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.