Lessons from the community unlocked
By Alan Mitchell
Published: March 24 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 24 2008 02:00
W hen Andy Buck, head teacher at a state school in the UK, wanted to implement new government policies relating to community cohesion, he sought information from several sources. Finding useful answers to his questions proved difficult, however. Either he could not find the right source or the answers were no help or he did not trust their provenance.
But then he telephoned The Key, an in-novative service set up by two UK government-sponsored agencies. "I got an answer that went straight to exactly what I needed. I was able to make a decision almost instant-ly," he says, from his office at the Eastbrook-Jo Richardson Partnership school in Essex.
The Key is an experimental "prob-lem-solving community", a new type of service that tries to combine human beings' ability to understand significance and meaning with the efficiencies of new technologies. It is a break from the top-down script-driven concepts usually used in such services, with different economics and with the pot-ential to be applied to virtually any sector.
The Key is being provided by Ten UK, a lifestyle services company that has also laun-ched a "green concierge", which answers people's questions about how to make their lifestyle greener using the same principles.
The core principles behind The Key - a tightly focused community facing similar problems and letting individuals' questions define the con-tent of the information provided - could be applied to countless other situations in public and private sectors, says James Crab-tree, director of public policy at the Institute of Public Policy Research. It was as a former policy adviser at the UK prime minister's policy unit that he became interested in The Key's innovative principles.
In The Key's first phase, school leaders phone or e-mail questions to researchers who find the best possible answer from official sources, experts and published res-earch. The researchers, some of whom are former school leaders, compile a full answer, with references, sources and suggestions for further reading, and tag it for future reference.
At first sight, the model looks econ-omic nonsense. Paying for hum--an beings to research answers to tricky questions from potentially 20,000 school leaders, one by one, would be expensive.But they are all facing similar problems; and the more times a question comes up, the lower the cost per answer. The aim is to manage the resulting information so that each ans-wer adds to an ever-expanding knowledge base. In the first four weeks, half the questions required new research. At three months, nearly 90 per cent could be answer-ed using existing content.
Now The Key is moving to its second phase. Previously answered questions are being transferred to the internet so school leaders can access the knowledge base directly.
If this phase works, the researchers will be needed only to answer new questions and to update ans-wers to old ones. The goal is to turn ignorance (individuals' questions) into a valuable resource. "It frees users from having to keep on reinventing the wheel," says Mr Buck.
So far, in the 1,200 schools in the pilot, the experiment seems to be working. Research by the Training and Development Agency for Schools, one of the two government agencies running The Key, reports nine out of 10 users saying it has saved an average of five hours per question. In addition, most say it has improved the way the school works because better decisions are made more quickly. Some say it is "like having another member of staff", says Yvette Tomlinson, The Key's project leader at the TDA.
Making the principles work re-mains a challenge, however. "Everything about the service has to be designed by the user," says Ms Tomlinson. This applies not only to information content but to the structure of the website (designed around number and type of questions asked), and the language (the words actually used by school leaders in their questions, rather than the language used by policymakers or government officials).
Cost management is crucial if the problem-solving community concept is to work economically. If a community is too diffuse, the same questions will not be repeated and costs will quickly spiral. Costs will also rise too high if too many users continue to opt for phone and e-mail questions rather than web self-service. On the other hand, if the volume of phone and e-mail questions falls too low, the knowledge base will be less useful.
The big question, however, is whether politicians and civil servants will let policy implementers rather than policymakers set the information agenda in this way. It is vital that users remain confident that answers remain free from bias.
"There has to be a sense of ownership, of the profession talking to itself. If it's seen as pushing a government agenda it will lose credibility immediately," says Mr Buck.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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