John Hudson

Michael Cross has a piece on directgov in today’s Guardian Online. He points to a couple of important weaknesses:

Directgov falls a long way short of the “online government store” previously trailed by the e-envoy. Citizens will still need to go to individual agencies’ sites for “transactions”, such as filing tax returns online. Directgov’s relationship with local government, which is responsible for most regular contacts with officialdom, is also unclear.

Interestingly, he points the finger at Douglas Alexander for the slow pace of change:

Pinder blames the complexities of joining up systems at the “back end” of government. However political caution may also be to blame. Pinder’s immediate political boss, the Cabinet Office minister Douglas Alexander, is understood to be highly averse to taking risks with IT.

The first site to emerge from the mysociety project - Downing Street Says - has gone live. The site automatically captures press briefings from the PMOS and allows readers the opportunity to respond. Still thought our submission to the mysociety project - inequalities.net - was a winner… can’t believe they didn’t go for it!

Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation of Economic Trends has a piece in today’s Guardian - Return of a Conundrum - which suggests that technological change is producing a crisis in world employment levels.

He says some 1 billion people are unemployed are underemployed and that the culprit is not globalisation and the relocation of jobs to low wage regions but, rather, technological advancement and the automation of tasks. He argues:

Manufacturing employment has declined every year in the past seven years and in every region of the world. The employment decline occurred during a period when global industrial production rose by more than 30%.

If the current rate of decline continues - and it is more than likely to accelerate - manufacturing employment will dwindle from the current 164m jobs to just a few million by 2040, virtually ending the era of mass factory labour.

Further, he suggests that this trend is no longer confined to the manufacturing sector:

Now the white-collar and services industries are experiencing similar job losses, as intelligent technologies replace more and more workers. Banking, insurance, and the wholesale and retail sectors are introducing smart technologies into every aspect of their business operations, fast eliminating support personnel in the process. The US internet banking company Netbank has $2.4bn in deposits. A typical bank that size employs 2,000 people. Netbank runs its entire operation with just 180 workers.

The UK and US jobs being lost to call centres in India, while important, pale in significance compared with jobs lost every day to voice recognition technology. Consider the US phone company Sprint, which has been steadily replacing human operators with this technology. In the year 2002, Sprint’s productivity jumped 15% and revenue increased by 4.3%, while the company reduced its payroll by 11,500.

And so:

Herein lies the conundrum. If dramatic advances in productivity can replace more and more human labour, resulting in more workers being let go from the workforce, where will the consumer demand come from to buy all the potential new products and services? We are being forced to face up to an inherent contradiction at the heart of our market economy that has been present since the very beginning, but is only now becoming irreconcilable.

His argument echoes some points made in a 10 Downing Street Millennium Lecture titled Wealth Creation in the Knowledge Economy given by David Potter (Psion Chairman) in 1999 that, by chance, I surfed upon again yesterday while looking for something else. He pointed out that while, over the course of the past three decades, the proportion of the UK workforce employed in manufacturing had declined from around 50% to around 15%, the output of the manufacturing sector had increased by around a third in real terms. Potter suggested:

The core lesson here is… that making things is becoming increasingly automated and routine… There is a parallel with the agrarian revolution where most of the labour force worked on the land to grow the things we required to eat. Today some 3% of the labour force works on the land and produces a cornucopia greater than our needs. In fifty years time, it might well be that only 5% of the work force make things, but produce all that we reasonably require.

Potter, like Rifkin, feels

we are in the relatively early phases of a major economic revolution. This revolution is based around the concept of a post industrial era where making things is increasingly automated and routine, creating things is difficult and value therefore derives from creation and from the intellectual capital or knowledge base of the firm or nation.

The government’s latest incarnation of its one-stop internet portal - directgov is now online in a preview version. Using the fabulous internet archive wayback machine links are available to the original portal open.gov.uk (this version from 2000, but running from 1994) - which was little more than an A-Z listing of government organisations - and its successor a UK Online your life (this version from 2002, but running from 2001 and still live in 2004) - in which the key innovation was the organisation of information around ‘life episodes’ such as having a baby or learning to drive.

BBC carried a report/interview with the e-envoy about the switch. In it, Pinder offered an analogy to outline the difference between directgov and UK Online:

The e-Envoy, Andrew Pinder, likened the UK Online site to a travel agent that was suggesting destinations for a holiday.

By contrast, he said, Directgov was a purpose-built resort, though he admitted that not all of the rides were built yet.

Mr Pinder illustrated how the different sites handled queries using the example of a parent with a young disabled child trying to find out about sending their offspring to a mainstream school.

Using UK Online, a parent would be directed to all the sites of the government departments involved such as the Department for Education and Skills and the Department of Work and Pensions.

Mr Pinder said tracking down all relevant information can be tricky as the government maintains more than 2,500 websites, few of which share formatting or search terms.

By contrast, he said, on Directgov everything a parent needs to know will be collected on one page and individual government websites were invisible to the end user

“We are really trying hard to be customer-focused,” he said. “It’s something that government has not done very well in the past.”

ID cards were on the agenda of the Home Affairs select committee again last week (see Kablenet for a report - the Home Affairs committee website has yet to catch up). Ross Anderson - who helped the BMA sink plans for NHS networking and electronic patient records in their mid-1990s incarnation - gave a generally critical appraisal of the plans. Then his argument was that a national, networked system presented too great a security risk: the probability of hackers gaining access to confidential information was 100%. This time his worries seem similar: that a single national database of biometric information would be a target for those wishing to threaten the security of the nation.

Manuel Castells has a new book out soon: a cross-cultural perspective on the network society. According to the blurb:

Manuel Castells – one of the world’s pre-eminent social scientists – has drawn together a stellar group of contributors to explore the patterns and dynamics of the network society in its cultural and institutional diversity. After presenting a theoretical discussion of the network society, the book analyzes processes of technological transformation in interaction with social culture in five different cultural and institutional contexts: Silicon Valley, Finland, Russia, China and the UK. The conviction that the network society takes very different forms, depending on the cultural and institutional environments in which it evolves, lies at the heart of this book.

And contributors include: ‘S.K. Acord, W.E. Baker, T. Bates, C. Benner, N. Bulkley, M. Castells, A. Chatterjee, K.M. Coleman, I. Díaz de Isla Gómez, K.N. Hampton, P. Himanen, J.S. Juris, J.E. Katz, J. Linchuan Qiu, R. Pinkett, R.E. Rice, T. Sancho, L.J. Servon, A. Sey, I. Tubella, M. Van Alstyne, E. Vartanova, B. Wellman, R. Williams, S. Woolgar, C. Zaloom’

The EU are stepping up the drive for accessible e-government, following on from a recent report that considered usability.

They have also just published an interesting report examining progress in implementing online services in EU nations. It ranks the UK as 6th in service availability and 8th in sophistication.

Two articles in the Guardian this week (

Went to see the e-Envoy speak on ‘The Future of the UK e-government’ at the London School of Economics last night. Curiously enough he had relatively little to say about the future of e-government - and I didn’t get the chance to ask what would be happening when the Office of the e-Envoy is disbanded this year or what this change will mean in terms of e-government’s position in the policy agenda.

Despite this it was still an interesting enough talk (rough notes taken on my IPAQ). Pinder was very open in expressing his disappointment with progress in delivering information age government. In particular, he criticized the ‘tick box approach’ resulting from the 100% target - departments and agencies delivering ‘brochureware’ to satisfy the target rather than thinking about how services might be repackaged or reorganized.

Interestingly, he said much more thought still needed to go into devising services that would be relevant to the needs of a more fragmented, individualised citizenery and into tue marketing of these services. He described government as being stuck in the Fordist era of one size fits all and suggested e-government is still the way forward here… if change can be delivered.

Here, however, we get to the crux of the matter: he implied that resistance from within has been a key problem - ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ being his phrase - because of worries that e-government might threaten existing jobs and practices. This in turn hinted at another problem: rather than breaking down departmental silos, e-channels were creating additional silos, internet, call centre and physical services often being run in isolation from each other. It was here, Pinder suggested, that the key problem lay, for even when web services are being joined-up they aren’t being joined-up with other channels. There has been too little effort put into managing and mixing the channels and, ultimately, too little thought about how e-enabled services might open up a broader re-engineering of processes.

In short: we are still a long way from the vision of citizen-centric government touted in the early days of the OoEE’s existence.