For several years, until very recently, I had been traveling with a very beaten up and dog eared passport. The photo page had already started to de-laminate when I received it new from the British Embassy in Washington DC.

Despite the increasingly critical state of the lamination and it's generally dodgy appearance and I never once had a serious problem crossing a border with it. Sure enough the occasional immigration officer would take an extra long look at the passport, then at me and then at the passport again and then at me again before eventually stamping it and letting me pass. My progress through immigration was generally a little longer than those around me due to the suspicious state of my passport. However, I was never seriously delayed.

Three months ago I had to renew my old beaten up passport at the UK Passport Office in London. I am now the proud owner of a brand new shiny, embossed, hologram'd, bio-metrically encoded UK passport. Now I could look forward to speeding through immigration controls with the ultimate in secure, modern, identity documentation. That's what I thought anyway...

I flew to the UK for the day on Thursday this week and discovered to my surprise that despite being in possession of new state of the art passport, the immigration check actually took longer than it had done in the past. How could that be?

It turns out that the immigration officer now has to use a scanner to process these new enhanced passports. The scanning process would appear to be imperfect i.e. it took the immigration officer three attempts to get a clean scan of the document. As a percentage of the total time I was standing in front of the officer over three quarters of this time was spent looking down at the machine and trying to get it to work. Question: Is this meant to make citizens of the UK feel better about their border security?

Hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary development have given humans the most phenomenal signal processing and pattern recognition abilities. No digital system comes close to matching the power of our analogue signal processing capabilities. The professionals that control our borders have put these biological advantages to powerful use. Immigration officers, like customs and police officers, develop an innate ability to pick up on minor signals given off by the bad guys: voice stress, sweating, pupil dilation, nervous twitches etc. These tell tales are absolutely the best way of detecting whether someone is being evasive or not. It's going to be a very long time before any digital system can match sensory and pattern matching powers of the human system.

If you want to stop the wrong people crossing your border the best strategy is to have a skilled and highly experienced immigration officer looking cooly into the eyes of the person presenting their credentials, observing their behavior while engaging them in conversation and questioning. When the immigration officer's attention is diverted by an inefficient digital process then borders control processes are much less effective than they would be if we relied on human intuition alone.

No digital system is perfect and there is no such thing as perfect security. Policy makers might feel good about the fact that our passports now have these fancy digital chips embedded in them. However, any security professional will tell you that it's only a matter of time before the bad guys find a way to hack, spoof or circumvent this technology. The fundamental problem is that this layer of digital enhancement is in danger of giving us a false sense of security. Becoming dependant on these new digital tools runs the risk of us believing what they tell us even when our old analogue intuition system says something different.

As technologists we have a responsibility to ensure that policy makers and the organizations implementing this type of system are aware of the limits of technology. Where technology effectively enhances human capabilities it can be a very powerful tool. However, technology is too often seen as a panacea which replaces rather than enhances human capabilities. That is a very slippery slope which we start down at our peril.

I was on a panel session at our Government Leaders Forum in Berlin this week. Andrea Di Maio from Gartner did a great job moderating a discussion about the the impact of Web 2.0 on government services.

During the lunch break I was chatting to one of the delegates. His government is undertaking a foresight exercise to try and figure out what the structure of government might look like 15 years from now. Now forecasting 15 years out on any subject, let alone one as complex as the structure of government is an impossible task. However, he asked for my view on the subject so I took a stab at it.

The only thing you can really do when trying to look out this far is to extrapolate the trends you see today. Barring some totally disruptive event this approach should at least help narrow the range of alternative scenarios.

What are some of the trends we see in government around the world today?

1. Budgetary pressures forcing the downsizing and streamlining of government
2. Citizen pressure for improved quality and convenience of government service delivery
3. Increasing challenges in attracting and retaining top talent to work in public services
4. Outsourcing of government service delivery to the private sector

Budgetary pressure is perhaps one of the biggest drivers for many governments around the world. The ability of government to continue to generate operating revenues through ever higher levels of taxation is limited and politically unacceptable. These pressure mean that, over time, the era of government as the largest employer in the economy is likely to be coming to and end.

Citizens have ever higher expectations about the quality and means by which services are delivered. From healthcare to filling your taxes, citizens expect higher quality, convenience and delivery at a time and place which fits with their schedule rather than the governments. Unfortunately these demands run headlong into the very budgetary and financial pressure outlined above. Any long term restructuring of government will need to reconcile these two opposing forces.

The final trend is perhaps one of the most challenging for many governments. Even when it is possible to continue to fund the breadth of required government services the limiting factor is quite often the ability to hire and retain the technical and managerial talent required to implement and run these operations. In particular, access to technical skills is a critical factor for many governments. The complexity of modern, integrated, government service infrastructures is huge and yet many governments lack the required world class skills in architecture design, project and operational management that one would find in most large private sector organizations. There are many reasons for this but comparative salaries between the private and public sector and the lack of long term technical career tracks or perhaps two of the biggest.

In some ways the combination of the first three trends is driving the fourth trend listed above. We increasingly see governments looking to the private sector as a quick fix for the pressures they face. Outsourcing government services and the operational and technical infrastructures to implement them are a rapidly growing trend. Unfortunately, experience is demonstrating that the wholesale offloading of a problem to the private sector does guarantee result in any service improvement for citizens or even significant budgetary savings. 

Each of these trends has been present for a number of years and it's difficult to see a situation where they will not continue to be import drivers for public policy makers in the future. If we extrapolate these trends out 15 years what might a prototypical government structure look like?

In summary I believe that the future structure of government will likely have the following characteristics:

1. Almost all operational service delivery across the business of government moved from internal public sector organizations to a new public/private sector delivery model
2. Massive reductions in public sector operational service employment
3. The public sector will become a core of highly talented, policy and strategic planning and process/service design expertise

The outsourcing trend is not going to end any time soon. However, the current model of wholesale outsourcing is already proving to be ineffective. Over the next 10 years new integrated public/private sector models will be developed. These new models will find a way to blend the operational and quality advantages of a private sector lead approach while at the same time integrating balanced scorecards which reflect the broader priorities of governments i.e quality of services delivery for citizens, access to services by disadvantaged sectors of society, affordability etc.

The root effect of these new public/private service models will be that most of today's public sector employees engaged in operational service delivery will no longer work for the public sector. They will become private sector employees. Hopefully the benefit to employees of this move will be higher salaries and more flexible career opportunities. These new structures and benefits will also make it easier to attract and retain a higher level of talent which in the long term will continue to improve the quality of service delivery to citizens.

As the public sector sheds the burden of operational service delivery the focus will be able to return to the core competency of government i.e. the development of policies which focused on improving social and economic development. Combined with these new service delivery structures this should provide governments with an ability to be more responsive and impactful to the ever changing challenges of their societies. It will be critical for government to retain control over the strategic planning, process and architecture design skills which are needed to implement these new creative public/private services delivery models. This return to a core focus will, in my view, enable governments to become an attractive place to work for those highly talented individuals who want to have an impact in their societies. Government will have the potential to become a very attractive place to work for societies most talented managerial and technical talent.

This is a cool example of why I love spending time with customers an policy makers at this type of forum. You find yourself being confronted by this type of question which then gets you to think about a problem or issue you had not considered before. This was my first stab at an answer this this delegates question. I'd be interested in understanding what other people think.