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Episode #116: George Johnston
171 Plays7 years ago
George Johnston is the founder of Nitrous, a platform to help startup companies collaborate with governments to ensure more sustainable and cost effective innovation. They also help government open and share their data through collaboration with other partners. George is also...
The post Episode #116: George Johnston appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to PolicyViz Podcast and Guest
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. And on this week's episode, we're again going to focus on open data, government technology, civic technology, innovation in government.
George Johnston's Background and Journey
00:00:22
Speaker
And to help me understand some of these terms and some of these concepts and what's going on elsewhere in the world, I'm very excited to have on the show, George Johnston, who's the founder of Nitris, which is a firm based in London that's facilitating innovation in the public sector there in the UK and starting elsewhere in the world. So George, welcome to the show.
00:00:40
Speaker
How are you? Hey, John. Great to be here. Yeah. Very well. Thank you. Very well. Good. Good. Rainy in London these days. Oh yeah. It's on top of all. Well, I want to talk about the government tech and civic tech and open data. But maybe we can start by having you tell folks a little bit about yourself and a little bit about nitrous, the group that you founded and what it is you and your team is doing in London.
00:01:04
Speaker
Sure, I guess I slightly my journey back in a company called HODL, which back in the day four or five years ago was the enterprise B2B success story.
00:01:17
Speaker
of the London texting. It unfortunately had a very poor exit recently so this is kind of bad timing to bring up my origin story but essentially at Huddle they were sending into large government which is very brave for a UK SME four or five years ago.
00:01:37
Speaker
So I learned very quickly some of the collaboration issues as well as opportunities with the UK government and particularly spent a lot of time working on the G Cloud framework, which we can talk about a bit later, which is a really cool thing. I set up a nitrous to essentially bridge that gap between growing scaling SMEs who had a real value proposition for government
00:02:04
Speaker
And of course government has a very large, in some cases bureaucratic organisation, really struggling to grab hold of some of the great tech out there and ultimately deliver that ROI to taxpayers.
00:02:17
Speaker
Interesting.
Open Data Initiatives in London
00:02:18
Speaker
Can you tell me a little bit about the open data scenario or situation in the UK? I'm familiar with it in the US and a lot of it is driven by local cities and local governments, but I'm not familiar with what's happening in the UK. Can you talk a little bit about what's happening with open data and open tech in the UK?
00:02:38
Speaker
Yeah, so I think probably the last three years or so, it's been really on the agenda. And one of the great examples of open data is probably with TFL, so Transport for London. And this is London's Transport Authority. So on a city level, the previous mayor, Boris Johnson, had a big mandate for TFL to release as much open data as they could.
00:03:02
Speaker
Essentially, that was stimulated from what was a cost savings efficiency environment where instead of spending a lot of money on big innovation projects, local government had to look at how can we engage the developers, the innovators, the data scientists, the startups.
00:03:22
Speaker
that sit outside of our organisation to help deliver better public services. And they have a very strong open data policy, having, I think, released now over 100 individual data sets, which are available via an endpoint online. And the local government, so you have the Mayor's Office, known as the Greater London Authority here in London, now taking
00:03:49
Speaker
a leaf out of TFL's book and developing its own London data store, which essentially will be a hub hopefully to bring together all of the different data sets to do with city living. So from garbage pickup to transport to energy and maybe to social services like paying your bills online, accessing your government services all online,
00:04:17
Speaker
So yeah, it's a new time for London's data.
Understanding GovTech vs. CivicTech
00:04:21
Speaker
Interesting. Are you seeing similar sorts of evolutions elsewhere in other cities around the country or is it really primarily focused in London? Yes, elsewhere in the country, there's some great initiatives happening in cities like Manchester. You always have an area with the West Midlands and the West Midlands
00:04:42
Speaker
combined authority, which essentially is kind of the collection of local councils or boroughs or towns in this area that are looking to join together to develop a joint open data strategy. And you see in the UK
00:04:58
Speaker
a lot more of that where you have individual areas surrounding cities, which we call boroughs, coming together to set policy. A lot more collaboratively, just I guess because of the scale of that location.
00:05:13
Speaker
We also have things called catapults in the UK. These are government-funded organisations modelled on some of the German education institutions to fund and to support certain areas of public sector focus. We have one that is dedicated to future cities, which has a testbed in Milton Keynes alongside Verizon 2020, it's an EU-funded project.
00:05:43
Speaker
to look into autonomous vehicles and to look into the data implications associated with that. So there's a lot going on elsewhere in the country, but London is certainly leaving. Right, really interesting. On the NYTRUS website, it talks about government tech and civic tech. Can you talk about what those two terms mean to you and what are they as concepts?
00:06:07
Speaker
Sure. There's a lot of buzzwords out there. No, not in the data field. Are you kidding?
00:06:15
Speaker
I mean, it is like another language. I remember when I first came to it, it was mind boggling. But you find off the scale of disruption that technology is playing. You hear lots of verticals having tech slapped at the end of them. So you've heard of probably FinTech, the Financial Services Disruption, or MadTech, the media and advertising. Essentially, as in public sector innovation space, the two main ones are GovTech and CivicTech. There is a
00:06:44
Speaker
broad range of definitions, but I think the best I've been able to come up with is GovTech essentially looks at the back office.
00:06:53
Speaker
It's looking at how can you bring to the table exciting, separate, agnostic B2B startups that can sell into government and therefore often go through procurement process, which has its own trials and tribulations, which we talked about, but essentially to be procured in to solve, innovate a battle for consumption, like maybe the data within an organization, increasing efficiency in HR or a department
00:07:23
Speaker
such as accountancy or legal providing maybe machine learning tools to handle things like HR requests anything that can improve cyber security of the firm or generate an efficiency which therefore saves costs and of course in government where it is very complex and very bureaucratic there is a lot of opportunity to drive efficiency through these technologies
00:07:51
Speaker
Right. That's gold tech. Okay. And then civic tech is then, if you flip that, and then you're looking at then the more sexy type of style art to be heard of CityMapper, which is a great, fantastic London success story. Those types of companies are then looking at delivery of better services, the things that touch actual citizens. They're the BBC businesses.
00:08:14
Speaker
And where you can't really procure those businesses, or you can't develop those businesses in most government organisations, you can support them to then deliver better services to your citizens.
Barriers to Government Data Accessibility
00:08:27
Speaker
And data is often a big part of that support.
00:08:29
Speaker
So we've had over the last few years an increase in the amount of data that we can get data sort of easier to get there's more tools but has there been a big block from government being able to get more data out there like is there a structural organizational barriers and just the way government is organized that hasn't allowed them to get this data out and then needs
00:08:51
Speaker
you know help from citizens and from startups and from small organizations rather than maybe big corporate cultures and a sort of a that sort of a wide ranging question but i guess at the core the question really is. What is it about government that makes it hard to make data more accessible to the people that it affects.
00:09:11
Speaker
I think it all comes down to the tools and the applications that are enabling this strategy and often government procurement is, as it is such a large and complex organisation, very disparate and therefore procurement frameworks are isolated to certain government departments
00:09:31
Speaker
And essentially, although it's a more democratic within the process, you do have a very disparate landscape of different tools and services. The box of Lego as it was popping out across London with all of these different tools and services that very often don't talk to each other.
00:09:49
Speaker
So I think it's very difficult to find a winning strategy when it comes to government when there are so many things and strategies happening at once. However, I think the most important thing is to understand when you're opening a data set, what is the ROI on doing that?
00:10:11
Speaker
What is the case study of how this data is going to improve a service or deliver a better innovation for government? And there's a lot of data sets, which I'll be honest are kind of useless. I mean, essentially taken from static data dumps and cleaned up and put online.
00:10:33
Speaker
developers that we've been to, they can't be doing much with it. So there's a lot more work to be done in consulting startups, maybe through structured programs, speaking with citizens, data scientists, so that side of government, to understand what is the data that you need, rather than this is just the data that we have sitting around and it's easiest to pull out there and tick an open data box.
00:10:59
Speaker
Right, right, right. And when you're working with government agencies, are you talking to the people that are on the front lines, you know, they are collecting the data, they're doing the analysis, because oftentimes, I wonder if one of the barriers is that someone who's on the front line, they're working with some data set, they don't see the ROI to making that data more accessible. And so I there's like multiple
00:11:23
Speaker
levels within any organization, but especially government. And so when you're working with government agencies, are you talking
ROI and Challenges in Data Monetization
00:11:30
Speaker
to people on the front line to try to make the case that open data is important for particular reasons?
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think very often we're speaking with department specific, also people that sit within say a marketing function or people, for example, in transport for London that sit specifically in the biking or the cycle function. So London has a fairly big public cycle buyer scheme, because in these individual departments, you need to understand what is the data they have available, and then understand
00:12:03
Speaker
and the applications that they need to be solving, where are the inefficiencies or the opportunities within their use cases, and then you try to think the two together.
00:12:13
Speaker
When you have a too broad data approach that maybe is too high within the organization, say a CIO or CDO level, so Chief Digital Officer or Chief Information Officer, sometimes the brief can be too large and you miss out a lot of very viable data sets which are hidden within pockets within the business because they might not necessarily be a big service, but as a team they are generating some really awesome data.
00:12:42
Speaker
So I think you have to bring those people to the table. You can't overlook them. Those conversations can get very technical. They can get very focused on their specific area, but you have to have them to understand the big picture. Interesting. So you've identified a few things already that are some of these barriers. So there's the tools and the technology, there's management and maybe the frontline folks. Are there other barriers that I haven't thought about that are not allowing government agencies to get those data out there?
00:13:10
Speaker
I think, so you can discuss technology, I think another area is the ROI, but with ROI, they have to spend money on building the platforms or computing the platforms to release this data. How can government get more ROI out of those datasets? Often innovating with data through third-party style arts innovators
00:13:35
Speaker
It has quite a long ROI, maybe a few years, so you can really see the benefit. And in terms of short-term opportunity, I think, and although it's controversial just to say, monetizing data is definitely something overlooked. And I'm not talking about necessarily monetizing the data itself. Open data is open data, and that should be expected. But the ecosystem that sits around that data, for example, the platform where that data can be accessed,
00:14:05
Speaker
potential tools, services, or apps that sit within that platform, or collaborative tools that allow developers to work together on that data.
00:14:15
Speaker
that in my opinion can be developed to provide value to these people and that value can be charged and that will allow government to politically and ethically monetize open data better and if we want to accelerate our open data strategies then we need to apply more commercial thinking where it's appropriate to how we release open data
00:14:39
Speaker
That is really interesting.
Models for Government Data Monetization
00:14:40
Speaker
Can you give me an example of what it would mean for a government to monetize its open data without, as you mentioned, without charging for access to the data? But what would a model of that look like?
00:14:50
Speaker
There's different models. One, for example, could be API throttling or more simple terms. It could be like a SAS model or a software as a service or freemium model. You have a certain amount of data which is free and that encourages innovators to get their hands on it. However, when it gets to a certain point, I'm going to use
00:15:15
Speaker
that open data and it gets to a commercial scale where you've probably raised funding and you can now afford it, why shouldn't you then be charged for then using that data? Especially when you're putting a lot of strain of resources onto the government platforms that are then deploying that data. The other model, and that still requires some little debate, or I think quite a lot because essentially you are still monetizing the data itself.
00:15:45
Speaker
Another model might be what if you provide tools and services that are very valuable to these innovators that they will pay for and those tools and services require that data to be valuable. So one example is imagine a platform which has this data available for free
00:16:04
Speaker
However, when you want to apply a cool natural language processing model to that data on this platform or invite 10 of your teammates or developer buddies to come in and collaborate on that data, then that's something maybe you have to pay for monthly as a membership. These types of models, after talking with developers,
00:16:28
Speaker
They have shown interest and they do see the value. So I think that's something to be explored. That's really interesting. So in some ways it's like upping the challenge of working with government, right? Because you are not only trying to encourage governments to be more open with their data, but you're also in some ways asking them to take on an additional sort of entrepreneurial task, right?
00:16:56
Speaker
creating a marketplace, as it were, for people to purchase access to the data in some way. So when you work with government agencies, how do you sort of sell that both of those things simultaneously? Are you taking a real gradual approach to this? Yeah, it is gradual. In the first case and working with government, you have to mitigate the risk as much as possible.
00:17:22
Speaker
To get your first pilot to get your foot through the door that enables you to create that case study to scale, you have to mitigate where possible. So for example, again, that's that previous example, maybe your minimum viable proposition is just having that data available on a platform for everyone to use. To them through value there, maybe then it's time to try, you know, charging for a couple of services on the platform that people might like.
00:17:50
Speaker
And then you might then say, well, this is working really well. Now let's do some API problem. You really do have to be careful with very big vision approaches.
Future of GovTech and Innovation Frameworks
00:18:00
Speaker
It is a part of the culture you have to respect in government that you can't go in as this visionary entrepreneur and mix things up too fast. If you want to limit your vision, you do have to play within that culture.
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. So before you wrap up, I want to ask what you see coming up next for GovTech, Civic Tech, innovation in the public sector. Yeah, I think there's lots of threats and opportunities. I think one of the threats is ensuring that the government innovation space doesn't go the same way as the corporate innovation space.
00:18:40
Speaker
So essentially, out-of-the-box innovation or accelerator models or incubating models which are sold into these organizations to create innovation. For example, in the private sector, you have so many of these different corporate accelerators which sit there trying to attract
00:19:03
Speaker
the next big FinTech, the next big MadTech, the next big MedTech idea. But the problem is, as a corporate in this space, as the incumbent, you can never attract the best companies in that space, the true disruptors, to work with you. The model is a complete paradox. So often these models, they become essentially marketing campaigns or CSR opportunities.
00:19:28
Speaker
To direct your innovation, you really do have to bring those true disruptors together with the incumbents. In government, you can do this. In government, you can, because government wants to attract disruptors, and the best disruptors will come to government, because government isn't profit motivated. It is not scared to work with those disruptors, and the disruptors aren't scared of being copied or snapped up by government. So, in their lives, that threat, but there is that opportunity
00:19:59
Speaker
I think the other thing is that it's the much better focus and work on procurement frameworks. So we've talked a lot about the open data B2C front office startups. However, for the back office, where the real cost savings are going to come into government, when we can rip out the old Lotus Notes and
00:20:18
Speaker
Horrible SharePoint implementations and make everyone love their jobs a bit better and create efficiency. We do have to improve the way the government prepares these startups. So a lot of the work that I'm doing is on procurement hacks. And this is a whole other conversation, but like procurement hack models to not circumvent, but to work within the current system.
00:20:42
Speaker
but enable more SME procurement. And the UK government has a strong mandate over the last few years to have, by 2020, one in three pounds of all procurement going to SMEs.
00:20:57
Speaker
So the landscape is very ripe for this here, but there does need to be policy changes at the top level because procurement hacks aren't sustainable in the long term. So I think that is a big thing to look at as well and want to watch out for.
00:21:13
Speaker
Really interesting. Well, I look forward to seeing what you and the rest of your nitrous team does and how open data evolves both in London and the UK and all across the world. So, George, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been really interesting. Thanks, John. That's been really fun. Thank you. Yeah. And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. If you have comments or questions, please do let me know. And that's all we have for this week. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis podcast. Thanks so much for listening.