ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

To the LSE yesterday evening, where I had the honour of chairing Jaron Lanier's lecture. If you've been living in a parallel universe and only just popped out for a KitKat and a cup of tea, Jaron is the American computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author who coined the term "Virtual Reality" in the early 1980s.

Fresh from reading his new book, "You are not a gadget", I knew we were in for something special and rare -- someone with a different and informed view of the way our digital world and digital culture is evolving. My only disappointment was that on this occasion Jaron had not brought along one of his many unusual musical instruments, although this YouTube video will give you some idea of his talents. (He is, incidentally, doing a gig tonight at the Vortex although I'm not sure if there are any tickets left)

If you want to follow the full value of his perspectives and insights, well, read his book. But here are some approximate soundbites to provide a flavour (all transcription errors and misinterpretations are entirely of my own creation) of where his lecture went last night ...

".... I realised early on that the physical design of computers would have a profound influence upon our world..."

"... as an originator of open culture, I now reject much of it ... it has become a new religion, with people believing in ideas such as the Singularity in the same way as some Christian sects believe in The Rapture... If you don't espouse the new theology you get shouted down and trolled."

"... there are similarities between jihadi groups and Internet trolls banging on about poodles, or guitars or something that obsesses them insanely ...."

"... what's the point of dumbing down humans? So what --we become morons in order to make computers smart?!"

"... open culture has produced nothing new. It's most revered works -- Linux and Wikipedia -- are a re-hash of an antique and ugly 1960s operating system and a text-based encyclopaedia! Open culture has failed. Where is the imagination, the creation, the genuinely new thinking rather than the rehash of existing, old ideas? Where is the open culture iPod? It's no coincidence that such developments come from closed communities..."

"... open culture collided with a kind of neo-Maoist "everyone should be equal" and Google placing advertising at the core of the Internet ..."

"... we have ended up on an anti-human course ..."

"... collective works can be boring and derivative. There is nothing intrinsically good about them..."

"... try not using Wikipedia, the "one true source", for a week. You'll find the Web is much richer than you thought..."

"... I don't buy this idea that most people are passive recipients of others' creativity. I believe that by nature most people are creative, not passive ...."

"... the early days of the Web were something truly transformative. People used it and developed it because they enjoyed it and it was a good idea, not to feed a profit motive...."

"... journalists, musicians, authors, illustrators and other creators having their livelihoods destroyed are the canaries in the coalmine..."

"... anyone who uses the Internet should read EM Forster's "The Machine Stops". Written in 1909 it's a perceptive vision for the role of technology in our lives ..."

"... 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, with an associated micropayment mechanism ... it would give us the best basis on which to make the Internet work for content creators ...."

"... the Internet is one of the least green things around ... its infrastructure is a giant industrial machine, the hardware needed to run it (including silicon fabrication) is an intensive industry... and the waste of duplication! BitTorrent alone, copying and duplicating files around the Internet, takes up around 50% of all Internet traffic...."

Some of this may sound negative but in the context of Jaron's lecture, it most certainly wasn't. Jaron raises important issues about the need for human design as we navigate how best to charter our digital age. He remains at heart an optimist and digital enthusiast. But he's pointing out where we should be doing it far better, using it far more imaginatively and effectively.

It was a timely reminder that our digital age shouldn't be something that just happens to us. It should be something we help shape.

Technorati tags: future Britain IT technology policy

Below is what wordle makes of NTOUK (click to enlarge).

Which seems about right.

2010 promises to be a very interesting year indeed on the technology policy front. With an election coming, I'm not making any predictions ... yet. But I remain an optimist - and hope that many of the issues raised since Feb 2006, when I started this blog, may start to be addressed.

With all best wishes for 2010 and beyond.

Technorati tags: UK future Britain policymaking politics IT technology policy

The impact of technology can often have profound and unforeseen consequences. Take for example the recent controversy around the police entering Parliament in order to raid the offices of Damian Green MP, Shadow Minister for Immigration.

In pre-digital times, it would have been possible to restore the sanctity and rule of Parliamentary privilege to the Parliamentary estate to protect MPs from unwarranted intrusion by the state, or officers acting on behalf of the state such as the police. After all, MPs often receive information in confidence from their constituents and others. They rightfully need to be able to preserve such confidentiality, as journalists are likewise able to ensure the confidentiality of their sources. Ensuring that the Parliamentary estate offers such protection would be relatively easy to enforce.

But the digital age has changed all that. Take for example an MP who receives a confidential communication via email or text message whilst on the Parliamentary estate. Inside the estate itself, that communication and its contents will (hopefully) remain confidential. However, as soon as the MP steps outside of the estate, he can potentially be stopped by the police and the contents of his laptop and mobile phone inspected, making any Parliamentary privileges around confidentiality somewhat pointless.

So, where are the boundaries to be drawn around Parliamentary privilege now that the physical boundaries of the estate have little relevance? Not only does technology in practice mean that the rules of the game have changed, but proposals such as the interception modernisation programme will potentially exacerbate the problem, enabling third parties to track patterns of communication between an MP and his or her network of contacts (as indeed will also happen to journalists and their sources, and police and their undercover informants). And encryption is no answer either: under RIPA, anyone (including MPs) who refuses to unencrypt the contents of say their laptop can be arrested and potentially prosecuted.

This seems to me another example of why we need a better understanding of the impact and potential of technology (good, bad and ugly) to inform public policymaking, as well as the Parliamentary and legislative agenda. Whilst we have a Chief Scientific Adviser community to help inform the R&D deliberations of Whitehall departments, there is no equivalent available to help inform technology policy. The problems this is causing lie everywhere around us.

The proposals to reconstitute the Boards of Whitehall departments to bring in experienced non-executive directors from outside may in part address this. But also we need to think about how the overall vision and strategy for technology policy is set in the UK. That is, even with such changes, how we best establish leadership of technology policy and clear co-ordination and planning across Whitehall, not just within its functional silos.

So one thing I am particularly keen to see is whether any good ideas emerge from the current 1,000 GBP ideal government IT strategy competition that will help make headway into this issue. Many of the failures and problems we witness at present seem to me to hinge around an inadequate governance model.

I have been working with a small team to develop ideas around this topic that we shall be exploring during 2010. But in the meantime I welcome all ideas about how we can best work together to define a better governance model. One that will, in time, help us reach a situation where the types of outfall highlighted by "the Damian Green affair" can be better anticipated and tackled, with demonstrable benefits to our wider UK democracy.

Unless we make such changes, we will only witness more and more ill-designed and uninformed decisions taken around technology, with inevitable and unfortunate consequences for us all. So please, come along and add your thoughts to the competition.

Technorati tags: UK Parliament future Britain policymaking politics government IT technology policy policy

I've been spending a lot of time lately talking to politicians, senior Whitehall officials, representatives of overseas governments, think tanks, retired senior civil servants (who prove remarkably candid), academics, technologists and many others about how we can improve public sector IT.

Looking back over some 12 years of government IT reports, strategies and plans, we don't seem to have made much progress. Although in the meantime somewhere in excess of 100-120bn GBP seems to have been spent (possibly far more). A figure that does not seem to be adequately reflected in the way that our public services are currently designed and operated.

So today the Centre for Technology Policy Research(which, transparency declaration, I have recently helped co-found), and Ideal Government are launching an IT strategy competition to see what smart minds can do when put together to help come up with a better approach. We have 1,000 GBP in the kitty to underpin the competition and help organise a party and suitable prizes at the end.

The collaborative wiki and details of the competition can be found online here. We have a commitment from the 3 main political parties - Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservative Party - to engage with the outcome.

Any effective government IT strategy will need to be rooted in the need to modernise and improve our UK public services. It should not exist as an autonomous work. Neither should it be focused on inward-looking short-term technical fads and fashions. Such lower level pragmatics are the remit of an operational plan. An over-arching strategy should instead set out clear principles and objectives, ones that remain relatively stable over time, and which unify public service objectives with the best of what technology can offer.

If this is going to produce something worthwhile, it needs to be a collaborative work that brings together the best thinking from citizens, policymakers, public sector workers and technologists alike. So inbetween the Christmas turkey, mince pies and repeats of the Great Escape, please come along and join in.

Technorati tags: UK future Britain policymaking politics government IT technology policy policy

The state of the economy has changed everything. Current discussions about information technology (IT) in the public sector have become focused on the need for short-term tactical cuts, rather than its longer-term strategic role. And this time around it is no longer a theoretical debate about paper-based "operational efficiencies", but about real, hard cuts requiring well-evidenced decisions and practical execution. The Prime Minster has committed to " -5 per cent. reductions in real terms in the cost of running Government in each of the next three years."

This commitment will be easy to monitor on the government's balance sheets. It's a better way of proving demonstrable savings for the taxpayer than the operational efficiency programme, which has come into question in Parliament due to weaknesses in the way that such theoretical savings are measured. Indeed, there are serious doubts about whether the claimed 26.5bn GBP of Gershon IT savings exist anywhere other than on paper.

But from an IT perspective, this is not just about better management and use of technology. I also believe that there needs to be a rediscovery and renewal of the public service ethos and a reinvigoration and re-enthusiasm around what it means to be a civil servant. Most civil servants that I know and meet in the course of my work are frustrated that the current system does not let them fulfil either their own latent potential or that of the public services they work within.

"Walking through treacle" is one oft-repeated description, along with a feeling of fin-de-siecle depression about where to go next after the era of centralised monolithic thinking has washed up on the beach like some vast, sadly stranded whale. The system needs renewal and rejuvenation to enable everyone to be more successful and more satisfied with their role in delivering public services focused on the citizen. And the citizen needs to experience a public sector working both efficiently and effectively, but also feeling good about itself in a way that just doesn't seem true right now.

There is less consensus however about the way in which the current push for cuts can be most effectively applied, particularly when it comes to IT. The underlying problem in the current discussions is the poor perception of IT within Whitehall. It is associated with a bloating budget, running at anywhere up to 21bn GBP a year, and a track record, at least in the media, of repeated failure rather than shining success.

We all know of course that exceptions do exist, examples of public sector IT that works well and of good, impactful public sector CIOs working at Board level as an integrated and valued part of the business. But alas, so few exceptions it seems that IT cannot defend its corner effectively and argue a persuasive case about its role in the delivery of better quality public services at lower cost.

None of this is helped by the fact that Whitehall still seems to largely lack accounting systems able to monitor and track where the money goes, and is therefore unable to prove where value for money may be being achieved. IT expenditure of anywhere between 13bn GBP and 21bn GBP is a very large spread indeed, complicated by an apparent lack of consistency in the way in which expenditure is coded and accounted for. Some departments include capital depreciation, for example, in their returns and others do not. All too many Parliamentary Questions about IT projects and their costs end up with a response along the lines of "The information requested could be obtained only at disproportionate cost." Which brings into question how well projects and programmes are being managed if such baseline financial information is not routinely tracked, monitored and reported on. This is basic accounting, basic project management 101 stuff after all.

One reason for the current cynicism about government IT is that that people have been hearing promises about the latent potential of IT for a long time. Take a look at documents such as "Modernising Government" (PDF) from the early Blair era and you find them full of visionary aspirations for better public services delivered through smart use of modern technology. Yet there is little evidence of substantive progress these many years later, despite 100bn+ GBP worth of government expenditure on IT. And I do think "expenditure" is the right word rather than "investment": an investment should deliver a demonstrable return.

Given the current state we're in, whatever changes are brought into play around IT are going to need to happen regardless of who forms the next government. And making this happen is about more than IT alone. A more agile civil service is required that enables the right talent to move into the right positions more swiftly. The civil service needs to implement a talent bubble sort, enabling those with appropriate talents and skills to move rapidly into the right roles, avoiding many of the costly and time-consuming frustrations they experience today.

There's a pressing need too for a clear, inspirational vision and leadership around the role of IT in the public sector. But any such vision will have no substance if it exists solely as an abstract notion in the ether. It must be underpinned by an effective programme to deliver year on year progress, year on year practical improvements in our public services.

If there is one criticism of all those old early Blair vision documents it is that they never had a clear delivery vehicle and clear lines of responsibility and accountability for progress. So as we look around the public sector some 12 years on, we find that much of the original vision of the need to improve public services, for employees and citizens alike, remains as valid now as it did then. But equally there is little progress to report.

There is a strong case to be made about the need for a fundamental, twenty-first century re-organisation of the structure of Whitehall, to re-orientate it around citizen services and outcomes rather than producer-side organisational structures. But any administration needing to deliver change effectively and efficiently is likely to focus pragmatically on working within the existing model. Any machinery of government changes would tie up an administration on internally-facing issues for years unless well executed. Such changes will ultimately be needed. But their timing and precise definition are issues that require much wider consideration and a broad cross-party consensus.

However, even within the current dysfunctional Whitehall model there remains an opportunity to focus on citizen-focused policy outcomes that span departments. One idea doing the rounds is for a cabinet-level Minister for IT and a Treasury-backed CIO able to ensure IT is better integrated and better delivered than in the past. Their focus would be on establishing binding IT frameworks on a cross-Whitehall basis, framed within the context of policy objectives and outcomes rather than a technically-driven agenda.

Any such model would need to be empowered with new cross-Whitehall accountability and responsibility mechanisms. These could in part be brought about through changes being considered to the governance, accountability and responsibility of senior civil servants at departmental Board level.

The real challenge will be to achieve the right kind of balance between agreed policies, such as those around open standards, whilst leaving more power and autonomy locally. And to do so without seeing a return to the inefficiencies of the last 30+ years in Whitehall of both overly-centralised IT models and chaotic local free-for-alls. The last thing anyone wants is a pointless swing of the pendulum from one failed historical model to another.

Now is an opportune time for a fundamental rethink about public sector IT and the way in which it informs, engages with and supports public policy. But it needs to be done in the context of wider public service renewal and the current economic climate, finding a way for the civil service to be re-enthused and re-engaged as key players in the renaissance of the UK's public services. And all of this needs to help restore citizen trust by placing them and their needs at the centre of public service re-design, not those of Whitehall.

I see clear potential for an exciting and innovative few years ahead. I hope I don't find myself in another 12 years time looking back and wondering where things went wrong yet again. At the risk of over-stating the case, I do think the future of the UK at least in part depends on finding ways to make IT work more effectively as an integral part of public service renewal. I am frequently exposed to, and hence very well aware of, what other countries are already doing, and planning, in their use of IT to help redesign and modernise their societies and associated public services.

The UK does not lack ambition, talent or indeed top level political vision about what needs to be done. But this time around the difference is that we need to ensure we work effectively to find a way of making it succeed on the ground. A renaissance in the role and competence and reputation of Whitehall IT is a vital and integral part of making such success a reality.

This time around, we all need to find ways of getting it right.

Technorati tags: UK future Britain policymaking politics government IT technology policy