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Liam Maxwell: Give us back our data... and stop wasting our money
GOVERNMENT spending is under enormous pressure as the country faces up to the mountain of debt that will be Labour's legacy.
One huge administrative cost that must be fixed is IT. Ministers have got through at least 140bn on information systems since 1997 in a nave belief that access to cash makes government more efficient. At the moment, the cash burn rate of IT is 16.7bn a year – that is more than 1 per cent of our entire GDP and much higher than any similar country; it is a truly world- class effort. But what are we like at delivery? Only 30 per cent of systems work. Budgets get broken by ludicrous amounts.
Take the Department for Work and Pensions. They want to get more people to use online interactive services. More than half of their customer base can use the internet and yet after huge spending to create a new system the take-up was – according to the National Audit Office – "tiny". Out of the 142 million contacts with the public, only 340,000 (about 0.25 per cent) used the online services. It is a similar story across government.
Government relies heavily on huge contractors who convince them that big ideas need huge spending. There is little incentive for suppliers to tone down the costs and the vendors are often locked in at high prices for many years. Each department has gone off on its own and set up its own IT systems with databases and data centres all of their own. Each group seems to have re-invented the wheel many times.
More fundamentally, the savings and increases in effectiveness that IT can deliver are achieved by engaging the customers, the end users of the services. That is why Google and Facebook have been so successful, they have used a simple model and allowed others to work it in a way that best suits their applications.
Government IT is only just edging towards a recognition that the internet exists, not offering ways to exploit it. Government websites are not modern or easy to use.
In part, this is a political and cultural issue. The civil service and this very statist Government have always wanted to control from the centre, to have a dashboard through which they can judge what public services they think you need. The trouble is that would need us all to trust government to look after our data, which it manifestly cannot.
So how would a modern IT system for the country work?
Well, first, we should procure services differently. In January, George Osbone, the shadow Chancellor, showed that government project management and delivery would be better if huge projects were cut into smaller chunks. This would enable projects to be won by smaller companies, a great move for the UK small business economy and very much like the successful models of, say, Holland.
We should all own our own personal data. That is how Amazon, Facebook and Google work effectively. They allow access to our data so that people, organisations and companies can interact with us, but we own the data itself. This makes sure data is up to date, but it also allows us to offer access to Government (or third sector bodies) on our
own terms.
Data should be hosted by a small number of private sector suppliers with the Government as the default provider. Our data under our control.
This works in the delivery of more than just world-class
e-commerce; in the US, Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault lead the market offering online health records management to people (for free). Major pharmacies such as CVS use it to help offer their patients and customers better services – and to help patients plan their own healthcare – a major step forward in the efficient delivery of these expensive public services. It works in Sweden, too – a program called old@home has helped elderly patients manage their own healthcare services more effectively.
This approach of "government relationship management" recasts the way we use IT in government to make it more user friendly, more accurate, cheaper and more effective. It will help us remodel the way public services can be delivered, allowing a more flexible set of solutions that meets the needs of the public.
This approach will save very large amounts of money – it is difficult to estimate exactly but in the medium term we should halve our IT spend. Almost all other advanced governments operate at that level, what makes us so different? This will free up resources to spend on delivery to those not online, who are often the people who need the most help.
Giving us back our data will save us money, make government IT more effective and will make the delivery of services better. After all, it is our data.
Liam Maxwell is the author of It's ours: why we, not government, must own our data, published by the Centre for Policy Studies.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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