Malcolm Turnbull theguardian.com, Friday 20 June 2014
Australia has ambitious targets to improve the relationship between citizens and the government: all correspondence will be able to be conducted online by 2017
Smartphones will increasingly connect citizens to government services. Photograph: Silvia Izquierdo/AP
The man responsible for the UK government’s technology, Liam Maxwell, walks around with a very simple motto stickered onto his smartphone and Macbook: “What is the user need?”
Maxwell is Her Majesty’s government’s chief technology officer but his outlook, attitude and clothes he wears are far closer to Steve Jobs than to Sir Humphrey.
His job as part of the efficiency reform group – created in 2010 when the UK government was facing its largest deficit since the second world war – is to equip government departments with the right technology to deliver great digital services and to cut IT spending. But it’s more accurate to say his real mission is closer to reimagining the role of government and its daily relationship with citizens.
Increasingly, the relationship between citizens and the government no longer happens at an MP’s office or a Centrelink bureau, but on a smartphone. In Australia, our government has ambitious targets for this evolving relationship: all correspondence to and from the government, and major interactions such as visiting the Centrelink office, will be able to be conducted online by 2017.
But it is clear Australia is still a laggard in this area. This week, Maxwell visited Australia and there are some clear lessons for how our government can do better in the way it uses the internet better to engage with its citizens.
The first area screaming out for reform is how the government buys IT software and hardware.
In Australia, the whole of federal government ICT spend is around $5.97bn annually – accounting for around 1.6% of the government’s annual expenditure. Spending rose by 13% in the three years to 2011-12. Two thirds of that spending is on ongoing operating expenses, like maintaining old IT infrastructure. This is much less scrutinised than new spending decisions, so potential savings are very large.
Every major IT project over a threshold of $9.09m (£5m) has to be approved by Maxwell’s group, which sits in the UK cabinet office. Although Maxwell does not have much in the way of resources – in the first years of operation his team comprised of just seven staff – he does have authority.
Some projects are rejected, but more often the departments are shown how the goal can be achieved more efficiently and at less cost. Not “no” – but “no, but...”
In his first year of examining new projects, Maxwell and his team helped UK government departments save $564m in ICT procurement (£312m). This last financial year, those savings rose to $1.7 bn (£950m).
The second key lesson is to reduce the complexity of the software and processes used to deliver services. There is a reason why open source software has triumphed around the world – it drastically cuts down development costs and makes it easier to share lessons learnt in making platforms more efficient.
Take online transaction systems. There are hundreds of transactions citizens make with the government each year – although for the most part the amount of money collected by the government is concentrated in a few key transactions (such as when you lodge your tax return).
There are reasons why some departments such as the tax office might want to design its own unique billing system. But the experience in the UK is that as each department created its own bespoke billing system, the cost and complexity meant that collecting money online – particularly by smaller departments – was terribly inefficient.
The real value is not just in how much money is saved by the government – it’s in making government services more accessible and easier to use.
Consider organising a visit to a friend or a relative in prison. The government has a vested interest in facilitating such visits – research shows that inmates who have regular visits in jail are much less likely to reoffend after release. The problem is that booking a meeting is hard. The UK government created a simple booking system on the GOV.UK website, which allows people to arrange a visit in minutes.
What’s more, once you create a booking system for the prison system, it’s not that radically different to use that booking system for people to make appointments for a driving test or Centrelink appointment. So that code should be accessible for other departments to use.
The third lesson is to look at who you are awarding contracts to. The old adage that no one ever lost their job for awarding a contract to IBM still largely rings true. But big suppliers should be competing on the quality of their services and software rather than because of the government’s risk aversion and complexity of procurement rules.
In the UK, the government has set a target that 25% of its technology spend goes to small and medium sized enterprises. In one case, the UK government reduced the cost of hosting from $7.2m to $108,000 with a much smaller firm. Choosing smaller firms also tends to be great for employment. Some firms that have secured large UK government contracts in recent years have scaled from around 250 staff to 800 staff.
None of this sounds revolutionary for those involved in the technology business. The most successful are totally focussed on customers – their needs, their convenience, their experience; and competition quickly sorts out the stars from the also rans.
Governments, more often than not, don’t have the discipline of competition, so they need to work even harder never to forget that the only objective is to deliver a better and better service for the citizens they represent.
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