Breaking the PC Monopoly in Government Services

Speech given at E-Government Bulletin Seminar: E-Government for all - Planning for accessibility

Date: 30/03/2004
Venue: Globe Theatre, London, UK

At first glance the use of a variety of technologies for e-Government rather than maintaining the PC monopoly looks like a technological question; but at root it is far from being so. We have cultural prejudices about televisions, computers and telephones; there are democratic issues surrounding justice and complexity; and we have deeply ambivalent attitudes about Government and about privacy. Questions about technological diversity are important but I want to show that the issues I have just mentioned are more important still in breaking down access barriers to e-Government.

Two decades after the birth of desktop computing there is a deep uncertainty at the heart of Government. Everybody knows that this ICT revolution is life changing in a way that no other revolution has been since the industrial revolution of the early 19th Century but nobody is really sure why. I could quote numerous symptoms of this problem but just let me pick three from different fields:

First, and most notably, major projects have been problematic because suppliers have been their own expert witnesses, so the root problem of scaleability has been under-estimated
Secondly, the computer may be quite a useful tool for applications such as word processing which handle digital information but its main strength lies in its processing power but this has not been used in interactions with the public
Thirdly, basic ICT skills are being heavily promoted just at the time when machine processing is rendering them redundant.

Alongside this technological problem there is a cultural bias which some of you will have heard me discuss before: whereas computers are considered to be worthy and serious, television is vulgar and frivolous.

So it is against that background that I want to talk about the need for Government e-services to break out of its almost total PC-based monopoly. Of course I acknowledge the role of paper and traditional telephony in public sector transactions and so the title of this talk is somewhat hyperbolic but it draws attention to the core question: how can we make e-Government more accessible right now?

The first thing to say is that we have got two agendas mixed up: there may be good educational and employment reasons why people need ICT skills (although my estimate of this need is much lower than that declared in public policy); but that is not at all the same thing as saying that people must acquire ICT skills to facilitate transactions with the public sector. I can illustrate this problem in a concrete way by citing the experience of a DfES project called Cybrarian. This wonderful project was devised to encourage those who are currently not on-line to see the benefits of changing their mind. The target group comprised predictable population sectors such as the elderly, disabled, alienated and what was termed the "untapped mainstream". As soon as stakeholders were gathered together, three factors became obvious:

First, people wanted a cross platform approach rather than a PC monopoly
Secondly, officials were interested for a time in learning progression but stakeholders wanted information without having to go through a learning process
Thirdly, Proof of Concept testing showed that people wanted a "radically simple" interface nearer to consumer electronics rather than the over engineered products of the ICT industry.

I quote this experience because it begins to get at the heart of what we are talking about. Government needs to separate its accessibility agenda from its employability agenda. For all kinds of reasons Gordon Brown may want citizens to be ICT literate in order to get jobs and improve competitiveness but if he thinks this is also the way to make efficiency savings by substituting systems for people he is wrong. There will of course be very great savings in the short term from machine processing but that is in 'back office' operations. As something like 7/8 of public sector transactions are with people who are not on-line, the Government runs a very heavy risk of paying for citizen interface services twice: through the traditional method and through major web sites used by that very sector of the population which troubles Government least.

A good starting point, then, is to look at what kind of communications capacity people have and what can be done with it. First, and most obviously, most people have more or less constant access to broadcasting. The television programme market may be fragmenting and we may be watching slightly less but television is becoming less communal and more private. Radio is also holding its own, not least because of its use in cars. Traditionally, people have not liked Governments trying to get their message across in the highly restricted media environment we enjoyed in the second half of the 20th Century but using scarce air time to promote what people might regard with suspicion is quite different from providing information in a dedicated broadcasting service that people can take or leave. Broadening the knowledge base on Government services like benefits entitlement would be a very good start to improved citizen/state transactions. Given the use, for example, by older people of daytime television I can't understand why there isn't a Government television channel running benefits information programmes on a loop.

The obvious shortcoming of broadcasting is the problem of interactivity but this, as we all know, will be short lived. In the meantime, we need to make much more constructive use of the telephone. In terms of citizen connectedness the Government would be much wiser to spend its money on seeing that everyone has a mobile phone they can use effectively rather than trying to enforce the use of the qwerty keyboard. If you think of what you have on offer here, at the simplest you can offer people nine choices based on their numeric keypad. An example might be:

We propose to pay your pension of £120 today;

If you agree press 1
If you have a query press 2
If you think this does not apply to you press 3.

The public sector has experimented in sending text messages and, in the case of voting and paying the Congestion Charge, receiving them, but this needs to be extended.

Convergence may ultimately mean that the things we call the television, computer, telephone and radio may all end up being the same device but, psychologically, we need to start with technologies people like rather than those they quite correctly suspect.

This line of thinking naturally goes on to consider the way information is made. If the Government is to benefit from interacting with citizens through consumer electronics, particularly if this is based on the numeric keypad rather than a qwerty keyboard, then the transactions must be simplified. The Brown tendency to over-elaborate will have to be reversed; justice may by that route be a little rougher but if this strategy saves the Government a substantial amount of money then it can make rough justice acceptable by rounding up so that nobody loses. So a key message from today must be simplicity, in designing information so that it can be handled by a numeric keypad and making it look more like dialogue than instruction.

A key part of the simplification process is a general agreement on privacy. We need as a society to resolve the questions: what is it about us that we really need to keep private and private from whom? I suspect that our current obsession with privacy is temporary and short sighted; temporary because until recently hardly anything within the kind of communities we lived in fifty years ago was private, and temporary because the current inability to join up Government will be short lived. Do we really want to fill in our name and address every time we want something? We will have to look at ways of protecting our on-line identities from theft but in principle we should be able to access and change our citizen public record which can then be invoked by anyone, anywhere, anytime. We then need to look at the next layer of information which can be accessed by anyone in the public sector with a proper authorisation. That authorisation should be in the form of a contract between each of us and the public sector: we will authorise certain kind of officials to access our personal record on condition that the Government promises to furnish us with our total range of entitlements; both parties then have an incentive.

So far I have dealt with two kinds of transaction, providing information through broadcasting and handling personal transactions through advanced telephony based on simplified processes and a rational division between public and private information. The third strand is helping people to sort through a mass of public sector information to find the bits they want but, of course, much of this problem will be dealt with by my first two major points. Having said that, we all know that processing and sorting information is what computers are really good at. If we are prepared to give way a little on the privacy issue and use a pin number or just our post code and name it would be possible for intelligent agency to learn enough about us to cut down the tedium of searching.

It seems to me that there are two very specific areas of information which need special consideration, finance and health. I must say I am much less sympathetic than most to the pleas for privacy in financial matters. I always begin by asking whether people want to keep financial information to themselves because they are slightly ashamed of how much they have or because they want to pay less tax than they should. Personally I would not mind posting my tax return as part of my Citizen Public Record. It might be objected that criminals would then know whether my house was worth breaking into but they would know that from post code analysis anyway. I am not in the slightest doubt that everything known about me that might interest a criminal is already available or hackable. Other than the tax evasion point, I cannot think of any reason why we will give financial information to companies, knowing that they will share it, but not to elected Governments. As I have already implied, we need to be very clear what we want to keep private and why.

That discipline is also required in the area of health. You already know the basic argument about health records: somebody is asked who should have access to his health records and he says only his GP in the first instance and only the GP can pass on that information to somebody else; but what, he is asked, if you are in an accident? His answer, of course, is that those dealing with him need the information immediately without reference to the GP. The immediate solution to this problem is to declare your health record as accessible to all people in the NHS authorised to look at health records. You may put on a special provision if an NHS employee is a family member from whom you wish to conceal something - and given the size of the NHS workforce that is not going to be a one-off case - but in general I cannot see the argument for particularising access. Such a procedure would allow huge amounts of epidemiological research to be carried out at a very low price.

These points might seem to be far away from my topic but they are at the centre of it. Efficient digital communication between the Government and the Citizen requires more simplicity by both parties. Government needs to be very clear what it needs to know and why; and we have to be very clear what it should not know and why. The simpler the information framework, the easier it will be to use simple technologies and the less dependent we will be on PC-based ICT.

Whether the SIM card in our mobile phone becomes an identity card or whether our Identity Card has buttons and a SIM card so that we can receive our benefits by phone and undertake transactions with the Government, is a matter of minor fascination for engineers but it need not detain us for long. National security and the security of payments to citizens and the need to cut down on fraud will inevitably push us down that route. So we have some important issues to resolve, starting with this: what justification is there for our egregious dislike of Government? The 'right' dislikes Government and the "left" dislikes Governments but is ours really any worse than others in the EU where Identity Cards are carried and where multinationals are, in my view quite rightly, regarded rather more sceptically than Government ministries. We also need an adult debate about privacy and an urgent debate about simplification. As an extension of this set of issues, we need to decide as a democracy whether or not we really want efficient, joined up Government. We can no longer demand the end but deny the means. It seems to me that there is no justification in a privacy fetish leading to the death of children like Victoria Climbie.

In summary, then, here are my major points:

Our attitudes to technology are cultural
We must distinguish between the need to broadcast and publish information and the need for interaction
For providing information broadcasting is better than PC-based systems
Broadcasting is becoming increasingly fragmented and consumed privately
Telephones with screens are a primary medium of interactivity
If the Government wants a near universal e-Government system it will need to simplify procedures
If we want joined up Government we will need a more nuanced attitude to privacy
These debates are an important part of the Identity Card debate.

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Breaking the PC Monopoly in Government Services

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