Jerry Fishenden

University of Surrey · Surrey Business School

This paper provides an overview of the history of federated identity in the UK for access to online public services since the 1990s. The UK Government was an early adopter of federated identity, anticipating that it would provide a way to tackle the provision of identity in a country with little history of national identity cards or a central regis...

The concept of “Government as a Platform” (GaaP) (O'Reilly, 2009) is coined frequently, but interpreted inconsistently: views of GaaP as being solely about technology and the building of technical components ignore GaaP's radical and disruptive embrace of a new economic and organisational model with the potential to improve the way Government opera...

The concept of “Government as a Platform” (GaaP) (O’Reilly 2009) is coined frequently, but interpreted inconsistently: views of GaaP as being solely about technology and the building of technical components ignore GaaP’s radical and disruptive embrace of a new economic and organisational model with the potential to improve the way Government operat...

The author describes various aural techniques developed as part of the origination of the sonic content of compositions themed on palimpsests of time and place. Field-based recordings, authentic and synthetic impulse responses, convolution reverb and the use of third-party sounds retrieved via open programmatic interfaces are considered. The role o...

This paper discusses the development of a prototype human-computer interaction (HCI) environment for the user-led exploration of time and place. It draws on earlier research to develop user interaction techniques using Kinect for Windows and the Kinect SDK. Two specific visual techniques are applied - a lens and a slider - for gesture-based manipul...

We describe in this book an approach to the design of public services that centres on citizens and the front-line employees who provide those services — not about digital as merely existing services delivered on a computer screen. To succeed, it will involve a strong political and leadership commitment to a meaningful untangling of the fractured se...

In the previous chapter we set out the wider context within which the UK hoped to redevelop its public services — and highlighted some of the problems of organizational culture. This chapter reviews some of the modernization and technology-led initiatives of the major political parties.

The apparent inability to exploit technology in a genuinely transformational way in the UK public sector sits particularly uneasily with the UK’s reputation as a pioneer in computing. After all, it was the UK that brought the world figures such as Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee, and innovations from Colossus to the B...

Whilst government was preoccupied with its repeated efforts to move online, elsewhere we have seen the emergence of some truly digital organizations. These digital organizations use new business models and operating approaches to take advantage of opportunities created by societal and technological changes — such as increasingly available high-spee...

Throughout this book we have defined digital transformation quite broadly, encompassing everything from the cultural and organizational changes required to the related use of new digital technologies in order to enable major improvements — such as enhancing user services, streamlining operations or creating entirely new services. Fundamental to thi...

Our purpose in this book has been to examine the long-standing gap between political aspiration and the desire to use technology to improve public services, and — most importantly — to identify and recommend ways to close this gap. If the move to ‘digital’ is not merely to become a lazy rebadge of earlier online and e-government initiatives, govern...

We have briefly already touched upon the essential role of platforms. It’s worth spending a bit more time on this discussion: the concept is an important part of achieving an open architecture. But we need to be precise in our use of the term, since the word ‘platform’ tends to get used (and abused) in different ways in different contexts. Let’s be...

Change cannot mean chaos: in most organizations all activities, and change activities in particular, are governed by a plethora of formal and informal procedures, practices, processes and regulations. These governance mechanisms provide an essential function in managing and controlling how software is delivered into production. However, we have als...

As the first formal coalition government in the UK since the Second World War, some way of fusing and reconciling aspects of both parties’ manifestos and policy commitments needed to be found. This was achieved through the ‘Coalition Agreement’. The influence of Conservative Party and Liberal Democratic Party thinking whilst in opposition, together...

In the past, public services often procured information systems that were ‘built to last’ when in fact the real requirement was that they should be ‘built for change’. Their tight vertical integration meant that modifying any part of a system often impacted upon the entire system. What should have been a simple update of a business policy, calculat...

Over the past 20 years many governments have promised (often repeatedly and at great length) to use technology to modernize public services. Yet most have also struggled to make long-term improvements on anything like the scale of reinvention and innovation seen in the best of the private sector.

For many citizens, local services are our closest and most common interaction with government, and the public authorities who provide them are an important bedrock of local democracy and accountability. In the UK, this local landscape is surprisingly complex: there are hundreds of principal authorities: 27 county councils, 55 unitary authorities, 3...

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, technological advances have driven fundamental change in how applications are created and deployed. Technologies such as cloud computing, mobile and the broader realization of smart devices have brought a growing reality to the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) vision for a massively intelligent, instrument...

This article argues that the future of public services will be shaped increasingly by the evolution of global, Internet-enabled, digital platforms, with two distinctive technical and commercial features. First, use of open standards and architectures that separate standard business logic from supporting applications will allow government to become...

Traces is a collaboration between the artist Cynthia Beth Rubin and the Menden-Deuer Lab at the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, which studies plankton, the microscopic marine creatures that comprise the most basic piece of our food chain. The original micro-captures are of specimens in small batches of water, devoid of...

Traces is a collaboration between the artist Cynthia Beth Rubin and the Menden-Deuer Lab at the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, which studies plankton, the microscopic marine creatures that comprise the most basic piece of our food chain. The original micro-captures are of specimens in small batches of water, devoid of...

This research examines the relationship between the development of a portfolio of interactive digital techniques and compositions, and its impact on user experiences of time and place. It is designed to answer two research questions: • What are some effective methods and techniques for evoking an enhanced awareness of past time and place using int...

This paper discusses ongoing research into the development of an original composition portfolio themed on the concept of palimpsests of time and place. The research involves the application of an iterative development methodology to refine creative computer-based techniques for the exploration and navigation of multi-dimensional aural and visual co...

Public sector IT spending currently absorbs more than £17 billion of public spending annually in the UK. Under Labour, British expenditure in this area dwarfed that of any other European Union nation, with many contracts costing billions of £s and running for periods up to 18 years. The UK also has perhaps the most concentrated government IT market...

Technological innovations have already provided the tools to transform information management. Now the task is to focus these technologies to improve business process in a world where knowledge and in particular, efficient, timely access to knowledge is a critical economic factor in the commercial success of an organisation. Where intranet technolo...