Month: August 2019

Streamlining or Transforming

~ asdmather ~ Leave a comment

In early 2001 I presented to an audience of civil servants from the Inland Revenue, 300 or so grade 5s up to the Permanent Secretary (grade 5 is old money for what is now SCS 1).

The idea was to walk them through the changes that the Internet was bringing – and, particularly, what it would mean for the way they engaged with taxpayers (oh the debates that were had about customer versus taxpayer versus citizen versus many other words).

At the time Self Assessment was the only online transaction available from the IR’s website – we’d put that online in April 2000, though the application itself came on a floppy disc (we moved it to a truly online app in time for the 2001 tax year). Those were, indeed, the days.

I’ve pulled a couple of the slides out

Cell-phones as the next generation access tool? Who would have thought.

The conversation I wanted to have, mainly, was around the change in the customer experience that would come about from moving online – a shorter, more interactive, more reponsive process that had the power to change everything about the way tax was collected (timing, amounts, compliance etc)

Today, many would call this “digital transformation.” But, it’s not. It’s streamlining the process – getting rid of redundant steps, using technology to replace paper, speeding the turnaround time, providing feedback etc. The customer experience is certainly transformed; now a taxpayer / citizen / user / customer can reliably send their tax return in 1 minute before the annual deadline and know that it has been received safely. The numbers of people who send their tax returns in on Christmas Day was surpisingly high, from day one of putting this service online. Much of what we call “digital transformation” is like this – getting a paper process online and making it easier to use isn’t transformational at the macro level, although it can be in terms of customer experience. Do it when you want to, not when we want you to.

There are constraints of course – the Internet was new for many, but expectations were quickly moving much higher:

Looking at that all these years later, I wonder if I got hierarchy and capability the wrong way round, or whether I was making a different point. I think the former.

But we had a plan

True transformation needs a fundamental re-engineering. It changes not the process but the outcomes, removes constraints and affects people, the economy and the government fundamentally.

There are precious few examples of Real Transformation (TM), except where people throw the T word around to gloss over a lack of innovation, or lack of new thinking and just want to pretend that the planned changes are a big deal.

Delivery and Performance Down Under

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An interesting read, via @paulshetler, today, covers the setting up of a new piece of governance in New South Wales. the “Delivery and Performance Committee” (DaPCo).

The best quote from the release, by Victor Dominello, NSW Customer Minister, is easily:

This reform – is cultural and it is whole-of-government – it is the hard stuff, the messy and complex innards of government that nobody likes to talk about. It’s not shiny but it’s one of the biggest enablers for digital transformation and service delivery – which is why we’re committed to getting it right.

The committee plans to ask the hard questions on delivery, drive adoption of a Netflix-like approach (“test and tweak services in short delivery cycles based on customer feedback”), improve the “tell us once” functionality.

Importantly, they say that the model will be replicated at the Federal level, with “Services Australia”, previously known was the Department of Human Service.

and then this

With our counterparts in the federal government, we’re making big advances in designing services around complex life events – we’ve already launched a prototype to help people through the end–to–end journey at pivotal moments in life, like what to do when somebody dies, so you don’t have to go to 10 different government departments

For a moment I thought it was 2001 all again and UKonline had moved down under.

It all sounds good. Just a couple of thoughts

  1. A committee? That sounds like a challenging way to manage an agile, fleet of foot, iterative delivery cycle based on customer feedback
  2. What’s the first project or policy it will start with and is it policy focused, technology focused, solution focused, delivery methodology focused or all of the above?
  3. What’s the lever by which the work gets done once the committee pronounces? How will they tell everyone what the new guidance is so that people don’t waste time preparing the wrong solution that the committee then reject?

Interesting stuff. Would be good to compare before and after, if it can be asssessed transparently. Lots of effort has gone into making a similar switch in the UK, of course, but the translation into real improvement for transactional services is hard to see except in a few really strong cases.

Digital Transformation – The Roads

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If we were setting out to digitally transform transactions that are road (and road travel) related, we would have a few things to look at, including:

  • Vehicle Excise Duty (aka car tax, road tax, vehicle tax) – that is the “tax disc” of old, paid every 6 or 12 months through a transaction direct with DVLA
  • Fuel tax (paid at the pump when filling your tank with petrol or diesel)
  • Congestion charging (essentially pay as you go but with an option to set up a direct debit for easier payment, mostly to avoid fines when you forget to pay)

The money raised from these charges doesn’t necessarily go to managing, repairing or building roads. It’s not, as they say in government, hypothecated, or ring-fenced. The money goes into the Treasury’s general funding and is allocated according to policy and/or departmental bids. They are, then, focused on revenue raising. You have a car, you have to pay tax to keep it on the road and more tax the further you go and even more if you go into some specific areas.

There are ways to reduce how much you pay as a driver – having a fuel efficient car (reducing VED and fuel tax), driving an Electric Vehicle (taking VED and fuel tax to zero, at the cost of an increased electricity bill), driving fewer miles (reducing fuel tax), don’t drive in marked congestion zones etc. Obviously, those without cars pay none of the above charges, but may incur some of them indirectly.

DVLA would argue that they have transformed Vehicle Excise Duty. Not long ago you would show up at a Post Office with your MOT and insurance and get a paper tax disc, for display in the window of your car. Now the transaction is entirely online and the paper tax disc is virtual. This has been a long journey – see this piece I wrote in 2006.

But, in many ways, the cow path has been paved. It’s beautifully done, for sure, and DVLA’s work is amongst the very best that UK government has managed in the 20 years of working to move transactions online. The customer experience has, without doubt, been transformed – from a visit to the Post Office to point and click and done. The what and why remain the same, the how has changed (dramaticlaly).

Transformation is, though, about fundamentally re-engineering the process, the business model, the people and the systems. It requires looking at the what, the how and, particularly, the why.

With EVs expected to become more prevalent over the next few years, these taxes will all fall to zero without a change in policy. Some taxes – fuel duty – will be impossible to collect in the same way as they are now. And that means there’s a great chance to look at they why of each of them, and decide on what a better outcome (or set of outcomes might be).

We might for instance decide that the combination of policies we put in place should:

  • Work to reduce congestion at peak hours across the board (not just within certain geographic areas) … and so driving between certain hours attracts a higher “fuel tax” on a per mile basis. We’re no longer collecting that tax from the pump, but direct from your mileage, as reported by the car (or your phone, or sensors/cameras in or alongisde the roads etc)
  • Encourage people to use certain roads, balancing usage across all grades of roads, moving people off busy roads onto quieter roads, or away from residential areas during school hours … and so the type of road you are on will affect how much you pay
  • Charge you more based on what the list price of the car you are driving is … proxying VED but linking it directly to the original purchase price of the car. If you want to drive an electric Veyron, that’s fine, but you’re going to pay for the privilege
  • Make the question of car versus bus versus train versus plane a calculation for every journey, with the aim of persuading people to take the greenest option every time
  • Drive (ahem) a shift in road usage so that deliveries are consolidated with a mix of pull from customers (looking for greener and cheaper solutions) and push from delivery companies (who are subject to rising costs for peak road usage, inefficient vehicles etc)

Direct taxation (VED) and indirect taxation (fuel duty) could blend into a model that could, indeed, be varied so as to raise enough money each year, or over a period of 5 years, to build and maintain the road network. The types of tax and the methods of collecting it would be transformed, and digital technology would be required at every point of the process to manage who was paying, what are they paying and how are they paying.

Various people working in e-government predicted the demise of the tax disc many years ago, certainly as long ago as 2003 and likely before. The tax disc is, and was, just a way to raise money tied to something you had (a car), just as stamp duty is a way to raise money tied to something you are transacting (buying a house, or a share). We have evolved the uses of each tax, contrived to find ways to raise more money for each, and, at every stage, taken the tax further and further away from its original point.

Every so often we get an opportunity to rethink these things at a fundamental level. We get a chance to think what a true transformation could achieve … to question the why and the way… and then figure out “how” we might pull it off. And in thinking about that “how” we should be looking for the simplest solution – not the one that requires a nationwide infrastructure build that will be costly, expensive, prone to failure and take years, but one that makes best use of what we already have – what’s on the roads, what’s in the cars and what’s in the pocket of drivers.

The trick, of course, will be figuring out how to do this whilst recognising that some of the approaches and decisions will be wrong and will need to unwind. Some of the charges set will prove to be a peverse incentive, some of the routing will be wrong, some things will be gamed or outright defrauded. Transformation isn’t a before versus after big bang thing. It’s just as DVLA showed it to be – you keep working at it and every so often you look up and go “wow.”

Transformation. For Real.

~ asdmather ~ Leave a comment
Every year around the end of April, fallow deer bucks lose their antlers. Yep, they just fall off. The buck on the left has just lost his, the one on the right started the new growth just a few days earlier.
Overnight they go from fearsome and majestic beasts with beautiful antlers … to somewhat surprised antler-less boys.

Just What Is Digital Transformation?

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Yesterday, building on a Tweet from @hondanhon I posed the question

“What is a successful digital transformation project, from the last decade, that everyone would recognise?”

I started the list off with Netflix. This company has achieved four impressive feats:

  1. Disrupted the video rental market with its postal model, no late fees, large back catalogue etc … putting Blockbuster out of business (there are a couple of good books that tell the whole story, and an even better podcast from Wondery, in its Business Wars series)
  2. Transformed its own business model into a fully digital model by moving, first, to an online streaming business, letting customers watch major films and TV shows (though not those currently showing)
  3. Made a further leap to become a content company – like Warner, Sony and others – producing and commissioning its own shows and films, not just in English but in several languages.
  4. In doing (3), Netflix disrupted TV (binge watching entire series) as well as bringing “watch what you want when you want” to their customers

This has all cost a lot of money – their content budget this year is rumoured to be some $15bn – and it’s not clear if there’s a path to profitability, but all of it together makes for an astonishing transformation

But if you look for other examples of transformation and, particularly, digital transformation, it’s hard to find them.

That, for me, is because it feels like we’ve linked two words that are largely nothing to do with each other.

Digital is about putting your previously offline services online and improving them to fit better into the online world. Transformation is about fundamentally re-engineering your business model (in a positive way).

In 2001, HMRC put Self Assessment online. It wasn’t called digital then, but e-government. It was clearly a move to digital services. From that year on, you could fill in your Self Assessment form online, at 2 minutes to midnight on deadline day, 31st January, and be confident that your tax return was accepted.

Later, PAYE forms could be sent, from pretty much any accounting software, via the Government Gateway, achieving the same result. Over a few years, paper returns were largely wiped out.

But was this transformational? The forms were the same – they weren’t on paper, but they were still forms, asking the same questions in the same way. You didn’t need to print PAYE forms from your Sage package (or buy their hugely marked up paper), but the data you needed was the same. Perhaps the biggest benefit was that various applications – whether HMRC’s own or those from third parties – validated the data you were entering and ensured that it would be accepted (it didn’t mean it was right of course – there were, and are, still plenty of ways to get the data acceptably wrong).

More recently, an example might be that of DVLA with their online tax disc transaction.

That’s clearly a digital service – no longer did you have to go to the Post Office with your MOT and Insurance documents to pick up a new paper disc. If I recall correctly it was a two stage change, with the more recent work getting rid of the tax disc.

But is it transformational? Those who don’t buy a tax disc are now slightly more difficult to catch because a passing Police Officer can’t look in the window and check the date. And, of course, you still need a “tax disc” albeit now it arrives via email.

Perhaps transformation would have meant that the tax disc was purchased along with your insurance, or was given to you when you passed your MOT, collapsing some transactions, moving the point of collection to industry and changing the relationship with the customer so that it was no longer with government,

Very recently the Home Office launched an app that would allow an Android phone user to scan their passport when applying for, say, settled status. In a couple of weeks that same capability should be available for the other 50% of the population – the iPhone users – as the new release of iOS will allow the Home Office access to the NFC chip.

This is definitely game changing – some 85% of transactions (and there have been roughly a million so far) have apparently come through the online channel – and when iOS launches, this should jump massively (and help cover the 2m who haven’t yet used it but who may need to). Is this transformation? It could be, but then, of course, it’s a new burden that we are imposing on people and we are giving them a faster way to remove that burden, we are not removing the burden altogether,

Quick …

~ asdmather ~ Leave a comment

Name a successful public sector IT-led project, completed over the last 20 years, that the public will have heard of.

This was prompted by the tweet below, from Dan Hon. I narrowed the time frame a little from “any ever” to “20 years.”

My contribution was Oyster Cards – a mix of technology and physical infrastructure that is a roaring success. Others suggested congestion charging, Human Genome, healthcare.gov (the second iteration), job centre plus and the UK’s online car tax.

All successful now, but anyone anywhere near any of them will know just how difficult and how near disaster some of these projects were at various times in their life.

No project of consequence sails smoothly from the top left of the project plan to the bottom right. The trick is anticipating as many of the things that will go wrong as possible, and having a plan to deal with them. And then having a team around you who can deal with all of the things that you didn’t think of – and are capable enough to run around, hair on fire, to solve the emergencies, whilst still keeping the whole thing roughly on plan.

The list of such projects isn’t long though. Have we forgotten the other successful ones? Do our brains – or my brain particularly perhaps – think about the ones that have gone catastrophically wrong and forget the ones that didn’t grab headlines?

Now, what if the question I asked was … Quick … name a successful digital transformation project in the last decade that everyone would know about.

I’ll start you off. Netflix.

I’ll wait.

Trouble Down Under

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It turns out that not only can the Aussies lose a game of cricket from a seemingly invincible position, but they also share the same struggle as everyone else. That is, delivering projects is hard. Sometimes too hard.

The folks in Sydney have been busy building a light railway, with the aim of making travelling around the city easier and, doubtless, getting some cars off the road. This is no HS2, the plan is for it to run only 12km. Maybe it’s hs0.5.

The budget was a seemingly manageable AUS$1.6bn, but, a little like Crossrail, there’s now a delay of at least a year, and costs have gone up AUS$1bn. That’s a big increase – a far bigger increase than the equivalent in Crossrail (1 year’s delay, £1bn extra cost, so far at least, but that’s roughly 10% of budget; this is more than 60%). Something went wrong with the forecasts.

As I wrote in a previous post, borrowing a quote from someone else:

“Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in”

Projects are hard. Big projects are harder. Big construction projects may be harder still. Australia is planning to spend some AUS$300bn on infrastructure (from 2015 onwards). Let’s hope that’s really AUS$100bn with AUS$200bn of optimism bias thrown in. Some reports suggest that the investment will be AUS$75bn a year for the next 10 years. Still other reports sugegst the spend it AUS$100bn over 10 years, on roads and rail. Numbers are hard too, it turns out.

When costs go up, suppliers may be blamed. That may make them bid more for upcoming projects, to cover their risk. Or bid less, hoping to beat out competition, and hope for the best – Carillion shows that’s not a good plan of course.

With a large budget for infrastructure, Australia may find itself its own worse competition – there may not be enough capability to delive. Bidders could concentrate on the projects that they think they can make the most money on, leaving other projects alone. They may focus on lower risk projects, meaning the flagships stall. Other companies with less capability may bid, and the failure rate may go up.

Managing a large portfolio, knowing when to press the accelerator, when to hit the brakes, when to cut funding, when to provide more funding, when to recognise a risk is actually an issue and ensuring there’s enough capabilty and resource available, is a challenge every company and sector experiences.

The ambition is eye catching, but the practicailities will catch up with that ambition … delivery will be delayed, costs will be higher and some projects will fail dramatically. The hole, though, will be deep enough that it will keep getting filled.

TTL … TTD

~ asdmather ~ Leave a comment

Long ago, when first building U.K. governments online / digital capabilities, our team learned, early on, about TTL. Time To Live. The lower that value the faster you could see the effect of changes you made to eg domain names.

Projects run on TTD. Time To Decide. The faster decisions get made, the faster you can see their effect and decide if you made the right decision or need to change your mind.

Project boards operate on a monthly cycle. In the time between meetings, a typical project has made hundreds of decisions that the board never even saw. Yet some decisions get held up, waiting for the board. There is options analysis, risk assessment, rework. Another board meeting. The TTD gets longer than the project.

It doesn’t work.

The Project Management Myth

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We hire people to run projects. We call them project managers (PMs). We give them Project Management Offices (PMOs) to support them. Sometimes we get grander and hire Programme Directors, and we give them Programme Offices.

Together, these hardworking people produce project and/or programme plans. Beautifully drawn diagrams that show an even flow from task to task. From project inception all the way to go live and lessons learned. Tasks linked by lines that all move forward showing steady progress to the goal.

You think you’re following along and realise he’s lured you into a dead end. You backtrack and think you’ve got it, only to find he’s hoodwinked you again. You loop the loop, trying to figure out where it’s heading.

But we know projects aren’t like that. Any real project is more like a well-written crime novel. Something by Jo Nesbo.

The only thing that flows steadily onward in a project is time. Everything else goes forwards, backwards and, very often, sideways. Tasks that you thought were done turn out not to be. Tasks that you didn’t need yesterday become critical today. Next week’s tasks are already redundant, replaced by new ones that you’ve just made up.

Project boards manage on a monthly basis. They review risks that will never happen. The real risks are the ones being dealt with every day – on a scale of “shit we need to get this done else we’re going to slip” to “if we don’t get this done by the end of the week we are toast” and plenty of more emotional phrases in between.

The real skill of a project manager is how they react to those crises. How they handle ten at once. Or a hundred. How they cope with significant uncertainty – paddling furiously under the surface whilst remaining calm, like a swan, on the surface. And how they know when to ask for help because, if they don’t, they will sink.

It’s a rare skill. It’s one learned in the doing. Not on a course, or from a book (although “the mythical man month is totally worth reading). You learn it when you get things wrong and have to recover. You learn it by taking risks, some of which pay off. You may be Prince 2 certified or a scrum master or an agile practitioner … but can you actually make it happen when it counts?

Most of what you do the project board will never see. Their eyes are on the rear view mirror – “what progress did we make last month?” Your eyes are on tomorrow and what could go wrong and likely will go wrong. Your eyes are around the next corner looking for trouble.

Moving to WordPress

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Since the very end of 2001, this blog has been hosted on Blogger (originally developed by Pyra Labs, acquired by Google, in the pre “don’t be evil” days, in 2003).  In that time I’ve written some 1,199 posts.  Not all of those are intact here – various migrations, changes in publishing tools, fiddling around with templates and other errors mean that some have lost their images, line breaks are missing and doubtless some are entirely AWOL.

For a while I’ve wanted to move from Google.  I want more functionality – particularly a reliable way to compose and edit on mobile devices – and I also want out of Google (I’ve been a committed duckduckgo user for at least 7 years and maybe longer – I have no way to check as far as I can find).  I also feel strongly that if I’m using a tool that someone, or a company, has put time and effort into, then I should have a direct relationship with that company and should pay for what I use.  Wordpress is clearly the market leader and I wish I’d made the move years ago.

That said, domain names are being moved, posts are being exported and imported and CNAMEs are being repointed … and pointy things always break in such a move.  I’m on a streak of posting daily and hoping not to break it, but there may be a lull and then a catchup as posts go missing and then appear in the right place.

In the meantime, the site is currently hosted at digitalstorm.blog