In a previous post I covered some aspects of why local government could be considered a platform business, or at least could move in that direction. I’m enormously grateful to Stuart Boardman, Carl Haggerty and Tom Graves for supplying me with some challenges and suggestions in terms of developing these ideas. I’ve taken these suggestions on board and I think I’m in a position to outline the “top-level” of what the overall model looks like. I’ve even got some ideas about the next level of iteration down but I might park that for later so I can get the big picture out.
So, to recap: Local Government (in this model) is a hub. It’s purpose is to connect people (and places) with needs to people with funding to people who can provide services to help under the governance and ownership of people with the political mandate to do just that – with the aim of improving the lot of the people and places under its jurisdiction.
Top level of the local goverment platform model
In the traditional view local government has done all of this except for the bottom-left square. And I need to stress again that there’s no reason why it couldn’t continue to do so under this model – but in my opinion that might take away some of the value of the model.
Increasingly, in fact, the four corners of this model are being done by other people anyway. Local Government spends more time chasing grant funding; National, hyperlocal, regional and EU-wide policy reduces the room local politicians have to manoeuvre; service provision is increasingly diverse; and under the localism ethos individuals and community groups might start to commission services for themselves.
With the picture fragmenting, therefore, it is important to ask (as Tom Graves did) about governance and where it fits into the new landscape. Clearly governance is required: is public money being spent wisely? Are political decisions being taken for the right reasons? are services being provided fairly and efficiently? Are people’s (and places’) needs being adequately addressed?
Two things are therefore required to be added to the diagram. The first is data. Transparency of who is doing what, both with our money and with individual cases (subject to privacy and security rules); transparency of decision-making by politicians and officials; transparency of how services are being delivered by service providers. There is a requirement therefore for some quite meaty data warehousing and business intelligence in the centre – but this isn’t the whole story because effective governance needs the power to make changes. So the second thing we need to add are channels of control. I would suggest that these could all pass through the central hub – not sure if that’s a problem or not. We can park that issue for later. Either way, there is a requirement for a set of channels so that the various aspects of the model can govern each other (and I believe it does flow both ways in all cases).
Now lets make the thing functional. In the previous post I suggested the core functions that would need to be supported as
- understand the needs of people and places under its care
- search for funding opportunities that might help with those needs
- curate a set of service providers and help to ensure the markets for each are broadly functional
- provide a set of levers for those with a political mandate to push in order to deliver on political priorities
- provide intelligence to all so that commissioning decisions can be undertaken intelligently.
So let’s add that to the governance idea and break this down a bit.
Political levers
Politicians need 3 kinds of lever: Strategic (how do we balance our spending portfolio for maximum return), Managerial (how can we influence the direction and performance of service delivery), and Individual (how can we advocate for particular cases in the system). (Arguably, politicians can’t and maybe shouldn’t do the last thing, but they do. That’s what surgeries are for.)
The strategic levers are satisfied by the commissioning centre: business intelligence to inform decision-making and capabilities to actually commission the work required. At a managerial level, though, once we’ve split the provision from the commissioner then it is logically difficult to provide this lever of control aside from normal service level or performance management. A sticking-plaster solution might be to appoint politicians to NED level (or stronger) on the boards of the service provider organisations, but the actual solution will need to vary according to the kind of organisation we are talking about. On an individual level, it might be even more controversial (or even illegal) to allow a politician access to a service providers’ systems in order to influence the provision of an individual case, but either directly or via a proxy this level of access and influence will be required.
So although we can bake the first lever into this model, the other two both require standard contract terms to be instituted that allow for the necessary political “interference”. This might appear to be far from ideal, but if your company is delivering public services with public money then you might as well get used to it, in my opinion!
Citizen’s levers
In the final analysis, it is governance of the system by citizens that is most fundamental. Any individual citizen, however, is not all-powerful: democracy requires that we govern as an aggregate of people rather than getting our own way all the time. Nevertheless, we want to hold our politicians to account and the key demand here is transparency: let citizens have access to the same quality of intelligence that politicians use when making commissioning decisions so they can make up their own minds. In fact, lets just reuse the same set of systems to let them do it.
Secondly is the monitoring of service providers and their performance. In some cases citizens are co-opted onto management boards of public enterprises and if we want to do that then fine – but for the purposes of this system I think this is about giving citizens the same performance management data as politicians get. Again, lets just give them the same data and the same systems.
Third is the ability to submit cases (complaints, requests for services, feedback etc). These might end up anywhere and I think the job of the central “hub” is perhaps not to manage the cases individually but simply to route them to wherever they are best resolved in a fast and transparent fashion. I mentioned in a previous post that I don’t think we need CRM in local government: what I mean by that is that if everything else in this model works smoothly it won’t be needed.
The final lever for citizens is to allow them to commission services themselves. If an individual wants to make a difference in their community then they should be able to get help to improve their idea, apply for funding, and commission a service provider to do it. We are already seeing this sort of thing happening with personal budgets for social care.
Funders levers
Traditionally local government has raised its money through a central government grant, the Council Tax and business rates. However, other sources of funding exist and have been used for quite some time – EU grants, central government grants, the lottery, PFI initiatives, even private funding all play a part. So what do funding bodies need for their money?
Usually this is about two things: delivery and outcomes. If a funder funds a project it wants to see it completed and it wants to see the benefits of that project realised. Our hub must be able to track what money went where, how the project it supports is progressing, and what benefits are realised – otherwise we probably won’t be getting the same money the next time round. However, these processes are almost exclusively between commissioners and funders and the relationship between these two sets of people rather than some monolithic project management structure: commissioners (and there are going to be many of them, see above) have the responsibility to track their own projects. Since the Council itself is going to be doing a lot of that, it will need a system: it might even make that available to other commissioners, but the particular bit of the system that tracks individual projects and benefits is itself a service that can be commissioned. The “hub” merely needs to facilitate relationships.
Service provider levers
Of course, outsourcers have feelings too. It’s perhaps not as easy as it looks to have central or local government as your primary customer, even if it can (allegedly) be lucrative if you do it right. Service providers need the freedom to innovate their service delivery – wthin reason – but they also need support and standards and they need their feedback to be influential and to commission supporting services. So the first lever is that service providers are commissioners too and so they need the same access to intelligence, joined-up service delivery and channels that citizens, politicians, funders and council commissioners get.
Service providers that aren’t economically viable might be allowed to go to the wall in some cases, but in others they need to be constructively helped. This might mean the formation of local or national groupings of providers to lobby or to create shared platforms that provide core and common services to them. The commissioning hub must allow a seamless flow of clients, funding, and information to, from and between service providers and this must be based around recognised standards in order to work.
What’s in the box then?
These ideas lead to the central hub containing the following components:
- expertise in the funding landscape, performance management, public engagement, (big P) Politics and data
- a business intelligence toolset and competencies to crunch all the available data
- a web channel that ties services together (in a service-oriented architecture style of thing)
- document/records management that provides an archive of policy, actions and decisions
- Master data management (ensures we don’t double-count people or places in our calculations, and ensures joined up case management)
- Data warehousing (performance management, demographic, needs data on the full range of services)
- middleware to join processes up.
Those components are lifted from the previous post, but this post is probably long enough already so I’ll stop there for now. The internal architecture of the hub is probably next, but this is an evolving picture in my brain so please let me know what you think in the comments below.
Martin Howitt's blog 
This is really interesting Martin and I like the distributed model. I think one of the things that needs to be considered in this kind of approach is where power and leadership is going to sit – and how it will flow through the system. Power in networks is very fluid – but some of the power in this system is implicit rather than explicit. I think this hub is a very practical and is the right approach – I guess I my question is where do you think the overarching strategic planning process sits with respect to this and what is the role of the hub in this process? I agree with your analysis of the levers – but not sure how you plan to reconcile competing use of these levers!
Thanks for the thought provoking post
C.
Hi Catherine
thanks for the important comment.
This is only a guess as I’m thinking out loud in many ways, but I assume that strategy is an emergent property of the overall system. Strategy looks different from the perspective of everyone involved and no-one has the full picture. There can be no overarching strategic planning, only strategic choices made by the different actors. We don’t live in a planned economy. Funding bodies want to see outcomes consistent with their plans and the platform supports them by providing intelligence about where their funding will be most needed. Politicians have the mandate to improve outcomes and the platform empowers them by both showing them the effect of their decisions and by giving them the levers to make the changes they are mandated to make.
That’s not to say that there can’t exist a technocratic class of council workers who can interpret, guide, support, influence, cajole, lobby and lead their way to better outcomes and plan long-term for those outcomes. But right now our plans hardly ever come to fruition because stuff happens. I hope that this platform will shine a light on the “stuff” and help us manage it better.
I really value this sort of conversation so thanks again 🙂
Martin
You are welcome!! I think the problem with strategy as an emergent quality is that the process will lack focus and leadership – perhaps the elephant in the room here is the weakness of the democratic process when you look at it as part of a complex networked system. Mmmm…..might need to consider that a bit….
C
Hi Martin,
Following on from brief twitter exchange, what I was getting at was the need to put anyone or organisation that comes into contact with the hub/circuit board/ – the ‘thing’ we’re talking about here – at the centre of their own personal ‘thing’.
Your model is centralised – at it’s heart, it sees Local Government as being at the centre of the community and the connections/data/commissioning/democracy stuff flows through the Local Government thing.
Well OK and I get where you’re coming from but centralised models tend to be quite inflexible, pretty impersonal and not really suited to times of rapid change (imagine using a centralised model to organise or herd cats). More down to earth: imagine being a person living between two hubs – where do they go first ? You’d get into all sorts of problems of how to join hubs together etc. etc. etc.
The other approach is a distributed model – which is how flocks of birds or nightmares of cats work in the real world. So instead of thinking about creating a hub, thing about creating a ‘cloud’ that has no centre (or rather, millions of centre) and which enables a community to ‘flock’ (nowhere near as naughty as it sounds).
This isn’t intellectual bullshit – there are lots of real world examples of how this works (the internet itself, for one, then Twitter, Facebook and on.). But hi-jacking your blog to preach about all that stuff feels a bit arrogant. So I’ll leave it there. And I do like cats.
Ben
Hi Ben
massive thanks for the important comment.
I’ve got to say that firstly I totally understand your concern. I look at this a lot and wonder if POSIWID thinking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does) hasn’t taken over just a bit and what I am really designing here is a justification for local government continuing. Of course the whole reason for any of this is the citizen (in a place) and *services* must be designed around them. But….
…this isn’t one of those services in my opinion. It aims to be a framework that all stakeholders can use to commission other services from and for service providers to use to deliver them. In the situation of two hubs being next to each other, that shouldn’t be a problem as long as we use standards to enable them to talk to each other – or aggregate them. I’ve got ideas on that and I’ll bring them to the table in another post perhaps.
I actually modelled it partly on Amazon marketplace believe it or not 🙂 In that analogy, of course there is a user-centric design that is front and centre. But there is also a load of stuff under the hood that connects buyers to sellers and their preferences. This post is about the bit under the hood.
Your statement: “at it’s heart, it sees Local Government as being at the centre of the community and the connections/data/commissioning/democracy stuff flows through the Local Government thing” is spot on. I do see local government as being at the heart of the governance of a place/region and I don’t see any other public bodies being able to perform that role. If local government doesn’t do this, then I’d go as far as suggesting that we scrap it and replace it with something that does.
I hope this makes sense and doesn’t sound too unhinged 🙂 It’s as important to be understood as it is to be right sometimes!
Martin
Excellent post Martin,
I have some questions as usual 🙂
The “inside the hub” components seem very formal and organisational and whilst these would ensure the key requirements of accountability and transparency are demonstrated – how much of this do you really see being used by communities directly (or as you say – people and places) – is this something you see pushed out via the web channel?
From a locality point of view, we are only one tier of government and part of a complex collection of public bodies (health, police, fire etc), so how would a community access the relevant data and intelligence for other parts or are you saying that the hub itself is a complete “re-imagining” of what local government should be doing and in fact facilitates all of the above on behalf of the partner organisations?
I guess what i’m thinking is that the local government hub is only one component in a much wider set of hubs that communities need access to…so what facilitates that? I already have some ideas here (as you’d expect) about what might be part of the wider solution in terms of a tool that can help make sense of some of this.
Lastly, and in your opinion, how much of the hub is automated and how much requires local authority staff to make it work?
I need to think more, but please keep posting on this subject as it needs to be said and the questions you raise need to be discussed.
Thanks as ever Carl, the feedback keeps me going 🙂
I see the whole thing pushed out via the web channel, for everyone. In my deranged imagination everyone gets the same stuff: the Chief Exec, the politicians, you and I, citizens, community groups, the EU, social enterprises, NHS bodies, the whole lot.
Yes, we are just one piece of the jigsaw. What I am advocating is that at a locality level we are the glue that connects all public services together. Who else has the mandate to do that?
Other hubs? No problem. Web services connect them together although there’s some thinking that I still have to do on that score and we’ll probably need to crawl before we stand up and hail a taxi.
I think the core platform can be built quite quickly, but data cleansing, development of BI queries, a whole load of competencies around that plus the service orientation in the web channel…. I wouldn’t say it was going to be “automated” for quite some time, but it would head in that direction. We are nowhere right now as far as I can tell.
Martin
I ended up here following the excellent blog post on this subject by @carlhaggerty http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/03/07/does-local-government-need-a-local-government-digital-service/ . Firstly, I have to agree with much of what you say Martin but, like Ben I’m a. little nervous of models that put Local Government at the centre. Having said that, I can see why it’s there and understand full well the implications for governance and risk management.
I suspect that my nerves come from a declining faith in the relationship between the democratic process and the people who are the biggest users of the services for which politicians have oversight. I was struck recently by a piece by Mary Evans, Centennial Professor at the LSE, “We are not ‘all in this together’ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2012/02/14/uk-politics-disconnect/ which talks about a disconnect between the biggest users of public services and political oversight. By biggest users I suppose I mean biggest cost users; those who tend not to access services through the web or call centres but those who rely on services to address the consequences of a chaotic life style.
I think you are spot on with your requirement for data to support transparency and to support decision making. A particular favourite of mine is IFTF’s “The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion http://www.iftf.org/inclusion and this is underpinned by a “pro-poor” (hate the phrase) view of how data could be used to empower the most disempowered. This brings us to the idea of citizen levers and how they might work: I have yet to be convinced that the answer lies in Social Media – there may be wisdom in the crowd but I don’t see it making a difference at ground zero, not yet. I am interested in where Co-production of services will take us; I’m fascinated by the idea of personal wealth and by starting with what people have and looking at how their life can be made better will lead to better outcomes. While Localism may appear to offer a lever a quick read of the small print will show that it doesn’t give much away and to some extent that explains why your square in the corner is still empty. I am finding hugely diverse approaches to personalized and co-produced services but would recommend a close look at the Nesta project with Mental health Support Services in Stockport (no web link yet I’m afraid). Contrast this with Local Authorities who are simply keeping the services the same and re-directing the money via the individual – it ticks a box but it doesn’t change anything.
There is one final piece which is implied but missing and that is the role of the Third Sector. I guess it’s included in your Service Providers box but I believe it’s worth unpicking. There are issues of capacity, funding and philosophy to be explored here. Some Local Authorities are simply re-branding whole departments as CICs and moving people across new contracts others are re-shaping commissioning rules. There are serious questions to be asked about the ability of the sector and yet here is an important link with People in Places with needs, services and funding.
In 2009 (is it really that long ago?) I did a piece of work for Birmingham the results of which can be found here: http://www.penval.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Digital-Birmingham-Background-to-a-Digital-Inclusion-Network.pdf and I attempted a model which I think encompasses some of the points above though, due to its date of creation, it’s a bit dated now (see p 27). The point I was trying to make at the time is that a digital inclusion network requires a wider stakeholder base than you think, until you think about it. As we move into the world of Localism (however limited), personalisation, co-production, digital by default and assisted digital we need the kind of discussion generated by your blog post to really drill down into the issues and create the environment for real change.
Wow, thanks for all this Paul – some really crucial stuff here to chew on.
Firstly my general position is: I originally came at this as an IT person trying to work out how we were going to put systems in that supported a commissioning approach that might help us avoid some of the worst consequences of outsourcing (no names, no pack drill, but some aren’t a million miles away from where I’m sitting right now). I think there are many problems that this model will not solve and can’t (probably) be solved by methodology or “structure” alone.
The democratic deficit is a good example of this in my view – we need engaged citizens. I can’t deliver that. IT systems can – at best, and with a following wind – deliver informed citizens where those citizens are already engaged. The Mary Evans link you posted is spot on, but as someone with a technical background I veer towards evidence-based everything and am constantly disappointed by the lack of an analytical approach to policy and strategy: my solution (more data! better analysis!) is worryingly stereotypical 🙂
That #civiclabs stuff looks really interesting, thanks for the link. I’ve no particular expertise in service design or co-production although those things seem to hold some promise, but again I’ve focused entirely on an infrastructure that might enable some of those things by giving every player broadly the same tools: I merely expect local government to have the capability to use them better than others (possibly a vain hope) and that in the right hands the tools can enable faster and more effective innovations.
I realise there are limitations in the Localism bill, I must remember to always use the lower case version to indicate the philosophy rather than the reality 🙂
And your final paragraph – I agree – we need more, better, deeper conversations about all of this. In a way I suppose this model is partly my reaction and an attempt to frame and provide me with structure for the conversations that I hear bits of.
Martin
Thanks all for the challenging comments so far – lots to think about so we can take it to the next level. I hope to blog again on the same topic very soon and keep on developing it as far as I can and your comments are pushing me. Which is good 🙂
M
Reblogged this on Mark Thompson and commented:
Local Government Platform: Now this is more like it!
Hi Martin
Would really like to chat about this. What’s the best way to get in touch?
Mark Thompson – mpat2@cam.ac.uk
Recent examples of where I’m coming from:
http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Open-standards-are-about-the-business-model-not-the-technology
http://www.guardian.co.uk/public-leaders-network/2012/dec/20/government-it-systems-cabinet-office
thanks Mark, I’d be delighted. Will drop you an email.
It’s great, but it culminates when you add the missing ingredient: infrastructure on the side of the individual. When you add connection to individuals equipped with a personal data store such as Mydex to what you suggest here then the individual can express circumstances and preferences, join up services, clean up the data and drive commissioning (jointly or severally) in a privacy-friendly, EUDPD-conformant way.
On top of a competent local-authority IT setup (including open data and MDM) it’s the game-changer.
Thanks William.
I agree. I posted this last year and never really took it much further, but of course the capabilities in the hands of individuals are going to constantly change and I hope that includes improving levels of control over personal data.
Hi Martin – fascinating blog and discussion.
The really radical bit to pick up from curiouscatherine will be how your type of model can change and re-invigorate democracy itself – that becomes more important than “strategy” by technocrats (they they might have a role, I agree). For that we all collectively need to be able to exercise some of the levers that you ascribe only to politicians – but it is important that the system enables the collective goals and goods to shine through over individualistic needs.
Anyway, I got here through the Intellect route and have just voted to get you on the Main Board. I am the elected Social Care Lead on the H&SC Council – let’s get in touch – see http://www.richardpantlin.com – I’m beginning to work closely with ADASS Info Mgt Group, SOCITM and DH.