The Smart State - Redesigning government in the era of intelligent services
Foreword from Francis Maude in Policy Exchange’s paper ‘The Smart State - Redesigning government in the era of intelligent services’. Francis promotes the need for Government 2.0 in the UK.
‘If you were to create government today, you would not build it around large, free standing Departments of State. Instead of a series of siloed hierarchies, you would structure it as a platform responding to the needs of the end user. Ministers and specialists would draw on a common pool of advice and functional expertise. Rather than every department having its own often overlapping or conflicting database, you would power it with a single core technology platform.
One reason is cost. Around the world, governments are facing the challenges of low growth, constrained budgets and rising expectations. Digital offers the opportunity to drive genuine efficiency improvements, rather than salami slicing budgets. In the short term, digital transactions can be 20 times cheaper than those over the phone and 50 times cheaper than face-to-face. In the long term, machine learning and AI offers the opportunity to automate or transform a significant proportion of the work government does.
As important as cost, however, is the opportunity to create truly modern public services, more convenient to use and responsive to individual needs. Government should be there to serve you, not the political needs of Ministers or the administrative convenience of mandarins. If you can bank from your smartphone, you should be able to check your tax return or the status of a prescription.
In order to power the most transformative kinds of digital government, we will need to maintain the public’s trust in the handling of their data. That, in turn, requires digital government to be underpinned by clear principles, respecting individual privacy and remembering that ultimately power and control should rest with the citizen, not the state. From 2010 to 2015, we showed that change is possible. In the course of a few short years, we built the Government Digital Service, closed more than 1500 websites creating the award-winning GOV.UK and embedded the principles of digital-by-default. In 2016, the UN ranked the UK as the world’s leading e-government, with many other countries seeking to follow in our path. Not bad from the starting point of Britain being notorious worldwide as government IT car-crash central!
However, as this report warns, there are worrying signs that in recent years progress has slipped. Without constant pressure from the centre, the natural tendency in any large organisation is for individual departments to slip back into defensive isolation. Government as a Platform will not happen without clear direction from the top. It is time to reboot. Government 2.0 is overdue.’
Read the full report here.