Public “self” service

I worked for public services for 7 years as an IT person and experienced those of many countries, here is my opinion on how the digitalization of public services is failing those who need it the most and what we can do about it.

The problem with digitalization of public services is that everyone seemed to believe the best way to do it is to start from scratch, understand the current state of an organisation and issues to tackle to propose an actually simpler solution.

While I can agree to some extent and wish to see these projects flourish, I can’t help but notice this way of digitalizaing things had actually prevent many services to properly digitalise or set a base that is ready to transform, it also transfer the ownership and accountability of the project to IT businesses with low mindsets as public servants and shuffle the organisation to an extent where people are anyway not able to operate whatever nerdy application was built under delegation. I decided I will take a new approach and just get inspired by the old.

What I believe we need, is a tool that enables to create services that are still operated by humans, a form of hybridation between paper, server and brain which together compose what as traditionally became a cloud in modern IT.

Today’s automations are still defective, hide problems rather than exposing them, highly discriminate people on arbitrary decision that are not documented and didn’t provide any feedback loop to even notice they harmed people, they run unattended and cumulate lockups among thousands of processes that only the interfaces were actually simplified.

Understand than when an IT person says something is simplified, they usually mean that it provides a better interface and reduce operating costs, but these are 2 of dozen of important matters at stake, and this obstination of simplification under the cloak of agility is today’s evil we are all suffering from whenever we interact with public services.

Not everything can be simplified, especially not if it was designed to equally care and support for all people living or migrating to a specific territory.

IT project managers would too easily refer to MOSCOW matrix, end up short on budget after fancy experiments benefiting the majority and decide not to move on with what was categorised as “nice to have”, which is literally where fall all the requirements necessary to support minorities in need.

Not only these would be ignored in terms of features, but this amazing idea of limiting feedbacks to several exclusive options (and which no budgets was kept to even read anyway) would make sure they are speechless and whatever discrimination they face should be addressed to control authorities… whose approach is just the same.

Facing these injustices, the minority is systematically suffering more violence and eventually stop to even try to raise awareness or call for help, when they do, they face “loyalists” of all sorts from technocrats to extra local nationalists who merely ever fell in these unattended end of poorly designed – or “simplified” – processes but would decide to insult them or accuse them of sharing fake information or be guilty of some sort of imagined crime that would explain why they are out of consideration by this process that works just fine for the 80% lucky people fed with the silver spoon of the MOSCOW matrix all their life.

The same majority who mostly became adults and properly served by the public services without having reached the need to read any text of law in a lifetime because “everything works fine”, when people who actually read the law just knows nothing is and are afraid the next thing to be “simplified” is the actual law that was designed for universal inclusion. (Or at least that’s usually the case in my Europe)

This way of building software for public interest as been the same no matter if you look at left, center or right wing, partisan or not, all seem to agree that there is one good way to manage project and ressources and have been seduced by the same paradigm of enshitification they usually call “agility”, delegating the public function to some pieces of code left unattended after delivery. (That’s all you can get if you don’t mutualise procurements or hand over 20k for annual maintenance to sustain a team of 5… Not likely at a state level but very common for local governments)

Has they believe this is one good paradigm that enable people to question wether or not something is needed and provide good “common” sense, it seems natural to all that this is the solution to every problem since its very nature is to adapt and keep a momentum going.

One of it’s popular issues being that most organizations don’t have have their procurements structured to support such ongoing momentums, but a less popular one is that “agilty” how it is usually practiced, is inherently biased by how the development team (or the person proxying the commissioner of the work) sees the world, and what weight they give to each stakeholders voices.

The louder would usually be satisfied first before the agile team can start hearing from lower voices from the underground folks.

This is a good practice if you a re building software for a sales driven business but it is a violent mistake if you are building it for the wellbeing of a diverse community.

One better way of using agility and, why not, Moscow matrix here, would be to give equal points to each (of maybe a hundred) personas(and yes, these are dynamics) impacted by the public service, identify all the “Must Have” and consider these the first feature to implement.

Ones’ “Must Have” is not the others’, we can oppose a polycentric approach serving both the majority and the minorities to an amount based one which is exclusive by nature.

How do we make it happen ?

We keep it with the original dream, digitalization, done well, is the pillar of an inclusive and efficient society where we sustain a culture of caring for people and provide them with the best service to the extend of our capacities.

One where rest is granted, freetime is meant to develop personally and enjoy our hobbies, work time to efficiently and vigorously contribute to society with the best of our craft and public “self” service don’t take 6 hours of some people’s week.

I have a idea to achieve such a thing, it is technical, it is not really mine as I first implemented it working for hospitals and most of it came from smarter people but I moved a lot since then, leaving my country because I didn’t like its culture of public service and the social impacts it had on people on a daily basis, I lived in 5 different countries and travelled many more, always passionated by public services and learning, I found myself a part of the minority again and again as an immigrant and now this idea has matured.

The idea is to build a workflow management system, one than enable the process manager to digitalise the human/paper process just has it is, while keeping both humans and papers, but making sure every steps are tracked and raise alerts in a contextual way, one where user can find tracking information, view an ongoing process rather than spending hours looking for the right information, interact with the process to highlight missing parts or biased directly reported to the process managers in the shape of a new activity or alerts set on an existing one, one that would attribute tasks to the right people, giving them the right accesses on a per-information base to insure real privacy, one that would set clear expectations rather than non trust worthy service level agreements that sometimes leave people waiting for 6 months before anything is done.

If you feel me, drop a message on LinkedIn, I lack the ressources to start such a project all by myself but I coded some version of it in the past and I can make the next one even better, I am currently looking for my future job and finding partners, customer or employer might just convince me to go on with my – our- crazy idea in the making.

Thanks for reading, any feedback appreciated, I deconstruct -maybe demolish-several ideas here and its only fair I expose mine to the same treatment as long as it is driven by the research of common good :)