The Metamorphosis

That’s a bit harsh, but the transformation from analogue to digital state has left government in a strange place. This chapter of the book will discuss that metamorphosis and how we live with it.

Read the proposition, what the book is about and chapter 1.

Trade jargon captures the essential aspects of a specialism. It’s time to talk of functional and non-functional (or infrastructural) things.

And understanding the trade jargon is critical because the distinctions it draws are necessary to understand the weaknesses in the constitutional architecture of the US that Elon Musk has exploited.

Non-functional here just means everything-that-isn’t-functional.

In terms of digital systems - the functionals are what the system does and the non-functionals are how it does it.

The function of a tap is that it delivers water when you turn it on. It doesn’t care where the water comes from. The non-functional (or infrastructural) things behind it are reservoirs and water pipes. The tap would work fine from a well or a rain butt.

The functional requirements of 1950s Social Security were that it collected your personal information, calculated your entitlement and paid out the money. What it does.

The non-functional requirements were a building with a bus stop in a big enough town, pens, papers and toilets, its how.

What and how are decoupled.

Social Security now still needs physical infrastructure - the how.

Its digital services collect, calculate and pay - the what.

But there are new hows - staff sign-ons, databases, data exchange with other departments - joined up government. The old non-functionals were decoupled from function. These new non-functionals aren’t - they are embedded in its very software.

This is the heart of the transition to the digital state.

Close reading shows administrative legislation talks in functionality. Parliament says what the government should do but not how it should do it. (Evidence Working Paper 9 - Reading legislation with a non-functional eye and Appendices)

Ministers are given functional titles over departments named after functionality, doing things specified as functionality in laws, overseen by parliamentary committees focused on function.

And the non-functional specifications are spread all over - in service standards, guidelines, best practice and even blog posts and other expressions of thought leadership.

Legislative functional specification has prestige, high visibility and political salience. The infrastructural side, not so much.

This misbalance is the centre of the problem. Software delivery is a series of trade-offs. Functionality is a legal requirement and must-haves. The non-functionals are only nice-to-haves. So functional always wins in any clash over resource or timing.

You can easily tell tax from social security in legislation. But infrastructure is shared across all departments. Tax and social security may well share the same systems to send you money or notifications. So digital government has a tension between the functional departments and the central shared infrastructure that was absent in the old days.

Building and running shared digital infrastructure and ensuring that departmental systems can and do use it requires different institutional and legal structures, both on the executive and legislative side.

At the heart of this tension is the question of data. We model things in data. Citizens-as-a-thing appearing in many laws implies that the models-of-citizens-in-data held in many departments overlap.

Sharing data increases efficiency, allows processes to be streamlined and can deliver better services. But it also trashes privacy and empowers the state against the citizen.

There is a tension between the will and the means of data sharing.

When managing infrastructure we want to make it technically easy to share any dataset between government departments by standardising the means.

But the will to share data is generally prohibited unless it is reasonably required.

Data is the foundation of joined-up government, proper data management, proper use of information, the free flow of it, is what makes the digital world so powerful and so compelling.

And data contains the duality problem. Data is tied to the functional and non-functional worlds alike, in what it models and how it is shared and flows.

The state must manage both functional and non-functional decisions about systems and data alike. It needs appropriate institutions to do so.

Legislation is at least clear about a system’s functionality, it is poor at managing data models and the power to create and share them. Data sharing is an institutional and constitutional problem in its own right.

The state lacks the constitutional and organisational architecture to manage its digital infrastructure. It is not a problem of people, their motivation and skills. Functional issues are prioritised over non-functional and infrastructural ones by the structure of the state. If you drive with the steering lock on, you end up in the ditch.

This is the root cause of silos and disjointed government.

Government decision making must be institutionally rebalanced to strengthen the non-functional or infrastructural side with stronger oversight by the legislature.

Standards are the way to do this.

But the state also lacks the constitutional architecture, the appropriate separation of powers, to protect itself against the Trump coup. It would have failed if 5 or 6 armed policemen had been at the correct digital agencies.

The Federal Reserve has its own police force, the US Treasury Payments system doesn’t. The head of the Fed was cheerfully telling reporters that he disagreed with Trump and had no intention of resigning. His appointment was by a statutory process with the confirmation of the Senate required. By contrast the head of the US Digital Services, the body that Musk took over, is just a presidential appointee.

The organisation weakness that prevents the state from excelling in digital infrastructure is the same weakness that Musk exploited. By storming poorly understood and supervised critical digital infrastructure, he was able to seize control of the flow of money. And the state and the rule of law fell.

There are good reasons the state lags the private sector in digital matters. But the problems are eminently fixable, with a proper understanding of how digital systems are made, and political will.

But while on the one hand we can and must improve state digital provision, on the other we must prioritise protecting the citizen from the state. Digitisation brings more power to the centre, and preventing that being captured by malign actors as in the US is an urgent problem.

This understanding of the 2 ways of specification and how they are intertwined is fundamental to the modern world.

On the structural issues of how to organise state bodies to proper create and oversea standards see:

The Foundations of the Digital State

Working Paper 0.3 - The locus of change

Working Paper 11.1 - Jeff Bezos API mandate but for Government

Working Paper 12 - A theory of state

Working Paper 13 - The weak centre

In relation to will and means of data sharing please see:

Working Paper 5.1 - Law reform for data