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[Cross-posted from the Headshift blog]

The great and the good of social media (as well as the rest of us) descended on the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London yesterday for Reboot Britain, a 1-day conference run by NESTA looking at “how the promise of our new digital age can tackle the challenges we face as a country”

There have been a number of conferences and gatherings happened over the last few months that have had this theme, but this was the largest and most “official” so far. The participants were mixed – the usual social media suspects, non-profits, public sector and the hackers and the enthusiasts.   Speakers ranged from from the official spokespeople such as Martha Lane-Fox the Digital Inclusion “czar”, Shadow Cabinet members through to the doers such as School of Everything’s Paul Miller and the celebrity experts in the form of Howard Rheingold.

If there was a theme, it was that something’s gone fundamentally wrong with the way we operate many aspects of our society, and digital technology gives us an opportunity to fix some of these.   The opportunity was partially summed-up by Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA when he talked about there being no shortage of ingenuity in the UK, but that it’s now about moving this “from the marginal to the mainstream”.

The opening keynote was delivered by the Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt.  He’s the very model of a modern Tory (shadow) minister, straight from Conservative central casting – no notes, no podium and no tie.   He’s got a good line in expenses-related self-deprecation, which is probably all that stands between most politicians and their heads on spikes over Westminster Bridge these days, and played to the audience with references to the IT Crowd sitcom and “rebooting PCs” jokes.

His opener was that the current cynicism with politics is linked to the reach of technology – as organisations such as MySociety shine a bright light into some fairly murky corners, the information that comes into view shows the political processes for the corrupt and dysfunctional mess that they are.   Politics is now stuck in the old model of “getting on with it for now and get reelected every 4 years”.

The soundbite phrase he used was “collaborative individualism”, and there was a grab-bag of use cases – Wikipedia’s virtually instantaneous response to the 7/7 London bombings as an example of wikinomics in action. The flip side to collaborative individualism is nanny-state paternalism – I’m not sure I entirely agree with that distinction – to me, conservatism can be just as paternalistic – but it is at least distinct from the tendency of the current government to firehose public money at grandiose and badly defined mega-projects while staring starry-eyed at US corporate consultancies.

He also made a point that hadn’t really occurred to me before – whereas in the US, the opportunities offered by digital media were embraced by the centre left (or at least as left as the Obama administration gets), whereas in the UK it’s been taken up by the centre right.  He explained this as being down to the instinctive Tory like of decentralisation, and the way that the web can be seen as a fairly pure expression of evolution in action – good ideas get traction and services succeed, while poor ones don’t get the traffic and wither and die.  Again, that strikes me as a simplification, particularly when you consider public services where the concept of “competition” simply doesn’t apply – but it does at least give us examples of what works and what doesn’t that can be used as the basis for more successful online public services.

And there were a few semi-concrete ideas thrown out, such as making details of all expenditure of more than £25,000 freely available online – although that does raise the question of how many transactions will come in at exactly £24,999.99 once that goes live, of course…

What was most interesting, given where we are in the electoral cycle, was the complete lack of any Government representation at the conference – unless you count Tom Watson MP who was there in his capacity as a backbencher (or perhaps as the “Member for the Internet”?)  I supposed you could argue that this is down to the Government being busy – well, Governing – but it did strike me that here was a missed opportunity for a practical demonstration of the “listening” that is supposed to be happening.  Perhaps if the conference had cost 4 figures and delegates got bags emblazoned with large US corporate logos as freebies, we’d have seen a few more Government representatives?

Video of the speakers and the subsequent conversations are being curated at the Reboot Britain site, and there’s also a conference wiki where (hopefully) more follow-up will take place.

At the UK Government Bar Camp last weekend, there was a lot of discussion in many of the sessions about public sector procurement – particularly IT procurement.

Basically, it’s broken.

I was acutely aware of this before I turned up at the barcamp, because I’d spend a significant proportion of the previous week wrestling with a full-on OJEU-style procurement exercise.   After collating the last 3 years’-worth of financial results, the company directors’ inside leg measurements,  and writing 2-page CVs for everyone who may or may not be involved in the project should we be awarded the contract, we basically ended up have to provide a detailed specification of a system that hasn’t been designed yet.

It’s daft.  We think it’s daft, the potential client thinks it’s daft, but we’ve got to do it Because It’s The Rules.

But if we look at why the rules exist in the first place, we find that they’re basically there to make sure that the contract doesn’t go to the Chief Executive’s brother-in-law.   The rules are there to create a so-called level playing field, and ensure rigorous transparency around the procurement process.

The fact that the number of contracts that DO get awarded to the Chief Executive’s brother-in-law are vanishingly small seems to have been overlooked – so to prevent a marginal risk of corrupt practices, we’ve created a situation where the results of procurement exercises are massively skewed towards large organisations with the resources and the bureaucracy to jump through these hoops.   If the first threshold test is having been in business for three years, then there’s no way for an innovative start-up to get involved short of selling their souls out to the Big Consultancies.

This would be fine, if the large organisations then went on to do a good job.  But as we’ve seen time and time again, as the size of the project increases towards infinity, the probability of it going horribly wrong approaches unity.   The big consultancies have become bywords for repeating the same problems over and over again.  And what’s more, they’re selling the same old solutions – the ones which arguably have contributed to getting us into the current mess in the first place.

Is there a solution to the problem?   The discussions at GovBarCamp suggested that the problem’s clear, but were less conclusive about the solution.   Part of the issue is that the current system was created with the best of intentions, but has had unanticipated consequences.   There are signs of change, though.  We geeky types like nothing better than giggling at some of the portal-style ineptitude that has been the Direct.gov.uk site over the years, but then over the course of three days they’ve hacked together an “is my kids’ school closed” site which would probably have taken at least a year and six figures if it had gone through “traditional channels”.   But for every Schoolclosure.org.uk, there’s another incipient car crash of a project travelling towards us, whether it’s medical records or MTAS or the National Identity Register.

Perhaps the recession will be a catalyst for change – after bailing out the banks, there isn’t the money left to waste on huge projects.  What money does remain is going to need to go further than it ever did before.

[cross-posted from the Headshift blog]

Politicians and IT usually go together like fish and bicycles.   The story of public-sector IT in the UK is generally one of grandiose over-budget failures at the top end of the scale, and low-level outsourced inadequacies at the other.  The same is also true in the private sector, of course, but the public sector situation gets a higher profile by the fact that it’s “our” money that’s being wasted and it’s more difficult to sweep the disasters under the carpet.

The litany of disasters is a long one – the Child Support Agency’s IT system was “one of the worst public administration scandals in modern times” according to the Public Accounts Committee, while the NHS’s Connecting For Health project is seven times over-budget and more than two years behind schedule.  And that’s before we start trying to keep track of every email sent and webpage visited in the mother of all surveillance databases.

So why do we keep letting this happen?

Earlier this week, the Conservatives launched the results of a study they commissioned last year from Dr Mark Thompson of the Judge Business School in Cambridge.   The headlines were startling – government could save at least £600m a year, according to the report, and it promises an end to “IT white elephants”.

[The text of the report itself doesn't seem to be available via the Tories' website, but I've got a copy which I can email on if you're interested.]

There’s also some very interesting detail buried away below the headline figures.   One of the key recommendations is that there should be a cap on project size – no contract should be worth more than £100m.   Personally, that seems a fairly arbitrary figure to me – I’m not convinced that knocking a nought of the end of the contract value will make them any easier to deliver – but it does point to an increasingly widely-held belief that the days of huge projects are over.

Of course, a recession is going to make justifying telephone-number budgets very difficult even if big projects were always successful – but history suggests that when projects fail, big projects fail bigger.   I think the trend over the next few years is going to be towards projects on a much, much smaller scale.  Rather than taking years to spend millions on massive systems implementations that attempt to solve every problem simultaneously, instead organisations are going to try smaller-scale point solutions that are focussed on improving the way people *actually* work together.

I’m also beginning to think that there’s actually a finite limit to the size of a project, beyond which it’s impossible to achieve the stated benefits.   Some systems are just too big, and too complex, to be controlled by human brains which have been wired up be evolution to make a series of “can I eat it, or do I run away from it?” decisions.  And many situations just don’t lend themselves to a one-size-fits-all solution, particularly if the solution is being defined in isolation from the actual end-users who will be subjected to it – something that seems to sum up the IT programmes in the Health Service.

Of course, changing the culture of Government IT is going to be a huge job given the massive vested interests at play – the huge suppliers that seem to be a key part of the problem are not going to just walk away from their potential revenues.   Bureaucracies move slowly, and government bureaucracy moves slower than most.   But it’s encouraging to see signs that the status quo is being seriously questioned by a potential future ruling party – and hopefully it might influence the current decision makers in the meanwhile.

(cc-licensed photo by huangjiahui)