Book Review: Platformland by Richard Pope

This is an exquisitely detailed and righteously determined look about the how and why of Digital Government.

Richard Pope was there at the beginning of GOV.UK and helped steer it to the magnificent beast it is today. He reflects, clear eyed, on the various successes and failures of the geeky attempt to turn the state into something approaching modernity.

He's forthright on his views about the lack of vision in most projects:

The aim of most digitization programmes is the status quo, delivered more cheaply. This is not surprising. Government business cases are woven from such hopes. The resulting documents are catnip to treasury officials. But efficiency is a trap.

All of the advice and lessons are sensible and pragmatic. It is an efficiently written book which avoids the temptation of too much name-dropping or mythologising mundane events. There is, perhaps, a tinge of bitterness that some projects got dropped or some ideas never quite made it. While the personal is political, he doesn't get into the Politics of the time - but does acknowledge that every decision has a political dimension.

Where credentials will ‘live’ is both a technical question and a political question. Apple’s and Google’s digital wallets, and those of Samsung and others, are turning the storage of credentials into a zone of contest between the public and private sectors.

Similarly, he is much more interested in what is proven to work and what helps users rather than getting caught up in the various ideologies which spring up around digital government:

Privacy debates tend to attract absolutists on both sides, with sometimes-arbitrary arguments that everything must be put under user control in the name of privacy, or the counterargument: that it doesn’t matter what information is reused because people assume the government knows it anyway. Both are unhelpful.

Underpinning all of the advice is the realisation that it needs organisational will and political cover to instigate transformation. These things don't happen in isolation and techies need to confront the reality of the way the world is organised.

It is (delightfully) weird seeing friends quoted in this book - and from GovCamp no less! - and gratifying to see one of my posts cited. There's a section about the NHSX Covid tracing app (which I was intimately involved in) - I think it is a fair assessment of what happened and whether those choices were in the best interests of the country. But, again, it is weird seeing your personal history in a book!

Ultimately, it is the sort of book which should be mandatory reading for all Civil Servants and Politicians of every colour. We have to reconfigure the interface between the citizen and the state in order for them to have a more copacetic relationship. We have to redesign the state so that it is able to meet the challenges of today. We have to ensure that it is able to rapidly adapt to the challenges of tomorrow.