Jerry Fishenden

An International Problem

Over the past 20 years many governments have promised (often repeatedly and at great length) to use technology to modernize public services. Yet most have also struggled to make long-term improvements on anything like the scale of reinvention and innovation seen in the best of the private sector.

Appraising the impact and role of platform models and Government as a Platform (GaaP) in UK Government public service reform: towards a Platform Assessment Framework (PAF)

The concept of “Government as a Platform” (GaaP) (O’Reilly 2009) is coined frequently, but interpreted inconsistently: views of GaaP as being solely about technology and the building of technical components ignore GaaP’s radical and disruptive embrace of a new economic and organisational model with the potential to improve the way Government operates – helping resolve the binary political debate about centralised versus localised models of public service delivery. We offer a structured approach to the application of the platforms that underpin GaaP, encompassing not only their technical architecture, but also the other essential aspects of market dynamics and organisational form. Based on a review of information systems platforms literature, we develop a Platform Appraisal Framework (PAF) incorporating the various dimensions that characterise business models based on digital platforms. We propose this PAF as a general contribution to the strategy and audit of platform initiatives and more specifically as an assessment framework to provide consistency of thinking in GaaP initiatives. We demonstrate the utility of our PAF by applying it to UK Government platform initiatives over two distinct periods, 1999-2010 and 2010 to the present day, drawing practical conclusions concerning implementation of platforms within the unique and complex environment of the public sector.

Establishing a New Normal — Remaking Public Services for the Digital Age

Whilst government was preoccupied with its repeated efforts to move online, elsewhere we have seen the emergence of some truly digital organizations. These digital organizations use new business models and operating approaches to take advantage of opportunities created by societal and technological changes — such as increasingly available high-speed connectivity, access to huge amounts of real-time information on every aspect of the organization’s operating activities, and the convenience of digital media delivery models. However, a bit like other popular terms such as ‘Cloud’, ‘Open’ and ‘Transformation’, we recognize that ‘Digital’ is at risk of becoming meaningless through overuse, abuse and misunderstanding. We intentionally therefore use digital as an umbrella term for organizational values and practices that capitalize on the opportunities presented by the internet age.

Implementing a Mature Platform

We have briefly already touched upon the essential role of platforms. It’s worth spending a bit more time on this discussion: the concept is an important part of achieving an open architecture. But we need to be precise in our use of the term, since the word ‘platform’ tends to get used (and abused) in different ways in different contexts. Let’s begin with a review of several viewpoints of how different characteristics of platforms can help us understand the breadth of their application.

Establishing the Cultural Framework

We describe in this book an approach to the design of public services that centres on citizens and the front-line employees who provide those services — not about digital as merely existing services delivered on a computer screen. To succeed, it will involve a strong political and leadership commitment to a meaningful untangling of the fractured services, systems, organizations and processes currently in place. This new approach to user-driven service design needs to be underpinned by a much better architecture — a set of digital building blocks that enable us to reforge public services around its users in much more flexible and relevant ways.

Organizational Structures and Digital Transformation

Throughout this book we have defined digital transformation quite broadly, encompassing everything from the cultural and organizational changes required to the related use of new digital technologies in order to enable major improvements — such as enhancing user services, streamlining operations or creating entirely new services. Fundamental to this intentionally broad definition is the realignment of technology and business models to more effectively engage users. Restating our argument, our contention is that this breadth of view is an essential element of any viable digital transformation strategy, and that limiting the concept of digital delivery is both naive and harmful — and likely to condemn governments to repeat the cycle of self-similar rhetoric of ‘better public services’ of the past 20 or so years.

The UK’s Journey, A Lesson for Us All

The apparent inability to exploit technology in a genuinely transformational way in the UK public sector sits particularly uneasily with the UK’s reputation as a pioneer in computing. After all, it was the UK that brought the world figures such as Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee, and innovations from Colossus to the BBC Micro, Sinclair ZX-80, ARM and most recently the Raspberry Pi. Add to this the fact that the British civil service itself was an early pioneer in the use of computers — and something appears to have gone seriously wrong.

API Economy, Ecosystems and Engagement Models

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, technological advances have driven fundamental change in how applications are created and deployed. Technologies such as cloud computing, mobile and the broader realization of smart devices have brought a growing reality to the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) vision for a massively intelligent, instrumented and interconnected world.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Our purpose in this book has been to examine the long-standing gap between political aspiration and the desire to use technology to improve public services, and — most importantly — to identify and recommend ways to close this gap. If the move to ‘digital’ is not merely to become a lazy rebadge of earlier online and e-government initiatives, government and its wider service provider and supplier ecosystem needs to learn and apply the lessons of successful digital organizations rather than merely continue to throw technology at existing services, processes and organizational structures.

Decades of Hope

In the previous chapter we set out the wider context within which the UK hoped to redevelop its public services — and highlighted some of the problems of organizational culture. This chapter reviews some of the modernization and technology-led initiatives of the major political parties.