Platformland: Richard Pope & Emer Coleman in conversation (speaker notes)
** My speaker notes from this event: **
Platformland describes services that work much harder for the public, are simpler to build and fulfil their duty to be understandable, accountable and democratic.
- What do I mean by work harder
- Simpler to build
- And understandable accountable and democratic
1. Services that work harder
In the rush to digitize public services, there is little space to ask: why bother? If there is an answer, it is often financial: savings from automation, less duplication, the replacement of neglected systems or the closure of call centres. The aim of most digitization programmes is the status quo, delivered more cheaply.
But efficiency is a trap.
Even where services are well designed, it is all too easy to make things simpler and cheaper for government while services remain fundamentally the same for the public (or are even made worse!). That’s because the things that are expensive or complex for government are not necessarily the things that are expensive and complex for users. Government officials have strong incentives to fund work that makes a service simpler for users, but only when the existing process is expensive (within the bounds of a single department).
Digital rarely gets applied to bureaucratic frictions, the voids that exist between one public service and another, or the ragged edges between the public sector and the rest of everyday life.
If you want to prove that your child has a disability in the United Kingdom in 2024, you carry a dogeared bit of paper around an ‘award letter’ for a disability benefit to gain access to disability facilities. There are whole Facebook groups dedicated to discussing who will accept the letter and which will not.
There are countless examples of what are called administrative burdens.
To prove a company is VAT registered, for example, requires remembering an easily forgettable number.
As of the end of 2023, it was taking up to two years for changes to be made to the Land Registry in England and Wales. Despite its digital back-office systems, many of the changes to its database were still instigated by paper form.
Where public facing services have been digitised, they have often digitised the administrative burdens form by form.
In the United States the W-2 is a paper form issued by employers to their employees, detailing their annual earnings and the amount of tax withheld. Employers are expected to submit digital versions of those ‘W-2 forms’.
Or services have been digitised, but don’t join up.
In 2020, the National Health Service in England ran a bus-stop poster campaign warning of a £100 fine for fraudulently claiming free dental care. It promoted an online questionnaire for people to manually verify if the exact mix of government benefits they were receiving entitled them to free dental care or not. But this was information the UK government already held!
Rather than seeing digital as a short-term cost-saving measure, the aspiration should be to share the benefits of automation with the public. Applied correctly, digital can reduce the burden on individuals, families and communities to close to zero in everything from buying a house, to claiming benefits, to accessing free childcare. The opportunities to do this are better today than they have ever been.
- In place of paper letters, digital credentials will allow people and businesses to join up services in ways that work for them
- The once only principle means that information that is already known doesn’t have to be entered twice
- Services can give people answers in real-time, or proactively renew, enrol and remind
- Private and third sector services built onto of common public APIs can ensure that every need is met
But we don’t get those things by keeping on organising the work of government as it is today.
Today’s restriction of automation to areas where business cases claim that proximate savings are to be found leads to poor outcomes for the public and is unable to measure the potential for growth that comes with reducing the amount of admin faff that comes with running a company, being parent, a patient or a public servant.
The biggest opportunities lie in simplifying the complexity between different parts of the public sector, it must be a system-wide effort.
As first steps, administrative burden should become a key metric of delivery in the public sector and new teams with cross-government mandates should start to join up, simplify and remove complexity.
2. Simpler to build
In the public sector, the solution to joined up working is normally sought in the sharing of data. But ‘data sharing’ is a euphemism. In reality, it’s closer to copying and pasting. Data gets duplicated and is immediately out of sync and out of date. Actually, it’s more like faxing. The copy is a lower-resolution version of the original.
The governments of India, Ukraine and Estonia and have shown the value of organising data with more intent: treating data as a common resource used by multiple services, accessed via data exchange systems with built in access controls.
India has issued over 6 billion digital credentials by making it simple for public institutions to issue credentials - everything from exam results to drivers licences to disability certificates. France and Ukraine are systematically ‘dematerialising’ paper credentials, again supported by common data infrastructure and standards.
Finland, Estonia and other Northern European countries are also beginning to support cross-border invoicing and logistics reporting in real time. You have to winder how much Brexit friction could be removed by that sort of infrastructure?
Digital Public Infrastructure isn’t something that will just emerge from business as usual, and it’s definitely not something you buy in! It needs positioning as nationwide infrastructure and, even if the intitial costs can be low through by starting with small in-house expert team, digital pubic infrastructure must be funded for the long-term. (incidentally: backing small teams seems to be the only thing that has consistently worked in the UK and around the world when it comes to digital transformation).
3. And understandable accountable and democratic
Finally, making understandable accountable and democratic means challenging the ethos about how digital services are design in the public sector, which, today optimizes for utility and is inspired by Silicon Valley minimalism.
On YouTube, there’s a compilation of Steve Jobs speeches where he says: ‘It just works. Seamlessly.’ There are forty-four examples in total. ‘It just works’ sums up Jobs’s approach to design: remove and simplify. He thought design should ‘get out of the way’, as he said about the iPad and the iPhone, which were designed so nothing would distract from the screen.
One school of thought is that it is enough to apply Jobsian principles to the public sphere – to create public services that ‘just work’.
But do we really want to design our public services like an iPad? Functional yes, even magical, but good luck if you want to understand how it works. No.
The economist Elinor Ostrom’s ‘service paradox’ tells us that the quality of public services as defined by professionals results in suboptimal outcomes as defined by users of that service. A better-designed textbook might actually make education worse if the content is so clear and well designed that students no longer feel the need to discuss issues with their class or teachers.
Digital public services should explain to users something of how they work, who is accountable and how to change them.
Rather than aspiring to minimalism, they should aspire to what the late Mark Weiser called ‘beautiful seams’ - where the working are there to be revealed as needed and users understand or take control of automated processes, as needed. Something that will likely become ever more pressing as AI starts folding into public services.
These design principles applies to civil society as much as it does individual citizens.
As Lisa Nandy the Culture secretary said the other day, civil society groups have a critical role to ‘tell government when it’s getting it wrong’. How can they be helped them do that with digital public services?
When the charity Child Poverty Action Group was researching Universal Credit, the United Kingdom’s digital welfare system, they found there were few public sources that explained how the service worked.
Its researchers had to do take on the role of a courtroom artist. They recreated parts of the service worked by observing users and recreating mockups of the system.
In a democracy, understanding the way things are is a precondition for changing them. But today, the public are engaged as consumers, not as part of a democratic society. Government is designed out of the way.
Public service design requires a reset. Creating services with beautiful seams (or we could say democratic seams) provides a way of revealing decisions, rules, data and accountability to users while not abandoning the aspiration for simplicity. Superficially, it may appear that they are less utilitarian or functional or minimalist, but so be it. A public service is not an iPad.
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