TRANSFORMATIONAL GOVERNMENT:
HOW CAN WE MAXIMISE INFORMATION SECURITY AND INTERGRITY IN E
GOVERNMENT?
Seminar Summary
On 2nd November, the UK Government launched its new IT strategy,
“Transformational Government – Enabled by Technology”, which set out a
commitment to “use technology to give citizens choice, with personalised services
designed around their needs not the needs of the provider”. For the previous five
years, eGovernment policy had been working towards 2005 and the drive to move all
services online. While approximately 96 per cent of services will be e-enabled by the
end of 2005, focus has switched to more complex problems such as frameworks for
information security and data sharing.
A central theme running through the more difficult problems a truly transformational
eGovernment strategy has to face is establishing trust in eGovernment practices; not
only to stall anxiety amongst public sector employees and professionals, but also to
ensure take-up amongst citizens. Now that 96 per cent of the population know of
somewhere they can gain access to the internet, the digital divide in eGovernment
terms exists less in the provision of technology and more in the efficacy or otherwise
of services provided online.
This ippr seminar considered both practices and perceptions in overcoming anxieties
related to identity assurance, data collection, sharing and use, to understand how
trust in eGovernment services can be cultivated. Speakers included:

Jim Murphy MP, Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office

Ian Watmore, UK Government CIO and Head of eGovernment

William Heath, Chair, Kable

Declan Ross-Thomas, Strategic Development Manager, Siemens
The event was chaired by William Davies, ippr. The seminar took place on Thursday
8th December from 10:00 to 13:00 at the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Jim Murphy MP
The Minister began by considering the various challenges in attempting to implement
the Transformational Government strategy. These were outlined as:

The scale of the IT challenge within Government, particularly in terms of
efficiency. The Government spends approx £14bn a year on IT. This amount
may reduce as long as the Government can reach a stage where it is
spending less on legacy projects and more on forward planning;
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


There are a number of delivery challenges, not least because the UK is often
seen as a world leader in the provision of eGovernment, but also because of
the scale of publicity directed towards IT failures rather than IT successes;
The growth rate of the Indian and Chinese economies present a global
economic challenge to the UK and we need to use ICT to improve human
capital and skills in order to meet this challenge;
But one of the biggest challenges is developing trust in IT enabled projects.
The biggest driver for increasing trust is delivery. The Minister claimed it
would be impossible to move the public on this issue unless there is
meaningful delivery in their lives.
Jim Murphy MP outlined how the strategy would enable the move away from mere
provision of information to a truly transformational relationship online.
He
emphasised the importance of eGovernment in delivering the choice agenda which
should be about what services citizens consume rather than how they consume
them. This, he said, is central to the personalisation of services.
In order to build user input into the development of such services, the Government
will seek to build upon best practice from Canada, for example, and is putting
together a user panel of approx. 10,000 users to look at customer / citizen interaction
with Government services using a sample which aims to be representative of UK
society as a whole.
Ian Watmore
Ian Watmore began by criticising the term ‘eGovernment’ which, he said, inferred a
simplistic agenda and mere access to information.
The Transformational
Government strategy covers a much broader agenda and is about putting the
technology in the hands of front line workers in order to deliver real benefits to the
public.
For example, the NHS IT programme is giving doctors, nurses and other hospital
staff the information to serve the public better, empowering them to deliver better
clinical care, for example, through electronic patient records and digital x-ray
equipment which can lead to quicker, more efficient treatment and fewer mistakes in
diagnosis.
Transformational government is also essential to the joining up agenda; it is need to
connect different agencies and enable them to communicate with each other easily
and with greater efficiency. In addition, it supports evidence-based policy making as
it facilitates joined up data sets.
Ian Watmore tackled the perception of IT failures in Government. For the most part,
he said, Government performed pretty well. Where there are high profile failures,
these are brought up again and again despite the fact that failures tended to be a
result of change management rather than the technology itself – He specifically cited
the UK Passport Service. This is in part because change is much more complicated
in Government than in the private sector.
To address this, the Government is looking at professionalising their ways of working,
as well as making sure they are appropriately prioritising spending and investing
enough in the areas that matter, for example, security. At the same time they are
also trying to break down the silo culture of Government and improve accountability.
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On the issue of security, Ian Watmore identified the difficult trade off between
convenience and security. As you open up information networks you are of course
increasingly open to organised crime, hackers, internal threats and so on. At the
same time, laborious security checks required each time you access a service can
encourage limited take up.
Ian Watmore stated that people need to be able to manage new technologies in a
way that is easy and convenient to them. Getting the electronic ID agenda right is
crucial but identity management should not be seen as synonymous with ID cards.
William Heath
William’s slides are available here.
During his presentation William Heath highlighted the importance of building user
input into services and of opening up services to co-creation between users, public
sector information and existing interfaces. In particular we need to consider how we
can put effective feedback mechanisms into complicated services.
Declan Ross-Thomas
Declan’s slides are available here.
During his presentation Declan Ross-Thomas highlighted the importance of binding
digital credentials to real world identities, recognising the importance of the individual
as the definitive source of identity. He further suggested that Entitlement and Identity
Assurance were a key to assuring effective and efficient services, without which there
would be a real threat to the ‘evidential chain’. This was particularly important and
stressed when considered for both employees in positions of trust as well as citizens.
Discussion
William Heath finished his presentation criticising the Government, and security
services’ concept of trust which, he claimed, ignored the social history of how trust is
developed in favour of a vision of trust which relied on verification and validation.
This was later expanded into what was termed communal or village trust as opposed
to trust formed through validation and identification. In a sense, these two versions
of trust pull in different directions as the latter loses the norms of trust that have
existed offline for centuries.
Declan Ross-Thomas suggested that the former version is much easier to provide in
face to face dealings: you trust your doctor is qualified to treat you each time you
visit, although you do not ask him / her to identify themselves on each occasion.
Nonetheless, when accessing information over the internet, or providing personal
data, there is a need to know the source, the destination and the use of that data is
guaranteed. The role of the identity card in achieving this was discussed, as well as
a more federated approach to identification.
The discussion continued to discuss the concerns of the recent LSE report that ID
cards would be subject to function creep and the impact this would have on trust in
face to face transactions was voiced. Ian Watmore stated the top two reasons for the
public favouring the introduction of ID cards were concerns about identity theft, and
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the need to be able to properly identify and verify others, particularly those we place
in positions of trust, for example, caring for our children.
It was agreed there could be no perfect certainty in trust – there was always the
likelihood that a breach could be made somewhere with the biggest threat coming
from internal sources.
Trust is one of the major stated issues for health practitioners concerned about the
NHS IT programme. In the NHS new technology is being introduced which has the
capacity to save people’s lives, but staff are not necessarily in favour as one might
expect. The principle opposition is trust. But there is expectation that increasing
demand from citizens and users of health services will force the medical profession
to adopt a different position and really confront the problem of trust. Whether this
scenario could occur outside of the NHS was discussed. That some professional
opposition to eGovernment systems is based on the emergence of new tools to
increase accountability was mentioned.
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Speaker Biographies
Jim Murphy MP, Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office
Jim Murphy was appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office following
the General Election in May 2005.
Mr Murphy, MP for East Renfrewshire, entered Parliament in May 1997. He was
Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Scotland from March
2001 until June 2002, when he was appointed to the Government as a Whip. Jim
held Whip responsibility for a number of departments until June 2003, when he was
appointed Lord Commissioner.
Born in Glasgow in 1967, Jim was educated in Scotland and South Africa before
going on to Strathclyde University. He is married with two sons and one daughter.
Ian Watmore, UK Government CIO and Head of e-Government
Ian took up the position of UK Government CIO and Head of e-Government Unit in
September 2004. He joins from global management and technology services
company Accenture where he was UK Managing Director.
He has worked in both the public and private sectors, mainly in the UK and Ireland
but with spells in South Africa, New Zealand, United States and mainland Europe.
Ian is a past President of the Management Consultants Association, Chairs the CIO
Board of eSkills UK (the Sector Skills Council for IT and Telecommunications) and
previously represented Accenture on various external bodies such as the Council for
Industry and Higher Education and Business in the Community.
In a personal capacity he is on the Board of the English Institute for Sport, a Lottery
funded institute focused on serving high performance athletes in preparation for
Olympic and other major sporting events. Ian is married with four sons and lives in
the North West. He is a lifelong supporter of Arsenal.
William Heath, Chair, Kable
William is co-founder and chairman of Kable, Ltd, Europe's leading provider of
events, research and publishing for the public sector. Kable publications include
KableNet.com and Government Computing. William also moderates the
idealgovernment.com group blog.
Declan Ross-Thomas, Strategic Development Manager, Public Sector, Siemens
With a background in management consultancy and software engineering for both
public & private organisations in the UK and Europe, I now provide conceptual and
strategic guidance on identity solutions as a member of Siemens Business Services
Office of Government Affairs.
William Davies, Senior Research Fellow, ippr
William joined the ippr as Senior Research Fellow in June 2004. Prior to this, he
worked on The Work Foundation’s iSociety project, where his research focused on
the relationship between social networks, communities and new media. He is the
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author of Modernising with Purpose: A Manifesto for a Digital Britain (ippr, 2004),
Proxicommunication: ICT and the Local Public Realm (Work Foundation, 2004),
Invisible Villages: Technolocalism and the Enabling Council (New Local Government
Network, 2004) and You Don’t Know Me, But...: Social Capital & Social Software
(Work Foundation, 2003)
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Attendees
Name
Nick Penston
Tom Steinberg
Andrew Pinder
Joe Bolger
Alasdair McGowan
Sarah Arnott
Steve Lawrence
Luke Gibbs
Dave Wright
Paul Richmond
Mike Ellis
Ian Cockerill
Mike Washington
Jeremy Mackinlay
Geoff Llewellyn
Declan Ross Thomas
Kay Withers
Will Davies
Dr Jo Twist
Jim Murphy MP
Ian Watmore
Jonathan Sowler
Gerry Gavigan
William Heath
Jonathan Williams
Adrian Hancock
Rick Smith
Christina Smyth
Cass Chideock
Stefan Czerniawski
Nick Timmins
William Perrin
Ryan Heath
David Harman
Michael Hill
Max Roberts
Andrew Beddard
Nick Jones
Lucy Gilchrist
Katherine Fisher
Simon Tucker
Neil Robinson
Company / Organisation
Cisco
MySociety
Gov3
The Times
eBay
Computing
Cabinet Office
LLM
EURIM
NTL
Adobe
Adobe
Adobe
Siemens
Siemens
Siemens
ippr
ippr
ippr
Cabinet Office
UK Government CIO
Microsoft
HM Revenue and Customs
Kable
Political Intelligence
SOCITM
UK Online Centres Consultant
HM Revenue and Customs
Cabinet Office
Department for Work and Pensions
Financial Times
Cabinet Office
Cabinet Office
Fishburn Hedges
BT
BT
NHS Connecting for Health
Cabinet Office
LLM Communications
Cabinet Office
Young Foundation
Information Assurance Advisory
Council
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