UK government – Looking Forward

May 17, 2016

When Will Citizens Be Able To Track Requests To The Government? Still?

In 2009, I wrote a blog titled: “When Will Citizens Be Able To Track Requests To The Government?”

It’s time to see if much progress has been made, but first some background …

The
people that public officials call citizens or voters or residents are
not single-minded civic machines. Most of the time, they are consumers
and workers outside of the public sector. And so what happens outside
of the public sector affects their expectations of what should happen in
the public sector.

One of the more frequent parts of a
consumer’s life these days is being able to track things. Here are just
a few of the many diverse examples, almost all of which have been
around for at least a few years: track your Domino’s pizza
order from the oven to your front door; track shipments, at all stages,
through FedEx or UPS or even USPS; track the path of a car that you
ordered via Uber; track an airline flight so you know when to leave for the airport to pick up a relative or friend.

Why
not enable citizens to track their government transactions in
mid-stream? While suggestions of this kind are often proposed to
increase transparency of government, the tracking actually serves a much
simpler goal – to reduce frustration on the part of the citizen.

If
people can see where their request or application is, they will have a
lower sense of frustration and a greater sense of control. If the
citizens could also get an estimate of how long it usually takes to go
through each step of an approval process, all the better.

In the public sector, this kind of tracking was very rare in 2009. The standout was the UK, for example enabling residents to driving license applications.

Since
2009, we’ve seen some more ways to track requests and applications.
This has been especially true of requests under various freedom of
information laws, such as the US Justice Department’s. However, the
average citizen is not submitting FOIL requests – I suspect that most
come from media employees.

You can track your request for US government grants
– again something that the average citizen isn’t focused on. The US
Internal Revenue Service IRS2go app lets you track the status of your
refund, which is likely to be of interest to a much larger number of
people.

While it is difficult for me to judge from this distance
how well it actually works, certainly one of the broadest and most
ambitious efforts to let residents track their requests is in India, not the US or Europe even.

Alas, in New York City, the government’s website tells you call 311 to track applications for Food Stamps.

In South Carolina, a “Multi-Agency Partnership Portal”
provides a reasonably good way of applying for various health and
support programs. Although the website refers to seeing the status of
the application, it’s not clear from the documentation how you’d do that.

Colorado’s version of the same kind of website, called PEAK, makes it very easy to track status.

Although Indiana also does this, its website seems much more complicated than Colorado’s.

Even
the City of San Francisco, which aims to be a technology leader, has
had its difficulties in enabling people to do the simple tracking of,
for example, building permits. Its website refers back to a partial implementation two years ago, but no recent update.

Even worse, one of the examples from 2009 was from the District of Columbia, where you could the track the status of building permit applications. If you try that now, you’ll get this backtracking message:

“DCRA
has removed its permit status check page also known as Online Building
Permit Application Tracking (OBPAT) application from its website.

"DCRA
recognizes that some constituents are disappointed about this
decision. In short, DCRA found that-the information was too often
unreliable and resulted in misinformation to constituents. This is
totally unacceptable, DCRA is hopeful that the site will eventually be
restored, but the data issues must be resolved before it is. DCRA is
committed to transparency, but transparency is helpful when accurate
information is available. It is DCRA’s goal to have truthful, accurate
communication from staff, and the public access sites need to reflect
that as well.”

Clearly, there are still many situations where people want to track their interaction with the government and cannot.

(Of
course, the ultimate goal, in so far as possible, is to complete those
transactions instantaneously online, like the fishing license app that Michigan makes available. Then the tracking problem disappears, but that’s a subject for a future blog post.)

So the answer to the question?

In
the last seven years, there has only been a little progress here and
there in some areas of government, but not the massive change that
technology makes possible.

Consider an analogy. While
every government, for instance, expects that it needs a formal budget
document, most apparently don’t yet have an expectation that they need
to make it easy for people to find out the status of their requests for
common services. In this Internet age that is no longer something new. It’s time to get moving on it.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/144503228624/when-will-citizens-be-able-to-track-requests-to]

February 25, 2015

Innovations In Government

The National Association of Counties just concluded its annual mid-winter Legislative Conference in Washington, DC. I was there in my role as NACo’s first Senior Fellow.

As usual, its Chief Innovation Officer, Dr. Bert Jarreau, created a three-day extravaganza devoted to technology and innovation in local government.

The first day was a CIO Forum, the second day NACo’s Technology Innovation Summit and the final day a variety of NACO committees on IT, GIS, etc.

County government – especially the best ones – get too little recognition for their willingness to innovate, so I hope this post will provide some information about what county technologists and officials are discussing.

One main focus of the meetings was on government’s approach to technology and how it can be improved.

Jen Pahlka, founder and Executive Director of Code For America and former Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House, made the keynote presentations at both the CIO Forum on Friday and the Tech Summit on Saturday – and she was a hit in both.

She presented CfA’s seven “Principles for 21st Century Government”. The very first principle is that user experience comes before anything else. The use of technology is not, contrary to some internal views, about “solving” some problem that the government staff perceive.

She pointed out that the traditional lawyer-driven design of government services actually costs more than user-centric design. (I’ll have more on design in government in a future blog post.)

She referred to the approach taken by the United Kingdom’s Digital Service. For more about them, see https://gds.blog.gov.uk/about/ When she was in the White House, she took this as a model and helped create a US Digital Service.

She also discussed the importance of agile software development. She suggested that governments break up their big RFPs into several pieces so that smaller, more entrepreneurial and innovative firms can bid. This perhaps requires a bit more work on the part of government agencies, but they would be rewarded with lower costs and quicker results.

More generally she drew a distinction between the traditional approach that assumes all the answers – all the requirements for a computer system – are known ahead of time and an agile approach that encourages learning during the course of developing the software and changing the way an agency operates.

By way of example, she discussed why the Obamacare website failed. It used the traditional, waterfall method, not an agile, iterative approach. It didn’t involve real users testing and providing feedback on the website. And, despite the common wisdom to the contrary, the development project was too big and over-planned.

It was done in a way that was supposed to reduce risk, but instead was more risky. So she asked the NACo members to redefine risk, noting that yesterday’s risky approach is perhaps today’s prudent approach.

Helping along is the development of cloud computing. So Oakland County (Michigan) CIO Phil Bertolini has found that cloud computing is reducing government’s past dependence on big capital projects to deploy new technology, thus allowing for more day-to-day agility.

Finally Jen Pahlka suggested that government systems needed to be more open to integration with other systems. In a phrase, “share everything possible to share”. She showed an example where the government let Yelp use government restaurant inspection data and in turn learn about food problems from Yelp users. (And, of course, sharing includes not just data, but also software and analytics.)

In another illustration of open innovation in the public sector, Montgomery County, MD recently created its Thingstitute as an innovation laboratory where public services can be used as a test bed for the Internet of Things.
Even more examples were discussed in the IT Committee. Maricopa County, Arizona and Johnson County, Kansas, both now offer shared technology services to cities and nearby smaller counties. Rita Reynolds, CIO of the Pennsylvania County Commissioners Association, discussed the benefits of adopting the NIEM approach to data exchanges between governments.

The second major focus of these three days was cybersecurity.

Dr. Alan Shark, Executive Director of PTI, started off by revealing that latest surveys show security is the top concern for local government CIOs for the first time. Unfortunately, many don’t have the resources to react to the threat.
Actually, it’s more a reality than merely a threat. It was noted that, on average, it takes 229 days for organizations to find out they’ve been breached and that close to 100% have been attacked or hacked in some way. It’s obviously prudent to assume yours too has been hacked.

Jim Routh, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Aetna insurance recommended a more innovative approach to responding to cybersecurity threats. He said CIOs should ignore traditional advice to try to reduce risk. Instead “take risks to manage risk”. (This was an interesting, if unintentional, echo of Jen Pahlka’s comments about software development.)

Along those lines, he said it is better to buy less mature cybersecurity products, in addition to or even instead of the well-known products. The reason is that the newer products address new issues better in an ever changing world and cost less.

There was a lot more, but these highlights provide plenty of evidence that at least the folks at NACo’s meetings are dealing with serious and important issues in a creative way.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/112058162497/innovations-in-government]

February 17, 2015

Simplicity In Government?

The idea of simplicity in government is not new.

Thomas Jefferson was an advocate of “republican simplicity.” As he wrote in the year before he was elected President:

“I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple…”

Among others in the 18th century, Thomas Paine also was an advocate of simplicity in government. That was one reason he supported a single house of Congress which would control the national government, rather than the complex system we have.

Coming closer to our time, the last couple of years have seen a renewal of this idea. “Simpler: The Future of Government” was published in 2013. The book’s author, Cass Sunstein, was a long time professor at University of Chicago Law School and then ran the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for President Obama. In that role, he was a continual advocate for simplicity.

Partly, the complaints of the business community have encouraged the desire for simplicity in government regulations. More broadly, overly complex government operations have also been tied to higher than necessary taxes – so they affect everyone’s pocketbook.

It almost seems that no one can argue against simplification.

But Syracuse University’s Professor David Driesen argues in a review of Sunstein’s work, for example, that “complexity bears no fixed relationship to costs or benefits.” Moreover, he points out that there is often a trade-off between simplicity and other values; or looking at it another way, complexity in government is often a result of compromises that are necessary for a law to be enacted.

He’s also not the first to notice that some who advocate simplicity, attribute simplicity only to those policies and actions that they support on other grounds.

So perhaps simplicity of laws and regulations is not so simple, after all.

But simplicity has many forms. Is there a way of thinking about simplicity in government that bypasses underlying ideological motivations?

I think so, but it has less to do with debates about political philosophy and law, and more to do with the concrete interactions between government and people – the citizen’s experience.

For that, there are examples and inspiration from outside the public sector. Perhaps one of the best is Apple, especially as explained in the book, “Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success”. In this book,

Ken Segall, one of the company’s former marketing experts, points out the many ways that Apple and Steve Jobs worked to simplify the experience of dealing with Apple’s products and services – despite the ways that this might increase the complexity of the problems facing its designers, engineers and other staff.

Although this approach hasn’t been used much in governments in the US, it is not a completely outlandish idea. Tim Brown, the CEO of the famous design firm, Ideo, proclaimed in his blog that the “The UK Government Shows How to Design for Simplicity” – at least with respect to its Internet presence and digital public services.

The implication of Apple’s obsession with simplicity is that it starts out by subordinating everything it does to the user’s needs. And isn’t that what a democratic government is supposed to do too?

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/111280190609/simplicity-in-government]