Policy and analysis Service design

Mind the Gender Gap: The Hidden Data Gap in Transport

Nicole Badstuber – London Reconnections

Algorithmic bias doesn’t start with the algorithms, it starts with the bias. That bias comes in two basic forms, one more active and one more passive; one about what is present and one what is absent. Both forms matter and often both come together. If we examine a data set, we might see clear differences between groups but be slower to spot – if we spot it at all – skews caused by the representation of those groups in the data set in the first place. If we survey bus passengers, we may find out important things about the needs of women travelling with small children (and their pushchair and paraphernalia), but we may overlook those who have been discouraged from travelling that way at all. That’s a very simple example, many are more subtle than that – but the essential point is that bias of absence is pervasive.

This post systematically identifies and addresses those biases in the context of transport. It draws heavily on the approach of Caroline Criado Perez’s book, Invisible Women: Exposing the Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, illustrating the general point with pointers to a vast range of data and analysis. It should be compelling reading for anybody involved with transport planning, but it’s included here for two other reasons as well.

The first is that it provides a clear explanation of why it is essential to be intensely careful about even apparently objective and neutral data – the seductive objectivity of computerised algorithmic decision making is too often anything but, and why those problems won’t be solved by better code if the deeper causes discussed here are not addressed.

The second is prompted by a tweet about the post by Peter Hendy. He is the former Transport Commissioner for London and is currently the chairman of Network Rail, and he comments

This is brilliant! It’s required reading at Network Rail already.

That’s good, of course – a senior leader in the industry acknowledging the problem if not quite promising to do anything about it. But it’s also quite alarming: part of the power of this post is that in an important sense there is nothing new about it – it’s a brilliant survey of the landscape, but there isn’t much new about the landscape itself. So Hendy’s tweet leaves us wondering when it becomes acceptable to know something – and when it becomes essential. Or in the oddly appropriately gendered line of Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

 

Organisational change

What we’re learning about how the sector understands “digital”

Cassie Robinson

Hard on the heels of Mike Bracken’s pithy definition of digital transformation comes this longer post, exploring multiple meanings of digital through an extended metaphor of running a café. The two don’t contradict each other, but what this longer account draws out is that what counts as digital improvement is different at different stages of organisational and technical development. It offers nine questions to which digital is the answer, or is at least part of it. The eighth is organisational design and transition:

If I were to design the organisation again today, from scratch, how would I design it, based on the new needs and expectations people have, and how the wider context we are in is also changing?”

That comes pretty close to Mike’s one liner – which is a reminder both that digital change isn’t necessarily transformational and that digital as an unqualified descriptor doesn’t describe anything very precisely, a point further emphasised by Anthony Zacharzewski’s tongue in cheek tweet in response:

Digital is Facebook, right?

Service design

Own It!

Matt Jukes – Notbinary

Hertz wants a new website. They do a deal with Accenture to produce one for $25 million. It all goes horribly wrong. And it ends up in court, which is the only reason anybody else gets to know about it. Nobody is particularly surprised.

That’s the point from which this post starts, rapidly homing in on the question of the expertise Hertz should have had, but didn’t have, on the client side, and the delusion of outsourcing the product owner role to the supplier. That’s not really about the contractual relationship (and so is just as important when outsourcing is not at issue), it’s about the nature of the product owner role, which this post captures beautifully.

One thing which comes out particularly clearly is that treating product ownership as an ‘agile’ role, rather than as an organisational role can contribute to the misjudgement at the heart of the Hertz/Accenture dispute. That confusion can be seen in other contexts too – in the UK government, for example, treating product ownership (or in their language, service ownership) as one of the digital professions risks introducing a version of precisely that skew (which doesn’t, of course, mean that it necessarily does in practice) and so makes it even more important to focus on the core attributes of the role, without their being submerged by the process – important though that is for other reasons.

Service design

Transactions v Interactions

Matt Ballantine – mmitII

Transactions are bounded, manageable and measurable, which makes it makes them appear easy to improve and easy to tell whether some forms of improvement have been achieved. The temptation which results is to focus on improving transactions and, more subtly, on making more things more like transactions. There are some advantages in doing that, which is why it is so often done. But the more things are transactions, discarding the rich messiness of human variability, the less they are interactions.

That’s the starting point for a post which turns out to be about something rather different: how do organisations best support collaboration and effective team working. The connection is that while transactions are readily scalable – that’s almost the point of them – interactions aren’t. So in a world where organisational change tries to make things more transactional in contexts where interaction is vital, working out how to scale and systematise interaction without killing it off in the process becomes particularly important.

Organisational change

Digital transformation is a leadership problem

Mike Bracken – UCL IIPP Blog

‘Digital’ is an increasingly problematic word, ‘digital transformation’ a doubly problematic phrase – in both cases because they are used as much to obscure as to illuminate. One of the difficulties is that ‘digital’ is slapped on as a random qualifier of all sorts of things, to the point where it doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) add much meaning at all. Arguably the underlying problem comes from the fact that ‘digital’ started by being a word which said something about technology, and has become a word which says something about it’s not quite clear what.

Mike Bracken has neatly sidestepped all that with a definition which might actually be useful:

digital transformation is the act of radically changing how your organisation works, so that it can survive and thrive in the internet era

As the post goes on to note, transformation may deliver some technology change; technology change does not deliver transformation. But confusion on that point is understandable, because it is often the case that transformation becomes visible externally precisely as a technology based changed – and there is some faint irony in the fact that GDS and its first flagship product, gov.uk provide an example of how that confusion can be created.

Innovation

Four ideas to build more inclusive innovation systems

Alex Glennie – Nesta

Innovation is often discussed as a very abstract process. People are, of course, involved, but they are slightly impersonal people, components of the innovation machine, not fully rounded agents. That’s a caricature, but not a wholly unfair one, and the caricature makes it less obvious than it might otherwise be that we need to look beyond the roles to the people who play them.

This post addresses that head on, focusing on the four specific ideas flagged in the title. None of them sound dramatic or revolutionary – and that is perhaps the point. They won’t solve the problem, but they are all useful ways of doing things better, and they are all well worth folding into approaches to innovation.

Service design Strategy

A brief introduction to digital government

Eddie Copeland

Digital government is both something and nothing. It is something because there’s no denying that people use the phrase and think they mean something by it. Digital technologies are a distinctive driver of change in modern societies and economies and they make things possible that would be otherwise harder or not feasible at all. Filing cabinet government. carbon paper government and even mainframe government are all very clearly different from digital government. And yet digital government is nothing. Precisely because digital is everything, calling something digital doesn’t add much to understanding, but draws attention to the technology, which is simultaneously vitally important and not the thing which really matters.

But given that the phrase is not going to go away, some clear-headed thinking about what we should understand by it and how we should apply is highly desirable. And that is precisely what this paper offers. It’s a draft open to public comment, so very much still evolving, but it’s already a useful overview. It neatly and successfully avoids the traps of equating digital with technology and digital uniquely with service design, but is slightly less successful in avoiding the suggestion that digital is done by digital teams.

Innovation Strategy

Jumbo

BBC

pilots looking and pointing at a 747Fifty year old documentaries are not the staple of Strategic Reading, but this one is an intriguing insight into thinking about the future – a future which has of course become our past and present. It was made just a few months before the Boeing 747 went into service: the physical plane was very real, the implications for wider service design were very uncertain.

There’s an intriguing clip early on where the head of the Royal Aircraft Establishment observes that over the then half century of passenger flight, planes had doubled in size every ten years. The 747 fits that trend perfectly. Extrapolating to the next century, muses the Director, that would imply planes carrying 10,000 people. And you can hear in his voice both confidence in the trend and doubt about its implications, battling for dominance.

Half a century on, we know that it was right to doubt – the 747 was in some important ways on the inflection point of the growth curve. Planes haven’t got faster or higher or more comfortable since then, and they haven’t, with the brief and apparently aberrant exception of the Airbus 380, got any bigger.

That brings Herb Steins’ great line to mind, ‘If something cannot go on for ever, then it won’t’, and that in turn is an important reminder that in thinking about the future, it is unwise to assume that exponential change is unconstrained and indefinite.

Meanwhile, stay with the documentary to stumble across the world’s only vertical take off passenger plane, developed at the same time as the 747, but never quite attaining the same dominance of the skies.

Government and politics

Radical Visions of Future Government

Tom Symons – Nesta

Nesta wants to reimagine government, and invites anybody to have a go. This post is a call for contributions, looking beyond the immediate constraints of austerity (explicitly) and Brexit (implicitly).

We are interested in views which challenge existing orthodoxies, as well as those which take current trends, technologies or ideas to a new frontier. For the purposes of this collection, we have no fixed view of what future government should look like. We bring an open mind and hope to be challenged and surprised.

The challenge is a good one and it will be interesting to see what ideas emerge. Some, no doubt, will be visionary descriptions of what might be possible, of what ambitions we might set for ourselves. But it would be a good balance if some at least also contained an account of how it might be possible to get there from here.