6 reasons UK digital should not ignore Obama’s SXSW keynote

Every year 30,000 digital professionals meet in Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Interactive festival. For the first time, a US President addressed the attendees here on Friday, 11th March 2016. As I’ll detail below, President Obama’s message has important implications for the UK as well as our cousins across the Atlantic.

“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” — President Kennedy, Inaugural Address 1961

The President channelled JFK when he called on us as digital designers and technologists to apply our skills to government projects that affect society in a positive way. As a politician who has harnessed digital media both before and after coming to office, he is in a unique position to comment.

In the talk Obama accepted the difficulties that government projects face, but challenged us to take responsibility for helping to deliver digital services that make the lives of all people within our societies easier every day.

In this post I’ll take a look at six ways the United Kingdom can learn from the points that President Obama made on Friday, and draw comparisons between UK successes, failures and opportunities with those of the US.

1. His words apply just as much as to us as they do to our US counterparts

Obama’s message was understandably US-centred — like 319 million others this is the lens he views the world through. But the messages for first-world governments, societies and citizens were universal.

All Western governments struggle with the same problems — from simple things like issuing passports and driving licenses to more challenging issues such as healthcare provision, homelessness, security, care for the mentally ill and many more.

These are not easy problems to address, and importantly the most difficult of them rarely impact the life of affluent digital creatives or programmers working in the industry. Therefore even though they are the most important problems, they are not always attractive problems to work on.

“It’s not enough just to focus on what’s the cool next thing. Part of what we have to do is to figure out how do we use and harness the cool next thing to make sure that everybody in this country has opportunity.” — President Obama at SXSW 2016

Therefore, Obama’s call to arms was for us to take responsibility for helping other members of our society who are less fortunate than ourselves.

2. We have a responsibility to listen to his messages and interpret them for our country

This responsibility is not just ours as digital practitioners — it is shared with our local and national government. They need to bring the projects and processes up to date in order to deliver in the way digital projects are used to being delivered — genuinely lean, agile, with quick decision making processes and rapid, iterative feedback from users and stakeholders based on real data. This is how many of us work day-to-day in the industry and it’s time government projects caught up, rather than just paying lip-service to lean processes.

This may all seem like a long way off — but there are some examples of best practice in both the US and the UK which I’ll pick up on in point 5.

Important areas Obama touched on are as follows.

Procurement of digital services

Obama highlighted that the procurement process for digital suppliers was one originally designed for physical goods in the pre-digital world — which meant it was “big and bloated and slow”. In the UK we have the new Government Digital Marketplace, which my company UX Connections has just been accepted on to.

“The Digital Marketplace is helping those transforming public services by making it simpler, clearer and faster for them to buy what they need.” — UK Government Digital Marketplace Guide

Tax

In the US they have the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and in the UK we have Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). Obama says:

“If we make [accessing the IRS] easier, if it’s being done online, if you have the capacity to interact with government in a way that also gives you some feedback about how you’re tax dollars are being spent so that it’s a two-way exchange as opposed to something that feels distant and that you have no control over, then people’s attitudes change.” — President Obama at SXSW 2016

A key access point for tax services is personal taxes completed at the end of each year — in the UK these are managed by HMRC via the Self Assessment website, which has been hit with its own problems. In the US this is managed by private companies such as TurboTax and H&R Block.

Therefore in the UK the government has a greater responsibility to optimise this key channel, as it is a centralised national resource, rather than being managed by private companies.

Voting

Although in the UK we are ahead of the US in terms of voter turnout with 61.1% of voting-age participation, as against 53.6% in the US, the modernisation of this service is an important factor to consider — one that is surely likely to be disrupted or challenged in the future (question: is disruption an oxymoron within the context of government projects?).

“It is much easier to order pizza or a trip than it is for you to exercise the single most important task in a democracy, and that is for you to select who is going to represent you in government.” — President Obama at SXSW 2016

With this as a backdrop, the UK and its digital community are going to have to think hard about how best to address the issue of voting in the digital age.

3. The UK did not have the Obamacare digital disaster — but we have our own examples of badly implemented IT projects

For UK readers who don’t know, the US Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obamacare) was one of President Obama’s key manifesto promises back in 2008. It was designed to enable the 44 million Americans without health insurance to access healthcare via private health insurance.

However, the online launch which targeted 500,000 signups within the first month fell woefully short of this number with just 106,000, just over a fifth of the government’s target. This was attributed to back-end problems with the web site, but also user experience design and ease of use were also factors.

This caused Obama’s administration a lot of embarrassment and left vulnerable people without the care they needed. In the months that followed Obama brought in a team of experts to help fix the problem, and incentivised their usual employers (for example Google and Facebook) through tax breaks and government help for their businesses. Nowadays there are exemplary web sites in this space such as simple health insurance from Oscar.

Over in the UK we are not faring a whole lot better. IT issues we have had in the UK include the following.

Universal Credit welfare and benefits

The government’s flagship welfare system Universal Credit had only 3,610 people signed up in it’s first month of operation — a number that should have been in the hundreds of thousands

National Health Service patient records

NHS patient records system that cost £10bn and was eventually abandoned in 2013

Fire service command and control

Fire Control, a system to reduce the number of fire dispatch control rooms which never went live and cost £0.65bn

Same-sex marriage

Couples in a civil partnership were prevented from ‘upgrading’ their union to marriage due to an IT bug

Aircraft carriers

Ministry of Defence aircraft carriers that were left exposed to attack due to IT issues in a project that has ballooned £2bn over budget

The list could go on but the point is clear. We in the UK digital industry have just as much responsibility to get these projects right as our counterparts do in the US. They cost a lot of taxpayer’s money and their failure reflects badly on us all. President Obama rounded out his point firmly when he concluded:

“Here’s the point that I want to make. These are solvable problems. It’s not a matter of us passively waiting for somebody else to solve it. And that’s part of the mindset that I’m trying to break. As you will recall, the slogan was not ‘Yes I can’, it was ‘Yes we can’.” — President Obama at SXSW 2016

4. The UK is second only to the US in adoption of Internet and digital technologies — there is a special relationship there too

Ever since the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858 the UK has had a special relationship with the US in terms of telecommunications and technology. Great Briton Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet, and the US and UK have been at the forefront of the digital age for years.

We are not just any country — we need to lead the world in the provision on digital services, and currently have some catching up to do.

5. There are some ‘shining lights’ of best practice on both sides of the pond

However, the news is not all bad. Clearly both the UK and the US are competent at leading the world in many digital sectors, even if there have been some high-profile failures with government projects.

In the UK we have the Digital by Default set of online standards, sitting under the umbrella of the Government Digital Services (GDS). This has recently rolled out a new DVLA driving license service and passport and visa applications will follow soon.

6. The UK has a different attitude to privacy, but Obama’s words about the FBI and Apple have implications for us too

Over the years South by Southwest has covered the matter of privacy in the digital age at some length — with talks from Edward Snowden and Julian Assange of particular note. One of the themes that emerged from these talks was cultural attitudes to privacy — the way countries have differing attitudes to the privacy versus security debate.

On this factor I think we may end up following the lead of the US — but we need to have our own debate within the UK about whether we are happy with security services being able to access our mobile devices.

“If there is probable cause to think that you have abducted a child, or that you are engaging in a terrorist plot, or you are guilty of some serious crime, law enforcement can appear at your doorstep and say ‘we have a warrant to search your home’, and they can go into your bedroom and into your bedroom drawers and rifle through your underwear to see if there’s any evidence of wrongdoing. … So there has to be some concession to the need to be able to get into that [encrypted mobile device] information somehow.” — President Obama at SXSW 2016

Conclusion

In summary, there are some differences between the digital challenges facing the US and UK governments, but hopefully there are more similarities than we may at first consider.

It may not have been our own Prime Minister who issued the call to arms — but now is the time to listen to Obama and take responsibility for the future of UK digital services.

By Chris Sainsbury — Founder & Managing Director, UX Connections