To OOP or…not to OOP?

All views expressed in this blog post are solely for the purposes of an assignment at the Harvard Kennedy School and should only be interpreted in this context.

Image by NewUnion_org from Pixabay

Firstly…what is OOP?

OOP stands for“once-only-policy”. Under this policy citizens would only be asked for their data once by the Government.

This data is shared and re-used internally across different departments in the hope of making service delivery much better e.g. through the pre-population of a form. The data may be stored centrally however it’s probably more secure to take the Estonian approach of storing it de-centrally across different databases.

OOP would require some sort of digital identification mechanism being in place so that citizens can be identified. In Estonia citizens use this ‘e-ID’ to log into a state portal- all of the data the Government holds on them is stored here, they use this portal to interact with the Government.

OOP would mean the following; imagine you’re getting married, after you report this you wouldn’t have to do anything else you could sit back and relax and the Government would start the process of changing the name on your passport (if required)/ updating your tax records etc.

Lots of places have already implemented OOP either across the whole of government e.g. Estonia or in a particular area/service e.g. the UK. Here’s a map which shows all the instances of OOP in the EU.

OOP gives rise to many benefits

For Citizens it means:

• Less frustration/ a much better experience when using government services.
• Saving lots of time- this might especially be true for those in vulnerable groups.
• Getting access to the full range of support they’re entitled to.

For Governments it means:

• Administrative efficiency (less time and money required to process and store data).
• But perhaps even more fundamentally…it allows them to deliver better services which after all is their core purpose right?. OOP might also increase the uptake of government services, because users would view the whole interaction much less onerously.

For Society:

• Implementing OOP brings us closer to the idea of Government as a Platform, which Pope defines here. GaaP could enable the private sector and third party providers to innovate and provide public services that the Government just doesn’t have the capacity to deliver. This is happening in Estonia and is explored here.

Challenges

There are lots of challenges involved in implementing OOP a few of the most important ones are listed below.

• How will we maintain privacy and ensure data is protected?
• How will we ensure the system is technologically secure?
• Does the Government have capability to implement and run this? Is there political will?
• Will citizens trust the Government with their data?
• There’s also the bigger picture challenge of maintaining democracy in a digital age- in this article Parvin explores how all Western democracies must make a choice either to be reactive or proactive in the digital age to protect democracy. If we do go down the path of GaaP- the government needs to be brave and ensures it defines the rules of the game (as it always has done) not Big Tech/Corporations.

UK specific concerns

Some of the concerns above are especially important in the context of the UK:

• Citizen trust in the Government is incredibly low e.g. the previous failure of ID cards/the cautious re-welcome.
• We have lots of legacy systems which makes implementation complex.
• A Parliamentary Select Committee Report argued that GaaP had previously failed because of the absence of leadership and political will.
• We have a digital divide so we’d need to ensure non-digital access to government services remains.

Okay this thing looks way too challenging why bother?

The challenges are not insurmountable…

• Privacy preserving measures could adopted e.g. if analytics are being performed on a data set you could put processes in place to anonymise the data, this is already considered in the GDS standards. We could create policy and regulation so that citizens have control over their data. In Estonia through the Personal Data Protection Act, an individual owns all of the information recorded about them, they can see their data through the state portal and there’s clear audit trail of who has looked at their data and why. The act makes it a criminal offence to look at someone’s data for no reason. Certain sensitive data requires individual consent for access. We need to have strong internal governance around data access and processing.
• We should ensure we adopt the principle of secure by design. One way of doing this is by adopting a de-centralised database approach like Estonia.
• The public might also have concerns over hosting on private sector servers- they would need to be brought into the decision process regarding this.
• We’ve already tried OOP on one program so we know that it can work but to test what capability is required for implementation across Government we could try a bigger pilot. The National Data strategy announced this week looks promising- the idea of a Government Chief Data Officer could be just the kind of leadership required.
• Many commentators agree that the success of Estonia’s model is predicated on high levels of trust in the Government and the fact that citizens embraced it. Because trust has been so low we need to ensure citizens are really involved in both the thinking and the implementation of this policy…one way could be through using regular citizen engagement groups.

To OOP or…not to OOP?

The potential for better service delivery/ improving the very purpose of Government is just too great not to have a go at implementing OOP (in an agile way )… this blog is in favour of it!

However, it’s important to note the concerns around this policy especially regarding privacy, data protection/ big government. It’s also critical to pay attention to Parvin’s idea of “Democracy as a Platform for the Market”.

OOP necessitates the Government to step up, be brave, bring citizens into the process and keep in mind the purpose of it all; to deliver better services for citizens- if it does all of this, then it really has the potential to make things a lot easier and a lot better for citizens alongside protecting democracy as we know it.