Back in 1979 when I joined the Service the FCO effectively enjoyed a brilliant and droll monopoly over most of Whitehall for communicating quickly with foreign governments. If eg the Trade Department wanted to send a message to its opposite numbers in Japan, this is roughly what would happen:

 

  • The text would be typed up in the Trade Department
  • Then carried over to FCO in a van, or placed in a chunky cylinder and shot by air pressure along a series of tubes under Whitehall to the FCO Tube Room
  • FCO messengers would collect up the Tube messages at (very) regular but not necessarily frequent intervals and relay them on foot round to the FCO departments concerned
  • There the relevant desk officer would tweak the substance and perhaps add an elegant smirky manuscript correction or two to the grammar ("Egad. Another split infinitive."), before giving it to the ‘girls’ to retype on a special telegram form
  • The final version would be walked by messengers to the Communications Centre
  • Where the text would be retyped again on to long ticker-tape paper for feeding into the radio system and transmission to Tokyo.
  • The Embassy there would get it printed off, then retype it into a neat form fit for passing to the Japanese side.

All that was just fine until the fax machines and emails and cheap telephone calls came along. And Whitehall Departments started to communicate directly with their opposite numbers. The FCO was in effect ‘delayered’ for many key purposes.

 

Hence all the nervous obsessive attempts now to define the FCO’s role and get ‘Whitehall buy-in’ for its (and their) ever-changing strategic priorities.

 

The latest internal slogan is ‘More Foreign – Less Office’.

 

Hmmm.

 

My own role in this familiar story of technological developments leaving organisational structure far behind has been modest. But I did for a fleeting period act as a high-level FCO pioneer of e-ideas and nifty kit (such as voice-recognition software and the first PalmPilot fold-out pocket keyboard to make it into the FCO), after spending a year at Harvard from 1998-99 focusing mainly on how IT impacts on government.

 

At a senior management strategy meeting back in 1999 I asked why the FCO was laboriously re-organising itself into defined geographical ‘Commands’ and allocating budgets accordingly. Wasn’t that a bit … nineteenth century?

 

Surely (I said) the point was to know how much money was being spent round the world for different purposes in real time so that any surplus in X could be offered promptly to Y and Z who might be able to use it better? If that were set up the emerging apparatus of bickering Resource Management Units in each Command incentivised wastefully to hoard ‘their’ resources could be scrapped, in favour of a tiny group of people watching FCO spending as a whole round the clock on a handful of flickering computer screens.

 

The point, I insisted, was to use new IT to think quite differently. We should not continue to lurch tediously to and fro in organisational terms between Centralisation and Decentralisation. Instead we should capture the benefits (and avoid the disadvantages) of both – simultaneously.

 

Everyone under the age of 35 in the meeting (people brought up with computers) smiled and nodded vigorously.

 

Everyone over the age of 45 looked at me as if I were insane.

 

The subject was quickly changed. And the people over the age of 45 carried on (not) running the Office.