I meant to post some thoughts last week on the story picked up by BBC News that Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC) had launched an online tool with the same name (MyPolice) as that used by a promising social enterprise. However, I’ve not had a chance to familiarise myself with the detail, so shall simply wish Lauren and the team at MyPolice well and comment on some more general thoughts and observations around a challenge inherent in public sector working and the power of people and markets.

At the very least, and as almost every webmaster will likely testify, the story is a reminder of the importance of securing your online presence from both competitors (however indirect) and so-called cybersquatters. Public sector and project management professionals might also cite the importance of effective “stakeholder engagement and management”. The former is relatively easy to achieve, the latter less so.

Effective stakeholder engagement and management can be a real challenge. Take just that portion of the public sector that covers criminal justice. We find a range of departments and agencies: from the Home Office and Ministry of Justice, through to HMIC, the National Policing Improvement Agency, the National Offender Management Service and the Crown Prosecution Service (to name but a few).

Each organisation will typically have their own mission, their own performance measures, their own culture, their own strategy, their own politics (small p), their own set of policies, their own set of new initiatives and their own existing services. These organisations also often have local, regional and national management layers.

The result is a rather complex set of interconnected institutions and individuals. On this basis alone, working within or across the criminal justice system (aka x-CJS) can easily become time-consuming and challenging (and that’s before we start to actually tackle a problem such as reducing offending subject to resource constraints in a political and big-P political environment). Something like the MyPolice case was therefore going to happen sooner or later, has no doubt happened before and will surely occur again.

The Government has itself recognised the challenge of co-ordinating and joining-up service delivery, especially with respect to the development of online services. After a period when it struggled to maintain the integrity of its online presence, it has now taken steps to ensure DirectGov is recognised (by policymakers as well as citizens) as the ‘go-to’ place for accessing online services provided by government.

Jumping ahead a little, it is likely that with the decentralisation of decision-making that may follow the coming election and a move towards a greater role for the private and third sectors, there is set to be a proliferation of new online services - offered by organisations such as MyPolice and others that don’t even exist yet. Citizens will be offered and choose to use the new services, perhaps even in preference to existing government-created channels accessible via DirectGov. This is likely to pose a challenge for the government: they may be hard-pressed to keep track of the various new services offered by non-governmental actors and may be reluctant to implicitly endorse or support them (given DirectGov’s core value of trustworthiness).

However, the expectation must surely be that if government doesn’t make the “right” decision (whatever that might be) or provide the “right” service in response to the challenge, for whatever reasons, then the emerging market of both private and social entrepreneurs will move to correct it (case in point: MyPolice providing a new feedback service for the public or indeed Viscero’s work on victims and witnesses). By the same token, whatever the detail behind the MyPolice case and whatever the eventual outcome, it’s pretty safe to say that “the good will out”. And that, with perhaps a dash of optimism, is the power of people and markets.