tim O’Reilly set out his ideas on how to improve and modernise public services (referred to as both “Gov 2.0” and “government as a platform”), discussed in more detail in his subsequent 2010 article. These…
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Public policy, technology and society—democracy in an age of change
The intersection of public policy, technology and society is complex. And yes, that’s something of an understatement. A mix of politics, law, design, architecture, usability, privacy, security, accessibility, technology and ethics (amongst many other factors) all interplay in often unpredictable ways when creating and providing public services – not least when they encounter real people.…
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Payday loans and the missed opportunity?
In our book Digitizing Government: understanding and implementing new digital business models, there’s a table illustrating how often grand announcements have been made around the anticipated impact of technology on improving our public services: (I guess I should update it with various similar pronouncements since 2013 tirelessly recycling the same sentiments.) Despite some good work…
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The wellsprings of UK digital reform part 2—separating porcine lip enhancement from transformation
Previously This is the second episode of a mini-series of blogs looking at the origins of the UK government’s digital reform programme since 2010. Part 1 briefly set out the backstory – the focus on understanding the needs of service users (including redesigning services around “life episodes“) and the associated cross-government enabling platforms in place as…
new tech observations from the UK (ntouk) 