[D66] There is no such thing as the government

[Henk Elegeert]

There is no such thing as the
government<http://publicstrategist.com/2010/11/there-is-no-such-thing-as-the-government/>

Posted on 25 November 2010, 9:12 pm, by Public Strategist, under Leadership
and change <http://publicstrategist.com/category/leadership-and-change/>,
Systems
and processes <http://publicstrategist.com/category/systems-and-processes/>.

In the UK, we appear to have a government. It looks like a government, often
talks like a government, and sometimes behaves like a government.  But you
can’t really understand the way government works until you realise that it
doesn’t exist.

Bits of government exist, of course, lots of them. Sometimes we call those
bits ‘departments’ and sometimes we call them other things. Sometimes they
co-ordinate and collaborate. When No10 rings, they answer the phone and
listen attentively and at the very least will appear to do something which
can be described as a response. But government as a whole is at least as
much archipelago as land mass.

It can take a while to spot that. It took me years. It took me to the
Cabinet Office where, I deluded myself, I would get access to the levers of
power, and would be able to make the world a better place as a result.
 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/ingythewingy/3231435755/>

The levers of power (and the power brokers' kettle)

The delusion is not in thinking that there are levers of power. There most
assuredly are. There are rows of them, with brass handles and the patina of
age, polished daily until you can see your face in them. When you move one,
there is a satisfying clunk and a little bell rings. The levers are
connected together in complex ways and there are people who have made it
their life’s work to understand those linkages, and to pull the levers in
patterns and sequences which send clear messages in exactly the right
direction.

No, the delusion is to think that those levers are necessarily connected to
anything, that they directly control any machinery, that anybody hears the
little bell ringing in the corner, that brass and polish are correlated with
consequence.

And that matters. It matters because once you recognise that fact, you can
start to do things differently.  People do, of course, recognise it at the
level of caricature I have described here and nobody will admit to believing
that they can get things done simply by pulling the levers of power. But
inactions speak louder than words and the myth of the lever is harder to
eradicate than any of us like to admit.

There are two ways forward from there. One is to connect up the levers; the
other is to recognise that they are not connected and to find other ways of
getting things done. I don’t particularly mind – at least for the purposes
of this post – which route is chosen, nor do I think that it necessarily has
to be the same route for every decision made in government. The essential
thing, though, is not to imagine that anything will come from installing an
additional set of unconnected levers or investing in better quality brass
polish.

With that in mind, let us turn to the review of
Directgov<http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/newsroom/news_releases/2010/101122-defaultdigital/defaultdigital.aspx>prepared
by Martha Lane Fox for Francis Maude, which needs to be read in
conjunction with the essential gloss provided by Tom
Loosemore<http://blog.helpfultechnology.com/2010/11/a-window-on-the-wormery/#comment-48714>(and
do read
Steph’s post<http://blog.helpfultechnology.com/2010/11/a-window-on-the-wormery/>while
you are there).  This is not a post about that review: it’s something
I am directly involved with, so I am not going to discuss the specific
content and recommendations here. Neil
Williams<http://neilojwilliams.net/missioncreep/2010/profoundly-non-trivial-martha-lane-fox-review-of-directgov/>has
both his own analysis and some good links to other people’s if that is
what you are after. In any case, what matters for this post is not so much
what is in the report as what is outside it, the context into which it has
dropped.

The idea of joining up government services by bringing them together online
has been with us for years. In some ways a lot has been achieved, but pretty
much nobody is satisfied with where we have got to. I have written at some
length on e-government ten years
on<http://publicstrategist.com/2009/10/e-government-ten-years-on/>and
I won’t repeat that here, but I strongly suspect that we have often
looked for solutions in the wrong place. Somehow the ambition has always
comfortably outstripped progress. The temptation is always to blame the
digital delivery (e-government, online services gov 2.0, call it what you
will), as the new thing which was supposed to achieve miracles, but has
unaccountably failed to do so. That’s not completely wrong, but it is at
best only half the story. The missing levers of power provide the other
half. To some extent, joined up online services can cover up the essential
fragmentation of government, but they cannot actually defragment it, and it
is unreasonable to expect them to do so.

As a demonstration of the importance of the issue, it’s well worth reading Tom
Watson’s reflections<http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2010/11/24/can-martha-teach-the-government-not-to-be-google/>on
the nature of the problem, why the last government didn’t fix it, and
what would be needed to sort it out now. I recognise his diagnosis, though I
don’t altogether agree with it, but it is his prescription which is relevant
here. He suggests that bringing in the A team would make the critical
difference:

For, as Martha rightly points out, to achieve the changes required to make
engaging with HMG online a simple, pleasurable experience requires a massive
change in culture and technical expertise.

And Francis is also humble enough to know that he’s going to need the flair
and talent of Britain’s best web people. He needs the A-team.

If I were Francis, I would draft in Lib Dem Lord, Richard Allan, of facebook
to the team. I’d steal Tom Loosemore and Matt Lock from Channel 4. And I’d
throw in that well know anarchist and inventor of www.theyworkforyou.com,
Stefan Magdalinski. I’d demand that the BBC lend me Tony Ageh and Bill
Thompson.

And to finish off the A-team, I’d persuade David Cameron to put Martha in
the House of Lords. Make her the minister for digital engagement and let her
run the team. My God, they’d change Britain for the better. Good luck to
them. And well done Francis.

That’s not a bad suggestion. They are all good people, and any one of them,
let alone all of them, would bring energy, insight and experience. But I
don’t think it solves the problem, it’s a one last heave approach. We need
(as well, not necessarily instead) to recognise that providing a government
web service when there isn’t a government is an intrinsically difficult
thing.  The solution therefore requires a better government as well as the
better web service.

I am not for a moment suggesting that there is no point in doing anything
until the whole machinery of
government<http://publicstrategist.com/2010/05/the-maps-of-changing-whitehall/>has
been restructured. That’s not going to happen, and no good will come
from waiting for it. But it does mean that there are some important
questions which are well worth exploring, not because they will ever have
final answers, but because we need there to be better answers than we have
now. Three to start us off, all closely related, might be:

   - Whose is the cutomer?
   - Who is the agent of whom?
   - Whose fault is it when it goes wrong?

There is no such thing as the government.  But there could be.

Picture by Ingy the
Wingy<http://www.flickr.com/photos/ingythewingy/3231435755/>,
licensed under creative commons.

"

... of is het/dit nog (iets) te vroeg ...? ;)

Henk Elegeert
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