I think that in an ideal world I would take the time to step back and ask, “How do we want our public services to be working and engaging with citizens in the next five to 10 years?” I would be just taking the time to look at everything that's going on.
I've mentioned that people are going to be wearing more monitoring devices in health and that the Internet of things is going to be in people's homes more and constantly interacting with them. There's going to be a whole series of changes coming. I worry that government will always be behind the curve. If today it's still thinking about moving things onto websites just as the rest of the world is moving to the Internet of things and devices, the whole world will have moved on again just as government manages to catch up with the web.
I think there's an opportunity to look back. We have a very similar problem in the U.K. between central government and local government, and we have multiple tiers of administration. There is an enormous opportunity to take a lot of the complexity out of the internal operations across both local and central government and to potentially put more resources back into front-line services.
My worry is that we talk too much about online services, rather than thinking about digital in terms of how government itself reorganizes and restructures its own operations to remove a lot of the complexity in process, function, and administration in order to simplify and streamline front-line services, whether they're delivered face to face or through a gadget of some kind. By making better use of technology within government itself, potentially there's an upside of enabling more resources to go towards the front-line services that maybe can't be automated.