Live blog from Intellect-Cabinet Office event Tower ’09
Written by: John Hoggard on 14 May, 200909:35 I’m sitting here at the Tower with a couple lovely ladies from the National Archive Office and a gentleman from Steria (also lovely). Compared to last year, it’s now a lot easier to have a chat with my fellow attendees as we are sat in cabaret style (instead of theatre style) in a giant hall at the Guoman Tower Hotel. Flat screen televisions around the room so that everyone in the back can see what’s on the screen. Nice air-con. Just about ready to get going.
09:40 John Higgins (Intellect’s director general) steps up to the stage following a funky, trance music intro. Scattered grooving throughout the room (to the music).
09:44 Current priorities for the industry are highlighting how investing in technology can help revamp our digital infrastructure, tackle climate change, and modernise public services. John encouraged the attendees to go chat with people they don’t know, particularly our sponsors! Nice plug, John.
09:45 Today we’ll be first looking at empowering citizens, and then at empowering businesses. In addition to your faithful correspondent, the media is here. John adds that they will obviously all be reporting faithfully on the day’s events. The Cabinet Office film crew is also here to do audio/video recording and to keep everyone on their toes by doing some roving interviews.
09:50 Tom Watson MP is the morning’s keynote speaker. He says that he was a bit nervous last year prior to his presentation at Tower 08, when he felt like he needed to impress us a bit. This year he is more settled in his role, so he is more chilled (must admit he doesn’t actually use the word, ‘chilled’).
09:52 Tom noted that even uncool people are tweeting these days, such as UK MPs and US Congressman. I’d argue that mainly uncool people are using twitter! But you can’t argue with Tom’s statement that technology played a huge role in helping Barack Obama get into the White House.
09:55 The Transformational Government Annual Report has been published today, so pick up your copy online.
09:56 Tom believes that Web 2.0 is the greatest democratising tool of our time.
09:57 Digital engagement should become core business to all government departments.
09:58 “I love gigs,” says Tom. He expands by saying that Steve Watson taking part in Strictly Come Dancing is a cultural milestone.
10:00 Tom thinks that all public servants should help citizens navigate the web to get services. He adds that Andrew Stott has been appointed to a new role as Director of Digital Engagement.
10:01 “Innovate small and scale up” – Tom thinks that this mantra can be our chance to personalise the relationship between government and citizens.
10:03 On data – it’s the public’s data. We (government) just want to help the public to use it in new and value-adding ways.
10:05 The government is introducing new ways to share information online, with the model of taking one of Jamie Oliver’s recipes and making it a slightly different way to suit your tastes. Government leadership is in place, they just need us (civil servants and industry) to help them transform service delivery.
10:08 Up next is Richard Allan, chair of the Power of Information Task Force and Government Affairs Director at Cisco. Dr Beth Novack was going to be videoed in from the US, but looks like no love.
10:10 Richard highlighted theyworkforyou.com, which takes obscure content from parliament’s website and reformats it into an accessible format. And yes, they do have a league table of MPs’ expenses!
10:13 Richard feels that individual entrepreneurs may provide cheaper, more useful tools.
10:15 Richard puts up a slide of an elephant standing on its head and front legs and starts by saying ‘Andrew Stott …’ Gets a laugh. He asks, can an elephant (as metaphor for government) learn to dance? He answers that one way is through the innovation portal on Directgov.
10:20 Bit of an example of ‘dancing’ with HM Government’s feedback format for their new low carbon industrial strategy.
10:26 Steph Gray, head of digital engagement at DIUS, steps up to bat. Loads of stats to start – eg 55% of ‘young people’ have friends over while they use the internet.
10:31 Good definitions for the semantically-inclined. Social media = ‘conversations on the web’. Digital engagement = how public services can best take advantage of social media
10:36 ‘Why digital engagement matters?’ This is totally separate from Steph’s work, but I think the bigger picture is the benefits to productivity and the UK economy that are possible from further digital inclusion. Is government separating digital engagement and digital inclusion? Steph’s definition above would imply so. A better dialogue between DIUS and citizens is a plus, but it strikes me that this engagement will increase interactions with the digitally included but perhaps deepen the gap that separates the digitally excluded.
10:48 The best of Steph’s lessons learned is “interactive websites need interactive organisations.”
10:52 The main message of these two presentations seems to be: check out all the whizzy stuff we are doing that empower citizens.
10:56 The discussion delves into how you manage the information lifecycle and how to measure the value of information.
11:04 Key message – don’t underestimate the hunger for authoritative sources of information on social networking sites.
11:10 Coffee time. The presentations hall clears out and everyone piles out into the main foyer. Lively mingling. People manning booths and smilingly giving out info. Staff weaving their way through the crowds.
11:45 Martin Wyn Griffith, Director of Service Transformation at BERR introduces the second half of the
morning session. He says this portion will talk about transformation of service delivery for businesses as well as citizens. What is efficient for the customer (ie the citizen) is also efficient for government. Three cheers for that. Empowerment isn’t just something that’s nice to say and PC, it’s key for delivering on policy objectives and producing better services.
11:49 Martin introduces Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of Consumer Focus as the man who is “combating every way that Brits are ripped off.”
11:51 Ed brings three members of the audience on stage and asks them each to choose one card from a pile. Each card has a random word on it. He guarantees the combination of the three will describe service transformation. Eg ‘Corporate renewal assessment’. ‘Performance improvement partnership’. Very effective.
11:56 Consumer Focus is doing public service mystery shopping at Jobcentre Plus, Directgov, social housing, etc.
11:58 Ed notes that people now are saying they don’t trust or need politicians. Has this ever been otherwise?
12:00 Good slide about how public information can be misinterpreted! Biggest laugh of the day.
12:01 Ed showed an example of how by engaging with pregnant women smokers in a different way – eg treating them and their babies equally, explaining things clearly, no nagging – there has been a ten-fold increase in smoking cessation (or decrease in smoking while pregnant).
12:05 Lord Davies of Abersoch (minister of trade and investment at BERR and Foreign Office) is second up.
12:07 When he worked at Tesco, he saw fanaticism to serve the customer and a methodical attention to detail. The voice of the customer pervades everything you are doing. His challenge to government is to accept mistakes and eliminate the blame culture if you want to experiment. He thinks there should be open discussions about lessons learned.
12:11 Lord Davies imagines that service failures are going on everywhere in government. In the private sector, managerial meetings invariably discuss the customer experience. He challenged the public sector to do so as well.
12:18 The difficulty in government is the number of things that come across his desk, the short time to make decisions, and immediate blow-ups in the press afterwards. The House of Commons has become too much of a theatre for TV.
12:20 When Lord Davies tours the UK, he sees excellence everywhere – in manufacturing, services, etc. And we need to showcase this. Much nodding of heads in agreement from the audience.
12:25 He doesn’t feel that staff in government is engaged in the journey and feel that they need to contribute their little bit. This engagement is key to transformation.
12:27 Lord Davies seemed very switched on. Glad he is working for government, especially as he’s doing it for free!
12:33 Last of the rest – Andrew Summers, chairman of Companies House, chairman of Design Partners and deputy president of the RSA.
12:35 He notes the big gap between government’s perception of how the regulatory burden has been reduced by £1.2b and how only 1% of businesses say regulatory reform has saved them (businesses) time.
12:38 Andrew makes a great point about the transformative potential of technology. The iPod is really cool and well designed, but the real impact it has made is that it has revamped service delivery of music.
12:45 Fun slide from Andrew (though he seemed a bit sceptical about the design) on mapping the customer experience for the online registration process – it’s a series of very detailed emoticons demonstrating the customer’s emotional journey through the process.
12:58 Themes from the discussion include growing/exchanging new ideas, drawing on strategic partners to provide more joined-up services, fundamental redesign of services vs slight tweaks, and innovation on ‘the margins’ vs innovation of core services in the current economic environment.
13:04 Lord Davies thinks now is the time for a real, collective agenda across government departments and the industry to tackle all of the issues above.
13:06 Lunchtime. More to follow afterwards.
15:39 Ok. After lunch, three simultaneous workshops (in separate rooms), and a break for tea/coffee, your faithful correspondent is back. Cue the funky techno music again.
15:40 Jeremy Oates, chair of Intellect’s Public Sector Council and MD of Accenture’s UK SI business, gets things under way. Looking around the room, it seems like the majority of the audience has stayed for the afternoon session.
15:44 David Albury, working with The Innovation Unit, King’s College London, Capgemini and NESTA, is the first speaker of the afternoon.
15:47 David provides an interesting definition of innovation as a spectrum between physical and social innovation.
15:53 I agree with David that the importance of leadership is sometimes overemphasised. Though I think his use of the word ‘innovation’ is also slightly overemphasised – think he’s using it, or its derivatives, at a rate of about 8 to 12 times per minute.
15:57 David puts up a picture of a beautifully overgrown garden; making the point that you want a hundred flowers to bloom, but you also want order.
16:01 Next, Sarah Fogden, Deputy Director of Public Service Reform at the Cabinet Office, wants innovation to be business as usual, as opposed to being an area of specific focus. She thinks we need to harness innovation as part of real delivery processes.
16:04 The government’s new blueprint of working together (ie wider public service reform) sticks with the principles of the Service Transformation Agreement, but also promotes radical reform as a way of enabling the country to emerge stronger from the recession.
16:12 HMRC is carrying out a central demand management process to drive efficiencies.
16:14 The Cabinet Office will be producing channel strategy guidance for the public sector at the end of June. And they want to extend the performance management framework approach to every channel. Government is looking to drive ‘non-value contact’ out of the system.
16:18 Brian Woodford, Head of Public Sector at Tata Consultancy Services, will go through a potential new commercial model for government, finding new ways to solve problems and manage risk.
16:23 Brian is obviously a visual thinker and he has got some solid pictures of how to reform the buyer-supplier relationship and the structure of government. He believes that a new operating model for all of government should have citizens behind the wheel or at least as back-seat drivers (my phraseology, not his!).
16:25 With world class commissioning in the NHS, the right information is not available to support good business decisions as of yet.
16:26 Brian gives examples from India that illustrated new means of managing risk, joining up government processes, and setting up an electronic patient record.
16:31 Geoff Llewellyn, Director of Public Sector at Wipro, will now take us from Procrustes to Proteus to Haldane. Sorry, what???
16:32 Ok, he explains. Procrustes was a force-fitter, Proteus is a shape shifter and Haldane was the architect of the UK’s machinery of government. Geoff feels that you need an architectural approach to correctly structure government.
16:35 Do we structure government around groups of people or around the groups of services to be performed? Haldane originally felt the departmental approach was in the country’s best interest, but maybe now it’s time for a new, more Protean model.
16:40 Geoff feels that if the engine of government were treated more simply, policy could be more strategic and less reactive.
16:47 Discussion. Where do real innovations come from? There is a hearty debate here, but everyone seems to agree on one thing: flowers. Well, two things: gardening and flowers. The consensus is that with a plan, proper fertilizer, and an environment where plants can flourish, you can have a beautiful garden. You can’t just cast a handful of seeds into the garden and see what happens.
16:51 Should government be a club that offers the services that the members of the club want?
16:54 More on flowers from the audience. Some innovation has to happen in the wild. Of course, you can probably transplant flowers from the wild into the garden. But there are some flowers that can only be grown and nurtured in a garden. Hopefully this makes sense!
17:00 And to cap things all off, we’ve got Chris Wormald, Director General of Public Service Reform at the Cabinet Office. We’ll see if the flower theme continues.
17:02 The public wants simple things done well – a decent school, a safe hospital, a competent job centre, etc. But at the same time, they want innovation on par with the private sector. Kudos to Chris, who believes that this is a very reasonable expectation.
17:10 Chris highlights some of the key themes that came out of the conference today. He notes that if addressed and incorporated into government’s agenda, we may be able to have a hundred flowers bloom (yep…).
• Efficiency
• technology and digital services
• citizen engagement and power of information
• innovation and radical service redesign
• whole staff approach
• collaboration, shared services and joined-up delivery
• quality personalised public services
17:12 Chris feels that there are a number of solutions that don’t fall solely in central or local government. And it is a great challenge to identify where the answers lie – with the state, with the private sector, with the third sector, with the citizen, or with all of the above.
17:15 Well, that does it for Tower 09. Congrats if you’ve read this far, and hope to see you in person next year at Tower 10.
Tags: Cabinet Office, Lord Davies, Public Sectors, public service reform, Tom Watson, Tower '09
