ICT, Infrastructure and the Delivery of Services
humanITy Briefing Paper 5
Date: 16/04/2003
Article
1. Introduction / Background
1.1 Although it is still difficult to assess the environmental impact of ICT (the virtual transaction often resulting in a proliferation of home deliveries), although that, although there is not yet clear evidence that ICT has greatly increased business efficiency (though it has certainly increased activity) and although digital business models are still somewhat fragile except in certain kinds of retail and financial services (the bursting of the .com bubble), one sector that has received relatively little attention during the development of ICT is that of service delivery.
1.2 What effect will ICT have on the way that we deliver education, health, social and supportive services? Will the potential of the technology force changes in public policy or will there be a pitched battle between proponents of new solutions and guardians of the old professions such as teaching, nursing and social work?
2. Virtual and Real
A great deal of ‘remote’ digital technology has been developed in prototype but it has been slow in implementation. The two areas, which immediately spring to mind, are robotics and ‘the smart house’. Both of these have lived happy and progressing lives inside laboratories but have not come to market even though there have been a number of disappointed forecasts about each. Nonetheless the pressure on public expenditure and the changing role of the professional and the consumer will each have their impact on the way in which technologies deliver services.
3. The Individual and the Professional
3.1 Education. The old unwritten contract whereby pupils tolerated the wisdom of their teachers because it came packaged with economically useful information is beginning to break down. Teachers may still be wiser than their pupils but increasingly pupils can find their own information and process it. This means that teachers should become much more like further or higher education tutors acting as co-ordinators, facilitators, guides and mentors but not necessarily as monopoly suppliers of learning.
3.2 Health. The increased use of sensors warning clothing (and soon inserted under the skin) and of wireless alarms and telecommunications means that patients will be able to monitor themselves or be remotely monitored. There is also a growth of Internet led medical consumerism and self help.
3.3 Social and Support Services. The increased use of broadband will have an effect in the way in which people communicate those who provide social and support services. The facial anonymity of email and text messaging has already produced some interesting results on peer-to-peer communication.
In Briefing Paper 1 (Para. 6) “ICT Development and Basic Skills Strategy” dated 8.1.03, we alluded to the idea that socially excluded people are generally poor at asking for help but this embarrassment may be reduced through using ICT to ask for help.
4. Infrastructure and location
4.1 Education. The development of technology should lead to a much more distributed model of education. Pupils may still need to attend a physical facility to acquire social skills and to companionship and face to face guidance, but these activities may take place between 8 am and 10 pm in a facility which resembles the Village College, serving the whole community. At some point children might even teach adults some ICT skills! Learning will also be possible in small neighbourhood groups using conference facilities and portable cable free devices. We will therefore be able to break the dichotomies between being at school and being at home and learning in a large group and learning at home, these developments should have a major impact on the use of transport and physical facilities.
4.2 Health. Given that various physical conditions can be remotely monitored and that such conditions as MRSA are increasingly virulent there are a variety of reasons why hospitals should be more like houses and houses should be more like hospitals. In addition to monitors warning clothing or inserted in chips, surveillance technology to see how patient is doing. Pattern recognition technology can identify abnormal behaviour such as collapsing on the floor and programmed prompt systems can be used to remind those who forget to take medication or to eat. This will decrease the dependence upon in patient facilities and nursing homes and will allow people to live independently but safely period of their old age. Agreed procedures would be necessary for warning monitors of apparent problems detected by systems and the kind of surveillance that would be voluntarily accepted but again independence should outweigh any feelings of surveillance (note the acceptance of tagging over imprisonment).
4.3 Social and Support Services. Numerous cases since Maria Caldwell have shown that there is a structural mis-match between the public provision of social and support services and community need. The development of the ability to communicate simultaneously with a group of people either through voice only, text only, or teleconferencing means that those in need of help, those who provide it, people undergoing similar problems, virtual communities of interest and people who share a physical community will have a variety of strategies for dealing on line with problems. The impact of these developments is not clear but the ability of women to contribute to a Parliamentary Committee on domestic violence is an interesting indicator.
5. Location and flexibility
5.1 Very little research has been conducted into the mix of strategies people will use if they can move between the home base, small groups and larger groups. Some activities are clearly identified in our society as private but since the Industrial Revolution the location of activities has been largely dependent upon geography. Inevitably, in spite of social engineering, this has led to poorer people being forced to us less good hospitals and schools. The flexibility of the middle class has invariably meant that it has been in a better position to get the best out of public services whereas the working class, in far more need of these services, has often been a net subsidiser of middle class.
5.2 It is not yet clear whether services based on much more flexible locations will improve the chances of the least advantaged, improve the life choices of those who suffer from health or social problems and decrease public expenditure but these are questions which require some urgent research.
6. Recommendations
6.1 It is obviously in the Governments self interest to look into the possibility of reduced infrastructural costs, transportation and ecological improvements; and it is also possible that the use of small self supporting units may be more effective than large physical facilities. The government needs to launch a policy initiative that promotes pilot … in parallel with research.
6.2 The educational medical and social services professions need to study the impact of ICT on their future roles so that their changed activities can be planned instead of there being a prolonged painful and ultimately fruitless rear guard actions to preserve anachronistic practices.
6.3 The voluntary sector should take a lead in brokering, cutting edge solutions, taking advantage of ICT solutions in this area.
7. Resources
- Btexact Technologies. www.btexact.com
- Harris, K. “Keep your distance.” Remote communication, face-to-face,and the nature of community. Forthcoming in Journal of community work and development, Issue 4, 2003
- Moran, M. (2002) Womenspeak: Edemocracy or He Democracy? A Fawcett Occassional Paper. London: Fawcett Society
- Nettleton, S., Pleace, N., Burrows, R. , Muncer, S. and Loader, B. (2000) The Reality of Virtual Social Support. In Woolgar, S. (ed) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press
- Wilsdon, J. 2001 Digital Futures. Living in a dot-com world. London: Earthscan