Bureaucracy Hack and public servant use of cloud collaboration tools

Thinking about how we use the internet to work together

Today was One Team Gov Bureaucracy Hack. It was great event with five groups doing all-day deep dives into recruiting, business cases, governance, politics(!) and collaborating using cloud based digital tools.

This is the end of the day show and tell.

Firstly, thanks to everyone that was involved — including my co-organisers, the participants and especially the volunteers who gave up their time to enable everyone else to be fully involved.

Each of the streams will be releasing a blog post soon about the work they did on the day and what will happen next. One of the key differences between Bureaucracy Hack and an unconference was the commitment from participants to continue contributing to these workstreams after the event. I’m very much looking forward to see how they evolve and to contributing where I can. You can keep track of what’s going on via the One Team Gov blog and twitter feed.

I was undertaking my usual job at such events, organising the volunteers and generally helping make sure everything was running smoothly, so I didn’t get to participate much in the sessions. I did pop in briefly to the session that interested me most, use of cloud based collaboration tools in government, but I feel that I didn’t participate enough to put my name on the work they did on the day. I’m very much looking forward to the blog post covering that team’s work.

I’ve long said that public servants moving to cloud based tools, particularly real-time document sharing tools like Google Docs, will have as much as an impact on cost savings via efficiency as the much higher profile work that is done on citizen facing digital services. The work that the Cabinet Office did under Tom Read some years ago and that HackIT is currently going through reap large benefits. That said, it has to be a fully supported managed change. While the blocking of such systems in some parts of government is obviously a problem, just making them available without training and support — and most importantly demonstrating the power of related new ways of working — is just as much of an issue.

Since I didn’t get a chance to be in the session I thought I’d jot down a few of my own thoughts about the topic as they were shaped by the brief conversations I did have.

In order to do that I’ve started by creating a mind-map. Orange for questions, green for potential actions.

The first thing that leaps out are the large ranges of things we don’t know. These are roughly grouped into the following areas.

• Metrics about public servant knowledge of such tools, whether they have the skills to use them and any reservations they may have in doing so. For example, I have a hypothesis that some members of staff would be very reluctant to use any tool they’ve not been specifically told is okay.
• Further measuring of understanding why such tools enable powerful new ways of working.
• Discovering where such services are blocked in government, who makes that decision, understanding their user needs and encouraging them to meet with others undertaking their role who are based in organisations that have allowed access.

The group going forward to work on this issue could hugely benefit from any government organisation who would be willing to contribute some time from a user researcher.

As well as the open questions there are some things that I feel the group could look into doing right away.

• Create some assets showing the value of such tools including such things as blog posts, videos, case studies, etc. The most important thing about such material is that they need to show the value in the hands of folks outside of “digital groups” who are often seen as operating differently from the rest of the organisation.
• Update the related guidance on GOV.UK, ideally with reference to statements about such tools from NCSC (about cyber security) and the ICO (about what data can be held in such systems).

To mis-quote William Gibson : collaboration tool usage is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. I’m very much looking forward to following up on this great start in the Slack channel. Come and join us!