What do we truly want to achieve from eGovernment? The ippr thinktank aims to provide answers to this question through a consultation on the future of Britain's digital policy. Will Davies, Senior Research Fellow, ippr, calls for your input.
Knowledge management, like eGovernment, is an area where many large organisations still feel aggrieved about past IT failures. More often than not, these were not technological melt-downs as such, but failures to listen adequately to those who would need to use the tools on a day-to-day basis. eGovernment suffers from low levels of take-up on the part of the public. Similarly, millions of pounds worth of knowledge management and CRM systems lie unused around British offices. In both instances, the mistake was to put technology centre-stage, and expect people to adapt to work around it.
At a knowledge management seminar I attended recently, I was surprised by the scepticism that was still being voiced towards IT systems. However one attendee made an eminently sensible suggestion: keep the technologists out of the design meetings for as long as you possibly can, and only invite them in when the conversation can go no further. Only this way can a firm know exactly what it is that they want from the technology, and specify this in their procurement.
Could the same process be done in the public sector? Is Government missing opportunities for additional discussion and consultation, prior to the eGovernment contracts being signed? Probably, but then consultation can not go on indefinitely.
However, it is surely right to stand back periodically and ask ‘what are we actually trying to achieve?’ This is why the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) is running its current project, ‘A Manifesto for a Digital Britain’. It is also why a centrepiece of this will be listening to the public: starting today, we are running a three-week public consultation on the future of Britain’s digital policy.
The consultation will not be completely open-ended. We are nine months into the project, and have already held close to twenty seminars. But there are some crunch issues that have emerged, on which we would like to open ourselves up to the best external ideas, ideally from first-hand experience. Where relevant, we would like to be able to use the best ideas, and credit them accordingly. With a publication planned for early July outlining a vision for a future Digital Britain, we hope that this consultation can add weight and insight to our recommendations.
We’ve posed what we think are the fundamental questions surrounding Britain’s innovative capacity
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Online consultations can go wrong in too very contrasting ways. On the one hand they risk being over-whelmed by negative input or ‘trolling’. On the other hand, they can be ignored by all, resulting in nothing more than virtual tumble-weed rolling through them. So how might this one stave off these threats?
Firstly, the ippr is a genuinely independent voice in this debate. The pit-falls of online consultations are more likely when they operate in a one-to-one structure, between a service deliverer and a user. For instance, when a rail company invites comments from its passengers, it is unlikely to be inundated with praise or constructive criticism. Sadly, they are more likely to be insulted or ignored. This is why it makes sense for third party ‘brokers’ to step in, to help consumers channel their criticisms into constructive feed-back. Swedish website, Interesting.org shows how this can be done. With any luck, the ippr’s consultation might perform a similar role for digital policy-making.
Secondly, our consultation is not only a talking shop, but part of a sincere quest for new and useful ideas. Other think tanks are becoming very interested in the notion of ‘open source policy-making’ at the moment, in which ideas are fed in to a collective thought process. This is a similar activity, but with some significant amendments. Rather than seek to lose a sense of individual authorship or ownership over ideas, I would like to see this as a way of collecting and publicising both the best ideas and their originators.
Our consultation will be based around a weblog, namely the Digital Manifesto blog. But instead of a rolling conversation, we want to ask three sets of quite carefully targeted questions, under three key themes of ‘Innovating’, ‘Reassuring’ and ‘Empowering’.
Today marks the first phase, lasting a week. We’ve posed what we think are the fundamental questions surrounding Britain’s innovative capacity, and asked for concrete policy recommendations. It may not work, but we have to show a willingness to listen.
William Davies is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, and runs the Digital Society programme. The Digital Manifesto Online Consultation is taking place at www.digitalmanifesto.org between 7th and the 27th April, in three week-long phases.
