ICT and Social Services - presentation to GCC countries Social Security Leadership

Last week I had the pleasure to address a group of senior staff from Social Security Organisations in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), hosted by GOSI. I was invited to give a presentation on ICT trends and directions for Social Service and to outline recommendations for the GCC countries.

To my surprise it was actually raining in Riyadh when I arrived - but not for long. The next day (April 10th) the weather was back to normal - clear blue sky, bright sun and pretty hot - coming from Scandinavia's 5dg day temperature.

Whilst not know this beforehand Scandinavia and the Digitization of Denmark would be a topic that would be of interest - as well as recommendations on what the GCC countries could learn from other countries on the path forward to greater digitalization.

I had 20 minutes and 5 minutes for Q&A for my presentation. On the Panel was also Accenture and IBM to present their view on the future of Social Services from an ICT point of view.

I will not go through all my slides, as some of them was identical to the presentation I gave at the Minimum Income Support seminar on April 3rd in Brussels. Slides and comments to be found here.

I did spend a bit of time on going through a few of the different kind of trends that I see happening in the coming years - especially between the ones driven by paradigm-shifts and those driven by technology-shifts.

It is clear that a number of changes are heavily impacting what Governments need to do over the next years - to realize the Digitized Service Society - which in Accenture terminology is labeled: "The Digital Business". Governments need to prepare themselves for the demographic changes - this will also happen in the Arab world - some 30 years shifted compared to the Western world, but they need to prepare for a different mixture of citizens in the future - which will put much more pressure on Health Care and Social Care. From a technology point of view, Straight Through Processing (STP), Performance Management and Cloud-enablement will be significant areas to consider.

As the presentation focused on ICT-enablement and trends and directions, I contextualized to the audience what they need to consider to have success with ICT innovations and what kind of prerequisites they need to have before enabling advanced eGovernment Services to the Citizens.

Selecting the right amount of technology which is matching the right level of digitalizations and which are matching the maturity of both Government and Citizens is difficult. But first things first. One needs to secure the foundations.

And I believe that there are 3 elements that needs to be in place before realizing eGovernment Services to the Citizens:

1) Good Master Data - one needs to know the best possible sub-set of information regarding the Citizens, in order to be able to make eligibility determinations.

2) Good Authentication / PKI - one needs to be sure that the citizens asking for services is the right citizen, with the right credentials. Governments need to find ways to authenticate citizens in order to provide them with services and benefits.

3) Good communication infrastructure. Citizens and Government Employees want to have mobile access to information and services.

When the prerequisites are in place, Governments can start developing complex self-service and capabilities for the citizens. But - there are other issues that Governments need to address along the "right path" to the digitized Service Society.

 There are challenges around:

* Complex rules
* Citizens Digital Illiteracy
* Objective vs. Subjective rules
* Digital Payment

All of these have been dealt with in a number of countries. And there are some good learning's that can be shared.

As one of the previous slides showed there seems to be a correlation between the complexity of Social Benefit programs and the scale of digitalization - one explanation could be that the more complex the social welfare benefit system the more resources will correct determinations require - and hence the savings earned by increased digitalization will be greater. One of the best examples on how to enable Straight Through Processing is the Swedish Social Security Agency - they digitized more than 12.000 lines of rules and have now a "case processing time" of 1-2 seconds compared to days or weeks by experienced case workers. At the same time they have achieved 99.98% automation. Furthermore they don't need special IT-people or programmers to maintain the rules, as the maintenance can be done easily - and in natural language, by the legal people owning the legal responsibility.

Citizens want to do services when it fits them - not when it fits Governments. This is a change in culture. The mantra of today is: "Do not ask what the Citizen can do for you, but what you can do for the Citizen". The way Accenture puts this is that Citizens are no longer asked to "claim" benefit, but are "offered" benefits. But it is a challenge that a growing number of citizens are digital illiterates.

Digital illiteracy is a growing concern, as it creates division of citizens (A and B-teams) as well as it is the opposite of the inclusive society, as it exclude a number of citizens. While discussing my claim that more than 25% of the population of Denmark were digital illiterates, a peer within the Canadian Government stated that among users of Social Services in Canada, the estimate was that more than 80% were digital illiterates. Shocking indeed. But there is hope - evaluations among smartphone users show that most are able to use apps to navigate services and games. Hence one of the ways to ensure better inclusion will be gamification. And Governments need to start experimentation and develop strategies for how to embed elements of games (ie. gamification) into their strategic thinking - especially to communicate with the most vulnerable citizens.

On objective vs. subjective rules as well as digital payment, read here.

Jumping fast forward I also did spend some time on the recommendations - these are the same advise that I gave in 2013 on the ISSA conference on Compliance and Collection Evasion (see my white paper here). Basically because they are still perfectly valid and will remain so for long time.




I will not for now go through all the recommendations - later I will comment on each of them individually on the blog, but I just want to highlight one recommendation that was a bit unclear to many in the conference.

You are NOT unique.

Why is that I - for many years now - have claimed that Public Sector authorities are not unique, when many organisations and agencies certainly believes that they are?

Besides being a provocative statement, it is also one which is both true and false. It is false, because organizations are unique, there exist only one GOSI in Saudi Arabia, but it is also true, because what GOSI does in terms of PROCESSES (the way the work as a public sector entity) is NOT unique. It is basically generic and identical to most other public sector agencies around the world. The differences in Public Sector Processes are - in ICT-enablement terms - small. There might be variations in the way they do segregation of duties, who can do what, when, why; who approves; who informs who etc. But basically it is the same meta-processes that all Government organizations are formed after.

What really makes organizations UNIQUE is the POLICIES. Policies are vastly different. Just examine the EU and the debate on so-called "Welfare Tourism". This is because the definitions and benefit rights - the POLICIES of Welfare - are completely different and defined using a multiplicity of different concepts - why they seems to be quite incommensurable.

So - in the more ICT-mature countries there is a clear tendency to separate policies from processes. This is a challenge, if one have an integrated, hand-coded legacy system (in Cobolt), but there are technology options that allows one to extract Cobolt-rules and migrate them to a Policy Automation tools - like OPA.

 From the audience there was a number of questions to the panel. I will only reflect my answers in the following:

Q: How can the collaboration between Business and ICT be improved ?

A: It is one of the most frequently asked questions. Some years back I trained ICT people as well as Business People under understanding each others "language" - and it is a difficult task. Recently more and more companies (WSJ mentions how American Express sends senior executives to programming and computational design classes) has begun educating non-technical staff in programming in an effort to make them understand what the world of ICT is all about. No one is really doing the same for the ICT people. And here is a challenge - it is probably easier to learn ICT about the Business (Pains and Challenges) that it is to learn the Business about the ICT (Pains and Challenges).

But nevertheless both sides must collaborate - they must understand how Business and ICT is like Yin & Yang - two sides of the same coin. There are a number of strategies that can be deployed to make sure that there is created buy-in on all levels. Build a business case. Make sure that is is collaborative developed between the ICT and Business people, so that it reflects all the costs and all the values created. A huge issue with Public Sector Business Cases are that they tend to examine only the cost side and not value the value-side.  Ensure a sound Governance Structure: Make sure that there is frequent and direct involvement of Business in ICT and that ICT are involved with Business. Make the CIO part of Business discussions - and vice verse. Be transparent about how Business and ICT is a coin - "an item": Always include ICT in agency-wide internal communication - let everybody understand why ICT is important and how it will be part of the senior management teams transformation strategy.

Q: What can the GCC countries learn from other countries with respect to digitalization of Social Security / Social Welfare ?

A: There are quite some challenges in "knowledge transfer" from one experience to another - but there are some learning's that can be transferred - like the requirements / prerequisites mentioned above. Furthermore I think that it depends on the willingness of a country - something I often have encountered in Public Sector is a stickiness of minds to change - mostly in form of "NIH" - Not Invented Here syndrome. "We didn't invent it, then it can't be good". Governments must learn how to embrace best / good practices from other places in the world. Why re-invent the wheel, when others already have done it for you?

Among the learning that GCC countries can reuse is: 1) Make roadmaps and do not deviate from them. I will be more than happy to host inspirational workshops on how to construct an ICT roadmap for the next 5-10 years based on current technologies and industry solutions. 2) Collaborate with both the Implementer and the ICT-Vendor throughout the project. Instigate a collaborative forum between you, the Implementer and the ICT-vendor - could be in the form of an Innovation Advisory Board - where you are able to information and discuss current challenges and future innovations of the implementation of the roadmap. I would be happy to explain more in-depth on my experience with such boards, and what values it have provided. 

Denmark was mentioned several times by all speakers - and why? Because Denmark is seen as one of the front-runners on the edge of digitalization. And as a Dane I can confirm that it is absolutely awesome services that we get access to - from the information aggregated citizen portal to the "one-click" tax return for most citizens to "property information" with more than 400 individual data points per property - available for anyone to examine and reuse. And did I mention that the Government has enforced by law "digital-by-default" for companies and citizens within the next 2 years? And that all Government accumulated data (non-privacy intrusive and state-secrecy disclosing) is made freely available?

But this is the "It's always sunny in Philadelphia" part of the story - not that there is a "dark" side of the Danish experience - there are clearly issues that needs to be addressed, but we are working on that. No, it is more the time and the constraints that the digitalization has brought with it.

Digital Denmark is build on 3 key master data registries - these were defined in mid-60's and they were met with some concerns - but quickly everybody was behind the registers: The CPR (Citizen ID and Masterdata), BBR (Building and Property Registration) and SE/CVR (Company Registration - later than the two others).

Over time all services has been provided utilizing these central registers - and the reason why it has worked in Denmark is because Danes TRUST the Government. Danes are the single most Government trusting society. We basically believes that the Government will act in our interest rather than its own interest. This fundamental concept of trust has meant that we happily provide the Government with all our "master data" - Denmark has one of the best mortality databases in the world, because we are able to interconnect vast amount of data with the individuals - and hence "trace" cause and effect. As mentioned the OIS (Public Information Server) provide access to every single property - including public valuation, latest sales prices, ownership, roof-type, number of toilets etc etc - more than 400 data points per property.

There are two challenges going forward: 1) Harvest / Saw, 2) Governance-models and 3) Lack of Centralism. These two are tightly connected. It is always a challenge, if another agency needs to saw (ie. collect information and bear the cost) that others will harvest the benefit from (ie. use the data). This has often made required transformations take years where other countries who have different models have been able to react more swiftly. 2) Governance models - not only is agency-wide governance required to succeed with digitalization - but cross-agency governance is needed. And Denmark has been quite fragmented on this. There has been several entities, who have tried to commandeer the "right path" but without being successful. 3) The model of autonomy for Municipalities and Regions, as stated in the Constitution, is challenging, as it basically allows every single of the 98 municipalities to develop their own IT for exactly the same business problem. One could wish for a bit more centralism.



As always comments and ideas are more than welcome.    

ICT-enablement of Minimum Income Support

On Thursday April 3rd the Greek Presidency and the EU-commission, invited to a member state seminar around Minimum Income Support (#MIS). Agenda, outline, presentations and speeches can be found her.

I was invited to give an intervention on the applicability and challenges of ICT-enabling Minimum Income Systems in my capacity of global expert on Public Sector Digitization and Social Welfare Digitization.

In this blog post I would like to go through my slides and elaborate on the challenges of how digitization can be used to create effective and efficient Minimum Income Support systems. I will also make a few comments around some of the other presentations and the discussion from the day. A number of my comments are to be found on Twitter - either look for my handle @DigitizeSociety or the hash-tag: #MinInComEU.

First of all there is good reason to applause the EU aspirations to help the member states create more efficient Minimum Income Support Systems / Schemes. There is a big challenge on solving the fragmentation of the way Social Security Services (#SSS) and Public Employment Services (#PES) collaborate and share information as well as how they co-ordinate on helping the poorest / most vulnerable of our citizens.

Also great to see that almost all aspects of how to build the future MIS-schemes were covered in the presentation. Naturally there is a need for deeper dive into all the areas - like providing deeper insight to the Member State representatives on how to define the legal base involving tools like reference budgets, how to build maintainable and sustainable policies, how to ensure collaboration between Private, Public Voluntary in actual partnerships, and finally how to digitized as much as possible in order to run the schemes as efficient and effective as possible.

My starting point was to explain to the delegates what the world will look like the next 5-10-20 years - I know very well that this is Mission Impossible, just look at the global transformation that has been undertaken with the introduction of mobile communication and the Internet (which is now ONLY 25 years old) - could we 25 years ago have foreseen how influential and impacting on everybody's life the Internet would have been - I don't think so.

Nevertheless there are some MEGA-trends which are influencing the choices of today. The 4 most important ones are outlined below slide:

There is a trend toward what I have coined "The Digital Service Society" - this is next-generation of society where digital service delivery is more common and expected that analogue. Not many countries are there yet, but a few is approaching this: Denmark is going full-speed ahead on creating the Digital-by-Default on all levels.



It is somewhat easy for Denmark to interconnect all services and requirements in a digital model, as digitalization has been evolving in Public Sector over the last 40 years - the national registers for citizens (CPR), for companies (SE/CVR) and buildings/property (BBR) are almost twice as old as the Internet. And still today they are the foundation of the public sector digitization together with a strong and well-working PKI (NemID).

Secondly the Data & Innovation Driven Society is using ICT to "manipulate" information in real-time - with extremely large data amounts this is know as "Big Data". In combination with innovation new services and new possibilities will be available for the citizens. Without mentioning all the areas that will be possible, one that I personally is looking forward to is the realization of the Augmented Reality - according to rumors the new Iphone OIS will enable enhanced Augmented Reality capabilities. For Public Sector, this will allow case workers in the field to access real time - on-the-spot information and data linking the visual experience with data relevant to the field assignment.

Thirdly there will be a requirement to ensure the workability of the infrastructure and the digital services. The CIIP (Critical Information Infrastructure Protection) Society needs to address key issues like how to ensure 24/7 operation, how to maintain business resilience and how to protect the citizens privacy so that their personal integrity is maintained? The challenge for the Digitized Service Society is that it is quite vulnerable - and that criticality is increasing day-by-day as more and more services and operations gets digitized. Two examples to visualize the impact of why we need to carefully plan and execute the CIIP Society:

• Estonia: April 27th 2007 - this is almost 7 years anniversary - Estonia was digitally disrupted - no Public Service was accessible and the banking system was brought down for more than 3 days. As the consequence the entire society was in a state of emergency. As a consequence NATO prioritized Cyber Warfare as a real threat. More on Wikipedia.    

• Danish Milk: Not the most serious of problems, but it can serve as a visualization of the cascade effects that digitized supply-chain break-down can have. On April 9th 2008 a major server break-down at the ordering system at dairy producer Arla's IT-vendor IBM, let to non-delievery of milk to a number of stores in all of Denmark. As you might know, Denmark is among the countries in the world with the highst consumption of milk - and hence no milk availability is a big issue. It took several days before the supply- and ordering chain were re-established and once more the normal - and highly effective - digitized supply-chain were working again. More on the break-down here (in Danish only).

Fourthly, there is a long term trend around automation and robotization. With respect to the latter, this is not happening tomorrow, but it will increasingly over the coming years impact the most vulnerable groups in the Society, as more and more low-cost, service-jobs will be handled by robots. In Japan a growing number of services are handled using robot-enabled capabilities - and the Danish Governments strategy on "Digital Welfare / Well-being" is assuming that many functions carried out by care workers, like vacuum-cleaning, lifting elders, bathing elders etc. becomes robot-enabled and hence the care-workers can spend more time with the elder (or with more elders). Again to make the robotized society work one need a strong digitized back-bone.

The flow of the Social Welfare is quite complicated - I'm not sure if the citizens understand, how many Governmental checks and balances are needed to ensure correct and "rule of law" compliant determination of Social Security and any other Public Sector benefit.

In relation to MIS-schemes I think that there are especially two areas that are critical. First there is the eligibility - can you or can't you receive the benefit - and why/why not. Secondly, the actual payment of the benefits or service delivery. Of course there are a number of prerequisites to being able to cope with these decisions in real-time / digitally. To mention the three requirements that I see as most important: Good Masterdata (so that you know what you need to know around the citizen), good PKI (so that you ensure that it is the right citizen, that gets the right service at the right time) and finally good communication infrastructure (so that you can enable all case workers in the country - and ultimate also the citizens). For deeper insight on the best practices on eGovernment and on how to digitize Public Sector, please review the presentations I gave (1, 2) during a conference last year hosted by the Mauritian Minister of ICT.

I'm pretty convinced that there is a clear link between the more ICT-mature countries and their advanced digitization and the evolved complexity of Social Security.

The model here is based on the development model 3 steps on the staircase of Social Security. Basis offerings are what the ILO labels the Social Protection Floor - these are universal rights that every citizen has the right to receive. Step 2 is the additional rights achieved either by tax-funded rights (which can be seen as an extension of the social protection floor - which is somewhat the case in the Nordics) and rights obtained through contribution - many additional Social Insurance schemes are based on contribution - like unemployment insurance. The 3rd step is the full contributory where individual based rights are granted, often without Government involvement. Private Pension can be seen as such a contributory element.

The more complex the composition of the social welfare model becomes the greater the challenge of digitizing the elements and to make sure that the system is running as efficient and lean as possible. Hence the claim that the countries with the most complex Welfare-systems also need to have the most mature solutions for Social Service Delivery.

Introduction of MIS-schemes are complex - which also the seminar clearly showed. The amount of work put into the pilot in Greece and the complexity of the Cypress reform of Social Security / Minimum Income Support is impressive. Still it was clear that there is a massive disconnect between those drafting the policies and the actual implementations. This came out quite clear, when Professor Dan Finn, gave his presentation around successful Service Delivery in Social Benefits and Social Security. Many of the facts presented somewhat echoed with my own presentation, especially on the need for benchmarks and performance management.

When I talk about a disconnect it is because there in many Social Welfare projects seems to be a lack of holistic understanding of the "end-to-end" process - which includes actual implementation and execution of the organizational transformation and the ICT-enablement.

Some of the observations that I and my team in our Public Sector Digitization Research Group (PSDRG) have done over the last couple of years with respect to Social Security Digitization are:

• They may attempt to completely replace existing systems in a single phase.
• They may struggle to integrate a social services system with other government components.
• They may have a rigid architecture which effectively creates new siloes, and which makes it difficult to take an holistic approach across all social services programs.
• They adopt rigid software solutions, which may offer certain out-of-the-box functionality, but which are very difficult to configure or extend for a jurisdiction’s or agency’s unique laws, regulations and other requirements.
• They may create a disconnect between the stakeholders involved in the digitization process, by inhibit customer dialog with the product vendors, which can create inefficiencies.
• They may forget that the process is holistic and that holistic inclusion of stakeholders are required to obtain success. 

I will in the near future elaborate further on these observations and how we from a best practice as well as a solution development and CEFA (Component Enterprise Functional Architecture) point of view believe that these inefficiencies can be eliminated.
  

From an ICT-enablement point of view there are a number of challenges when implementing a MIS-system. I focused in my presentation on 4 topics: 1) Complexity of rules, 2) Embracing the weak citizen, 3) Distinction between Objective rules/policies and subjective rules/policies and finally 4) Digital Payment. There are - of course - many other challenges with respect to sound, efficient and effective digitization - as outlined above there are a number of prerequisites that needs to be in place to really maximize effort. Other components that ought to be included is "how to fight EFC - Error, Fraud and Corruption" (those with interest in this subject, please read my white paper here presented at the ISSA Technical Seminar on Contribution Evasion:

#ISSA has opened for contributions at World Forum & Seminars - inc my own White Paper on Error, Fraud and Corruption: http://t.co/4Me0uXI6wK
— C Wernberg-Tougaard (@DigitizeSociety) April 6, 2014

Complexity of rules/policies: One of the things that characterize digitization today is the growing awareness that the old dogma of "uniqueness" is quickly fading away. What Governments do - in process terms - are quite alike all around the globe! But there can be tremendous differences between nations on how the actual Policies are formulated. This is why it makes such good sense separating Processes from Policies.

With respect to MIS-schemes the complexity of the scheme will almost certain require digitization - this as using a tool like Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) makes it possible for citizens to screen their eligibility or to process a claim request - based on the same rules/policies. Furthermore the fact that the policy is stored with all its variations over time, enables effective change of circumstances as well as it allows to do reconciliation based on new information. From an EFC perspective, the sheer fact that the computation of eligibility is M2M (Machine-to-machine), makes it impossible for the case-worker to interrupt the process/determination - ie. a case-worker can not withhold a citizen the right service or benefit, nor can a citizen "persuade" a case-worker to grant a benefit if not eligible.

From an ICT-enablement point of view there are also immense cost-savings by utilizing a methodology where the actual Law literally is constituting the "computer-code" on which the determination is done - without programmers, consultants, implementers etc. It actually means that Governments can put policy changes into effect in hours rather than years.   

Objective vs. Subjective Law Digitization: Another major challenge is how to cope with rules as they become subjective rather than objective from a digitization point of view. This is an interesting field of research and operational implementation realization. 

 
A bit later in the presentation I gave a short introduction to the challenges with introducing Subjectivity in Determinations - the basic approach is to assist the case-workers ability to make consistent and "rule-of-law" decisions. I'm a keen believer in holistic Government processes on "Ideas <-> Law <-> Policy <->ICT" as this workflow will provide a huge step forward for Public Sector Digitization. Among the leading countries in the world are Denmark, New Zealand and Netherlands. This "back-office" digitization should also be seen as a way to enable the aspiration between the OGP - Open Government Partnership - as it will introduce tremendous transparency to cause and effect of legal systems and actual policy implementations.

Digital Illiteracy: A major concern when drafting MIS-schemes and utilizing ICT, is that the majority of the recipients of benefits are not well-equipped for the digital world. They basically lack the skills to do self-service or self-screening, which is normally a required element in order to obtain efficiency of Public Sector Digitization. Nevertheless this should not discourage Governments to digitize MIS-schemes, as many of the controls and efficiencies are located in the back-office operation. If the poor/home-less are required to do "self-service" they could be offered assistance in a service center - or through a voluntary/NGO organizations, but this will in the digitized world require other and more advanced checks-and-balances to realize.

Digital Payment: Among the areas where innovation is moving quite fast is on payment-enablement and service provisioning. In Spain a "MIS"-payment card has been developed to allow Social Security recipients to pay with a multiplicities of options - with out actually paying out cash to the benefit receivers. Countries in Africa - most notably Kenya - has developed the M-pesa System to create mobile banking services without actually having a bank account. It is clear that both options - mobile banking via simplified SMS and via an actual debt-card for "Minimum Income" should be considered when drafting the holistic frame around MIS.

  
To exemplify some of the challenges with the 4 key areas, I gave a few examples of successful digitization and inclusion - as well as pointed out some of the above innovations used around the world to solve / overcome the challenges.





Recommendations and key things to remember: My final slide summarized some of the learning that I find it is important that Government officials and policy makers remembers when dealing with digitization and the realization of the Digitized Service Society. There are things that both the EU-commission and the Member States can do. The EU-commission - DG EMPL - should consider to collaborate more intensive with the ICT-vendor's and system integrators through strategic knowledge exchange. This is not done through dialog with EU Industry organizations, as they tend to be lack the deeper knowledge and public sector sub-segment expertize, but rather as a collaborative forum between key experts and advisors in a PPVP-scheme.

For Member States it is important to remember the following 4 key items:

1) ICT is part of the solution, but humans are still the most challenging "obstacle" to overcome. Implementing digitized services and methods often impact the way case workers work, and hence inclusion and information around impact is required. Implementing ICT for Minimum Income Support systems is 20% technology and 80% organizational change - and culture change. Therefore one should develop schemes to empower and include case workers in the implementation process.

2) No-one can eat an elephant in one bite. A phased approach is always a good idea. Many programs are too optimistic and too convinced that the combined effort of technology and organizational change can be overcome in one big bite. And too often this is not the case. The best practice advise is to make smaller phases and releases. A good example on a 4-year, multiple phases implementation of Social Welfare transformation is the ICM system implemented by British Columbia (Canada). It also shows good use of open and transparent communication to reduce worries among both by the citizens and the case workers. The program status and progress can be found here, inclusive of an online demonstration of their new privacy-enabled Case Management / Payment System.

3) Ensure that all parties in the implementation is part of the implementation. As a consequence of most Public Sector procurements, the actual software/hardware vendor is outside the team discussing implementation. This can have sever consequences in terms of additional spend and increased risks. I have on a number of projects asked customers to establish a collaborative task-force, combining senior public sector stakeholders - often both the CEO and CIO, as well as senior representatives from the System Integrator and the Software/Hardware stakeholders, to form an "Innovation Advisory Board" that can steer issues and enable direct 3-parties dialog to ensure the best possible implementation going forward.

4) And to enable the required foundation for Policy Automation - which is good master data. Actually I recommend that Governments should establish the "Golden Virtual Record" which at a given time is the best possible set of information that one have to make the most correct determination of eligibility. This is not an easy task. Countries like Denmark and the Netherlands have spend 30-40 years constructing core systems that could enable such a regime - and it will be quite challenging to streamline existing systems to provide the Virtual Golden Record. But taking one bite at the time, the goal might be reached sooner than later.

As always - comments and adds are more than welcome. Thank you for reading to the end.

At turde tænke nyt og radikalt anderledes

På ITB's årsmøde forleden var der et dobbelt fokus på digitaliseringen af undervisningssektoren - eller på undervisning.

Lars Løkkke fortalte som hovedtaler under middagen, om sine ideer og resultaterne med Løkke Fonden.






På jysk kan ordet sjovt både betyde "underholdende" og "mærkværdigt/mystisk/underligt" - og de første resultater fra Løkke Fonden er faktisk begge - for vel er det fantastisk godt at man på få uger opnår forbedringer på 2-3 læringsår hos "udfordrede" unge drenge - men omvendt er det udover al fatteevne, at man ikke i folkeskolen kan tilbyde en undervisning som fanger unge, motivere og driver dem fremad.

Men spørgsmålet er, hvordan kan vi rulle en grundlæggende transformation ud på tværs af folkeskolen - de første skridt er taget med reformen af folkeskolesystemet, men har vi tænkt tingene helt til ende ...?

Den første taler var Kenneth Johansen, som er adm. dir. i Oracle Danmark, og en god kollega. Noget af det, som han påpegede var, at vi ikke tænker visionært nok, når vi forsøger, at visualisere hvordan fremtidens brug af IKT vil være i den offentlige sektor. Som eksempel nævnte han, at hvorfor ikke lade den bedste lærer i Danmark i matematik på 3-klasse trin undervise samtlige elever i Danmark ? Gennem fx videolæring?

Ideen er rigtig god, men den skal tænkes ind i et holistisk tilgang til hvordan vi maksimerer IKT anvendelsen i folkeskolen. Jeg beskrev de overordenede linier i det nedenstående overfor ABT-fonden for 3-4 år siden, så det er ikke en ny tanke!

Der er behov for at tænke skolen, undervisning, læring, forældrene, lærerne og det offentliges behov ind i en samlet model for den digitale skole - som skal understøtte det fysiske møde i skolen.

•Eleven

•Har færdigheder til at bruge IKT

•Har internet adgang på såvel skolen som i hjemmet. Den nye skolereform kan bla. betyde, at der bliver mindre egentlige lektier hjemme.

•Man har online adgang til alle læringsmoduler – herunder video af ”best-in-class” lærer, som viser hvordan pensum skal forståes.

•Man kan se hvor man er i sin læseplan – man kan se sin fremdrift. Og man kan fx indføre ”stjerner” for at nå givne mål (et element at gamefication). 

 

•Læreren

•Grundlæggende færdigheder i at bruge digitale undervisningstilbud

•Hjælper såvel de fagligt svage som stærke med hele tiden at løse de udfordringer de står overfor.

•Kan i realtid se hvor den enkelte elev er, hvad for opgaver de har løst, hvor de er gået i stå, osv.

•Kan rette og hjælpe eleven online– man kunne overveje at tilbyde online hjælp i tidsrummet 8 – 22 gennem fx lærerstuderende.

 

•Cloud-baseret læringssystem

• For hvert klassetrin findes 1-2 digitalt læringssystem (CONTENT) som er tilgængeligt via nettet

•Læreren  giver lektier for og kan løbende se fremdrift og læringshastighed for hver elev

•De dygtige elever får automatisk støtte til større / flere udfordringer – de svage elever får automatisk nemmere og mere støtte fra læreren.

•De kan se en video med den bedste lærer/pædagog i DK forklare det de ikke forstår.

 

•Forældrene

•Kan følge deres barns komplette fremdrift, historik og læring over tid. De kan føre en dialog med læreren om barnet ift. konkrete svagheder i forståelsen.

•De kan se hvor barnet er med at nå sine læringsmål

 

•Det offentige / staten

•Det offentlige kan aggregere data fra dette online læringsmiljø, og få brugs-data, og fremdrifts-data samt læringssdata.

•Der kan filtreres på mange niveauer og sammenlignes over regioner, kommuner, lærer etc. Data som kan anvendes til at optimere læringen for alle elever.

•Danmark har en unik chance for at blive blandt de mest digitalt effektive læringssamfund – og for at skabe fundamentet for videnseksport på området.