Puffbox

Government IT has a new boss: John Suffolk, the current head of Criminal Justice IT. Apparently, ‘he has a background of over 25 years’ experience in IT and major transformation programmes. John has worked in the financial service industries and has extensive experience in delivering IT–enabled change.’ Let’s see how long the smile stays on his ‘“face”‘. (I don’t know why the Cabinet Office felt it needed three inverted commas.)

I wonder what Presentation Zen would make of Tony Blair's PowerPoint use. I half-watched the PM's monthly press conference this lunchtime, and couldn't help noticing that although he was referring to presentation slides describing NHS reform, the TV cameras refused to include them in frame. Helpfully, Downing St posted the slides as a PDF file… and suddenly, I'm grateful to the TV galleries. Ouch.

A few hints for those in charge of the country:

• Be Consistent In what you give capital Letters To. Otherwise It Looks really Odd. I mean, 'Department of health'?
• Grids of numbers, even small grids, and especially when projected on big screens, can't be quickly digested. Just don't do it.
• If your slides have full sentences on them – they shouldn't. Ever. It's a presentation, not a document.
• Sixteen lines of text per slide is too many. Some , like Seth Godin, would even say: 'No more than six words on a slide. EVER.' (See his free PDF book, or this interview with fellow PPT guru Cliff Atkinson.)
• What's happening at the bottom of slide #9? 'baseli…Progress…arget'?

The best slides in the set – by far – are the two dominated by charts – particularly #3, showing the drop in 'Number of Patients Waiting more than 6 months' (not my capitalisation). I can barely read the Y-axis, and I can't see any of the underlying figures – but that's the point. Slides are there for their visual effect. They are at their best when conveying one single message… in this case, 'down down down'. In a split second, I get the message of this slide. The same simply can't be said of (most of) the rest.

Dave Winer quotes a piece by Scott Karp: “But what happens if big company brands realize that they no longer need a media middleman to connect with consumers?” Well, forget the ‘if’. Some of us already did realise – a decade ago.

I was lucky enough to begin my career in new media with a ‘big company brand’: namely, Her Britannic Majesty’s Government, and specifically its Diplomatic Service. Think of it as a big company brand, backed by nuclear weapons. 🙂 As far back as 1996 (or thereabouts), I remember giving presentations to diplomats heading overseas to do press and communication work, in which I would describe how the internet would ‘cut out the middle man’ (my exact words) in terms of getting political messages from government to government.

Working in government actually does have certain advantages. There’s no (direct) pressure over commercial targets, or cashflow. And with virtually all the material from UK government sources being Crown Copyright – allowing (nearly) unlimited re-use – we didn’t have the same psychological or financial hurdles to overcome. ‘Let’s get it out there.’ And we did.

So, as one might say: bing. A full ten years ago. Oh yeah, and remind me to tell the story one day of how I (co-)invented blogging back in 1998.

Is it any wonder that the whole debate around ID cards is entirely negative, when the justification is entirely negative? We need ID cards to stop terrorist attacks happening, or to stop fraud, or stop illegal immigration. Stop, stop, stop. All negative. So I’m actually quite encouraged to see this piece on silicon.com quoting a written Commons statement by Des Browne, chief secretary to the Treasury:

The IPS should be responsible for developing the national identity register (NIR) as an adult population database. Over time public sector systems, business processes and culture should be adapted to use the NIR as the definitive source of contact details in the longer term.

Wouldn’t that be a great thing? If you ever need to fill in an official form, or if you move house, all you would have to worry about is your ‘unique ID reference number’. Wait a minute… it gets better.

Until the NIR is up and running the Treasury said it should be a priority for HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions to look at short-term arrangements for wider use of the National Insurance number and ways to better share personal information.

YES! Finally someone notices that we already have a (more or less) comprehensive system of unique ID numbers, which would provide a head start at the very least.

Disclosure: I lobbied pretty hard in favour of this whilst working for the Office for National Statistics a few years ago. I’d love to take credit for this, but.. 🙂

You may well have missed a startling statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury in his big Easter sermon this morning. Talking about people’s love of conspiracy theories, he said:

We are instantly fascinated by the suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups; this has become so much the stuff of our imagination these days that it is only natural, it seems, to expect it when we turn to ancient texts, especially biblical texts. We treat them as if they were unconvincing press releases from some official source, whose intention is to conceal the real story; and that real story waits for the intrepid investigator to uncover it and share it with the waiting world.

This is an indication of how low people’s opinion now is of government communication. Not only that it is ‘unconvincing’ and (if I might paraphrase) deceitful, but that government isn’t even capable of sustaining the deceit.

Such an intriguing – and, frankly, depressing – choice of simile, on so many levels.

Special congratulations to colleagues at the Department for Education and Skills, whose website Need2Know has been nominated for a Webby Award… probably the most reputable web awards ceremony out there. In theory, this makes it one of the five best government web projects on the planet.

If you look at Need2Know, you might not spot it’s a government site. That’s exactly the point… even down to having a .co.uk address. There are times and subjects where government can’t be seen to say what the audience needs to hear. Good luck to them.

Most people don’t know what they want until they see it. And in government, where projects are big and lead-times are long, that’s a problem.

I’m currently working with plans for a major new government website, building on an award-winning successor. It seeks to address a professional, and generally a communicative audience numbering many, many thousands. There are a couple of relatively smart tricks, like a personal homepage with various forms of saved ‘bookmark’. But it all feels a bit ‘web 1.0’, if you know what I mean.

This new site is going to cost a lot of money, so it has to have a long shelf-life: let’s say five years. Give it a year at the start to bed in, and a year at the end to grow old gracefully. So ideally, the functional specification needs to think ‘what will users be expecting a year (or more likely, two years) from now?’

To me, it’s crying out for a ‘web 2.0’ solution. The audience in question is likely to be very receptive to a community-driven site. I can imagine them sharing outputs of their work with others; reviewing products and facilities; recommending good web resources; offering their opinions on controversial issues; all that good stuff. It could, and probably would, be groundbreaking. But unless the project leader lives in the ‘visionary’ segment of Geoffrey Moore‘s technology adoption curve, the specification will only reflect what is already in the mainstream today.

It’s an opportunity I’ll be sorry to miss, if that’s what ultimately happens. But my bigger worry is for the position three years from now. As we watch ‘a new high-tech wave‘ approaching the shoreline, I worry that it’s going to be a lot of money for something that will look very dated very quickly.

I get really tired of stories like this. Tired of people running mechanical validators against a host of websites to see which ones trigger an automated ‘fail’ flag. Tired of reporters trying to make it into a big deal, without any real qualification of how big a ‘fail’ we’re talking about – would one unclosed XHTML tag condemn the site as a ‘failure’? But most of all, tired of e-government pros not realising that this is going to keep happening, and taking action to avoid it. This is 2006, is it not?

I can't decide what to make of Directgov's move from the Cabinet Office to COI, as announced this morning. It seems odd to give control of the state's flagship e-government project to an arms-length body; and in strict terms of ministerial responsibility, it could be seen as downgrading the project's importance, with COI's Chief Executive being 'line managed' by the Minister for the Cabinet Office.

At the risk of oversimplifying, COI's main role is as government's middleman in the world of communication. They do a lot on behalf of other government departments, but haven't done a lot off their own bat. Taking ownership of Directgov is a big step in that regard. But on the other hand, if someone came to you for a job interview, having worked for all the big names in the field at various points in the past five to ten years, they would make an ideal candidate.

Perhaps COI's greatest asset here is who they aren't, rather than who they are. I wrote before about Directgov as a clean slate; this is probably just a further step down that same road.