Systems Technology

Payday loans and the missed opportunity?

Jerry Fishenden – ntouk

Don’t be misled by the title, this isn’t really a post about payday loans. Instead, it explores the fascinating contrast between the approaches HMRC (for tax) and DWP (for benefits) have taken to opening their services to third parties. The basic story is pretty simple: HMRC has a long pre-internet history of working with third party intermediaries which it carried forward into its thinking abuot online services (at one stage their ambition was not directly to offer an online tax return service at all); DWP’s history is much more about direct delivery, and that tradition similarly has been carried forward into the online world. The post makes no pretence to neutrality on the central question of which was the better choice, HMRC is clearly seen to have won that argument hands down.

The post is good on the advantages of the open method and the opportunities that could create (including the ethical payday loans of the title). But it doesn’t address the fairly central question of whether there is a reason for the difference. After all, HMRC’s administration of tax credits, which are a benefit in everything but name, didn’t get the same open treatment as their revenue-raising lines of business. The question of whether a version of HMRC’s trust model for taxpayers and their agents could be translated to the benefits system is one well worth further reflection.

Behavioural science Social and economic change Strategy

Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

Tom Vanderbilt – Nautilus

This post is more a string of examples than a fully constructed argument but is none the worse for that. The thread which holds the examples together is an important one: predicting the future goes wrong because we misunderstand behaviour, not because we misunderstand technology.

A couple of points stand out. One is the mismatch between social change and technology change: the shift of technology into the workplace turned out to be much easier to predict than the movement of women into the workplace. That’s a specific instance of the more general point that we both under- and over-predict the future. A second is that we over-weight the innovative in thinking about the future (and about the past and present); as Charlie Stross describes it, the near-future is comprised of three parts: 90% of it is just like the present, 9% is new but foreseeable developments and innovations, and 1% is utterly bizarre and unexpected.

None of that is a reason for abandoning attempts to think about the future. But the post is a strong – and necessary – reminder of the need to keep in mind the biases and distortions which all too easily skew the attempt.

Data and AI Government and politics

Real-time government

Richard Pope – Platform Land

New writing from Richard Pope is always something to look out for: he has been thinking about and doing the intersection of digital and government more creatively and for longer than most. This post is about the myriad ways in which government is not real time – you can’t track the progress of your benefit claim in anything like the way in which you can track your Amazon delivery. And conversely, at any given moment, Amazon has a very clear picture of who its active customers are and what they are doing, in a way which is rather less true of operators of government services.

He is absolutely right to make the point that many services would be improved if they operated – or at least conveyed information – in real time, and he is just as right that converted (rather than transformed) paper processes and overnight batch updates account for some of that. So it shouldn’t detract from his central point to note that some of his examples are slightly odd ones, which may come from an uncharacteristic confusion between real time and event triggered. There is a notification to potential school leavers of their new national insurance number – but since children’s sixteenth birthdays are highly predictable, that notification doesn’t need to be real time in the sense meant here.  It was very useful to be told that my passport was about to expire – but since they were helpfully giving me three months’ notice, the day and the hour of the message was pretty immaterial.

Of course there are government services which should operate on less leisurely cycles than that, and of course those services should be as fast and as transparent as they reasonably can be. But perhaps the real power of real-time government is from the other side, less in shortening the cycle times of service delivery and much more in shortening the cycle times of service improvement.

Curation Strategy

The Ultimate Guide to Making Smart Decisions

Shane Parrish – Farnam Street

Who could not want not just any guide to making smart decisions, but the ultimate guide? That’s a big promise, but there is some substance to what is delivered. The post itself briskly covers categories of bad decisions before moving on to extensive sets of links to material on thinking in general and decision making in particular. I can’t imagined anyone wanting to work through all of that systematically, but if you need a way of homing in on an aspect of or approach to the subject, this could be a very good place to start.

Data and AI

The Truth About Algorithms

Cathy O’Neil – RSA

This is a brilliant two and a half minute animation, explaining what algorithms are, what they are not, and why they are inherently not neutral.

Strategy

The four types of strategy work you need for the digital revolution

Josef Oehmen – LSE Business Review

The world is probably not crying out for another 2×2 typology of strategy, but nevertheless still they come. This one is interesting less for it cells than for its axes. Degree of uncertainty is fairly standard, but degree of people impact is slightly more surprising. The people in question are those within the organisation being strategised about – is the relevant change marginal to business as usual, are jobs and careers at risk, how much emotional stress can be expected. All those are good questions, of course, and the approach is certainly a good counter to the tendency to see people as machine components in change, and then to be surprised when they turn out not to be. But it risks muddling up two rather different aspects of the people impact of strategy – those who conceive of the strategy and execute its projects on one hand, and those who are affected by it on the other – and raises the bigger question of whether an internal people focus is the best way of understanding strategy in the first place. And the answer to that feels more likely to be situational than universal.

Perhaps though it is the matrix itself which gets slightly in the way of understanding. This is not an argument that organisations choose or discover which cell to be in or by what route to move between them. Instead:

Our impression was that the most successful companies had learned to execute activities in all four quadrants, all the time, and had robust processes for managing the transition of an activity from one quadrant to the other.

Innovation Social and economic change Technology

One Small Step for the Web…

Tim Berners-Lee – Medium

Time Berners-Lee didn’t invent the internet. But he did invent the world wide web, and he does not altogether like what it has become. This post is his manifesto for reversing one of the central power relationships of the web, the giving and taking of data. Instead of giving data to other organisations and having to watch them abuse it, lose it and compromise it, people should keep control of their personal data and allow third parties to see and use it only under their control.

This is not a new idea. Under the names ‘vendor relationship management’ (horrible) and ‘volunteered personal information’ (considerably better but not perfect), the thinking stretches back a decade and more, developing steadily, but without getting much traction. If nothing else, attaching Berners-Lee’s name to it could start to change that, but more substantively it’s clear that there is money and engineering behind this, as well as thoughts and words.

But one of the central problems of this approach from a decade ago also feels just as real today, perhaps more so. As so often with better futures, it’s fairly easy to describe what they should look like, but remarkably difficult to work out how to get there from here. This post briefly acknowledges the problem, but says nothing about how to address it. The web itself is, of course, a brilliant example of how a clear and powerful idea can transform the world without the ghost of an implementation plan, so this may not feel as big a challenge to Berners-Lee as it would to any more normal person. But the web filled what was in many ways a void, while the data driven business models of the modern internet are anything but, and those who have accumulated wealth and power through those models will not go quietly.

It’s nearly ten years since Tim Wu wrote The Master Switch, a meticulous account of how every wave of communications technology has started with dispersed creativity and ended with centralised industrial scale. In 2010, it was possible to treat the question of whether that was also the fate of the internet as still open, though with a tipping point visible ahead. The final sentence of the book sets out the challenge:

If we do not take this moment to secure our sovereignty over the choices our information age has allowed us to enjoy, we cannot reasonably blame its loss on those who are free to enrich themselves by taking it from us in a way history has foretold

A decade on, the path dependence is massively stronger and will need to be recognised if it is to be addressed. technological creativity based on simple views of data ownership is unlikely to be enough by itself.

Strategy

How to be Strategic

Julie Zhuo – Medium

This is a post which earns itself a place here just by its title, though that’s not all that can be said in its favour. It doesn’t start very promisingly, setting up the shakiest of straw men in order to knock them down – does anybody really think that ‘writing long documents’ is a good test of being strategic? – but it improves after the first third, to focus much more usefully on doing three things which actually make for good strategy. As the post acknowledges, the suggestions are very much in the spirit of Richard Rumelt’s good and bad strategy approach. So you can read the book, read Rumelt’s HBR article which is an excellent summary of the book, or read this post. Rumelt’s article is probably the best of the three, but this shorter and simpler post isn’t a bad alternative starting point.

Government and politics Organisational change

Is Estonia the Silicon Valley of digital government?

Rainer Kattel and Ines Mergel – UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

The story of how Estonia became the most e of e-governments is often told, but often pretty superficially and often with an implied – or even explicit – challenge to everybody else to measure themselves and their governments against the standard set by Estonia and despair. This post provides exactly the context which is missing from such accounts: Estonia is certainly the result of visionary leadership, which at least in principle could be found anywhere, but it is also the result of some very particular circumstances which can’t simply be copied or assumed to be universal. There is also a hint of the question behind Solow’s paradox: the real test is not the implementation of technology, but the delivery of better outcomes.

None of that is to knock Estonia’s very real achievements, but yet again to make clear that the test of the effectiveness of technology is not a technological one.