Boosting Take Up means Ensuring Access for All
Government and e-Government
Now let us, for a moment, look at the special case of government. Here I think that there are four special factors:
- First, the systems are designed in a producer centric way around the structure of Department of State silos
- Secondly, there is a rhetoric of interactivity which generates a certain degree of scepticism
- Thirdly, the systems are designed primarily for people who are articulate and well off
- Finally, this will almost certainly lead to double costing.
The first point is fairly obvious; the Government leads its life around Departmental divisions and we do not. Of course it is very difficult to translate the metadata of administration into the metadata of life but if Google can translate the metadata of the world into the metadata of individual users we know that technology is not the obstacle.
As to the rhetoric of interaction, it is quite difficult to answer a question that the Government has not asked but there are two much more telling pieces of evidence: first, almost every country in the world, including the UK, that made plans to put its 'services' on line began with tax collection; a Freudian slip or what? Still more telling is the fact that Government, like big business, actually thinks that the internet is a top/down, one way tool for getting its message across. It is emphatically not a tool for hearing what citizens have got to say.
As to the third point, that the systems are designed for people who least need them, I can illustrate this with a story and a statistic. Not long ago a Financial times journalist pointed out to a senior Treasury official that he could not understand a clause in the Finance Bill well enough to interpret it for readers to which the reply was that the Finance Bill was not written fort citizens, not even for journalists, but for lawyers. Putting legal texts onto the Internet may make them available but not accessible; we are back to the old chestnut about the right to enter the Ritz. As to the statistics, depending upon how you count, between 80% and 87%, or 4/5 and 7/8, of public sector transactions take place with the very people most likely, according to the Government's own socio-economic research, not to be on-line: the poor, the elderly, the unemployed, the poorly educated, the alienated, the helpless and the hopeless. Which leads to my final factor, the danger of double costing. As long as conditions remain the same with e-government services it will not saver a penny of its human resources and office costs by its expenditure on most e-government services; it will simply pay for two parallel services. Further, we have to distinguish between demand and supply driven services. In supply driven services such as benefits payments, inclusion will save money; but in demand driven services such as information provision, the higher the service quality and the more satisfactory the transaction, the more transactions there will be (the best real comparison is the way the NHS works). So we need a sophisticated model to help us understand how e-government will save money.
One of my basic rules of public speaking is that I spend less than half of my time on analysing what is wrong and more than half of my time suggesting how matters can be put right. So I want briefly to refer to three aspects of e-Government design which would boost take up:
- Self esteem/control
- Customisation/adjustability
- Language engineering/public domain documents.