Council IT chiefs should aim to take a leadership role in the coming period of drastic cuts, which is likely to be one of both retrenchment and technological revolution, Young Foundation Director Geoff Mulgan told the opening session of Socitm09, writes Dan Jellinek.
With UK society in a ‘twilight zone’ of a recession whose length and depth remains unclear - “half the experts predicting ‘double-dip’”, and any wise player is expecting not just official forecast on cuts but possibility of far worse ahead,” Mulgan warned.
We are also expecting imminent political change, he said, and policies promised by the Tories affecting public sector IT include a commitment to open source purchasing for government contracts. “This has caused considerable consternation in Whitehall, as all people sitting on contracts which are not open source wonder what on earth it will mean for them.” David Cameron promising to use technology to introduce greater transparency to government, he said.
These developments resonate with a key theme of social innovation powered by new technologies which is already taking place, Mulgan said.
These include such sites as the “School of Everything” (http://schoolofeverything.com/), which brings together people who can teach any skills or subject, from Mandarin Chinese to driving a car, with learners; and ‘Good Gym’ (http://www.thegoodgym.org), which combines an exchange of jogging routes helping people keep fit with stop-offs helping elderly people with everyday tasks, thus doing social good along the way.
“There are very quick, very easy examples of IT in action, which in my experience is not often the case in local government and Whitehall, where IT is often over-engineered and under-delivered,” Mulgan said.
The UK’s economic history over the past 200 years has seen a repeated cycle, he said, in which technologies – from canals to railways and the internet – are invented, people can see their potential and are excited by it, and this unlocks surges of investment.
“So you usually get a bubble, and this always ends in a massive crash. But what is interesting is what comes out of the crash is not a return to the past, but after a period of chaos, confusion and pain, there is a period of innovation, usually around institutions and regulation, and these then allow the new technologies to be diffused throughout society, resulting in a period of extraordinary growth.” The true benefits of a technology, such as its impact on productivity, only become evident in this second phase, Mulgan said.
“If this is even partly right, it has fundamental implications. It explains why so many good ideas about how you might reshape services never made it yet – the time was not quite right. But we are likely to see in the next 10 or 20 years, even without a great amount of new investment, a revolution in service delivery.”
The principles that will shape the next phase of development are those of services that are lower cost; modular, incremental, and organic; simple and direct; and draw on peer support and user power, he said.
Examples of how services could be made simpler and more powerful online included a Belgian site allowing people to make police statements online, which have legal force. “I don’t know if there are any examples of this kind of project in the UK, but where I live, we are a million miles away from this simplicity and directness.”
Public involvement in policymaking can be enabled by the new technologies, but progress can also be made at the other end of the spectrum, developing ways of citizens taking more responsibility for doing things themselves, Mulgan said. Instances of this include Pledgebank (www.pledgebank.org), a project where people come together to pledge to donate time, money or resources to a cause if others will do the same; and ‘Spice’ (www.justaddspice.org)
Collaboration and people-power can also be enabled within a public sector organisation, he said. The US Intelligence Services have developed ‘Intellipedia’, a way in which any operativ e at any level and in any location can share knowledge and information about any subject of potential value.
“I am not aware of any part of UK public sector that does this. But why doesn’t every council have a ‘municipedia’, on issues such as how to address the downturn – we are hopelessly inefficient about sharing knowledge and information, let alone between other local government and other public agencies such as health bodies. I would love to see it happen.”
Another key trend will be the rise of ‘hyperlocal media’, online information being grouped and gathered around communities the size of just a few neighbouring streets or a US city block. Up to now it has been easier to find out national information online than details of what your neighbours were doing, he said, but “in the next few years we are going to see interesting competition between people to get into this hyperlocal space, with councils, citizen-led initiatives and local media all trying to do the same.”
The diverse economy of public and private organisations vying for the same space will create some dilemmas over who will control the data, Mulgan said. “These arguments are only just beginning – but they are very serious arguments about handling of very important personal data.”
Returning to his opening theme, he said that ultimately, the biggest driver of all this innovation will be money. “Your chief execs will be asking for cash, and more and more of it – there will be pressures to cancel, and delay, to slim and trim everything.
“But will there be a bigger meaning to it, an opportunity. I think local government has fallen behind on all of this, and perhaps painfully for local government, some other bits of the public sector are now moving quite fast. The top echelons of the NHS, for example, know the health system has to change radically in the next 10 years, away from hospital models. They are supporting social entrepreneurs, investment funds for social enterprises, which will involve a radically different use of IT and networks moving more IT into homes, and use by individuals, to reduce pressure on the centre.”
Developed proerly, the new technologies will create economies of scale – for instance by aggregating call centres – which are “almost limitless”, he said. There will also be “economies of responsibility”, pushing some service responsibility out to the citizen.
So the coming years will be a time both of so retrenchment and revolution, Mulgan concluded. But there are dangers as well as opportunities: “some will use the energy of crisis to accelerate change, other will struggle to keep up.” Socitm09 has been warned.
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