A short note on the role of humans in Government 2.0

The latter part of this week I had an experience which I thought was quite an interesting use case for the Government 1.0 to 2.0 transition, ie exception handling. In a nutshell, I had to pay the road tax on my car. This, in the flow of things, is a fairly simple process. You take a renewal notice for the car or its ID document, go to the post office with evidence of insurance and its MOT (roadworthiness certificate) and Bob's your auntie. You can even do it online.

Except if you have moved house. In that case, you have to send in a part of the car's ID document, you get a new one back, so even if you do not get a renewal form in time, you can use the ID document to prove the existence of the car. You with me so far?

So where does this go wrong - simple, for some reason the new car ID document hasn't come back. Nor, for some reason, do we get the renewal notice this year. Something has clearly gone wrong. But the car needs its tax disc as a legal requirement to use it, the police start hauling you off the road and fining you if you have last year's (the tax disks have different colours year by year and very big numbers telling you what year it is, so its very visible).

If this case occurs, you then enter Kafkaland.

The DVLA (Department for Vehicle Licencing Annoyance) may have messed up the paperwork trail, but it now becomes your problem. You are no longer allowed to register online, as you don't have the requisite documents. The nearest DVLA office is miles away, so off you go to the post office, armed with the photocopy you took of your original form. This was allowed the last time we moved, a few years back - in fact it was the recommended approach.

Except that the Post Office has now decided not to accept photocopies of the original any longer, nor do they accept the remainder of the form that you have kept as evidence. In short, if the DVLA messes up returning your new car ownership form, you cannot tax your car, and you will be fined etc. You wind up in bureaucratic limbo because the Online and Post Office systems no longer recognises forms that were once deigned sufficient, and the process has not been updated. A long (hour plus) drive to the nearest (hah!) DVLA office beckons. A process that would have any jobsworth swelling with pride.

Except, we found a solution - human intervention. Our local post office is in a corner store, the lady who runs the store knows me. My car is parked outside, I show it to her, and she makes an executive decision to disentangle the Gordian system by granting me my tax disk on the basis of my photocopy and kept half of the ID (after the handing over of the money of course) so I can avoid the long arm of the law, and I can now chase the DVLA to find my lost change of address Car ID form at my leisure.

The lessons for Government 2.0 from this?

(i) You can't automate existing workflows, this process could not be solved online. Existing "Social" technologies on their own didn't solve this, I had long arguments with jobsworths over phone and post office counter, so it is unclear how new ones would do any better.
(ii) There has to be a continual stress test process - when you are mashing up multiple systems in a workflow and some later change their own policies, it will cause problems. The System has to accept that their own systems may have problems.
(iii) There needs to be "human over-ride" when The System is broken in these cases, rather than the default "user is wrong" assumption.
(iv) There needs to be a way to represent social capital - the postmistress knows me, and judged I wasn't trying to cheat the country in any way. The "system" as it stands is blind to an ordinary citizen frustrated by its rigidity, and a bad person trying to subvert it. There are far more of the former of us than the latter. There were multiple instances of my ownership good intentions that I have on paper (Proof of past payment, other proofs of ownership etc), but the system cannot see them.

Anyway, that was what a simple car tax disk renewal taught me.......