Friday 28 February 2014

midata, mimegalomania



"Ernst Stavro Blofeld is a fictional character and a supervillain from the James Bond series of novels and films, who was created by Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory. An evil genius with aspirations of world domination, he is the archenemy of the British Secret Service agent James Bond. Blofeld is head of the global criminal organisation SPECTRE and is commonly referred to as Number 1 ..."

Thank you, Wikipedia, that's quite enough of that.

Bond, Blofeld and SPECTRE are all in another dimension. Fantasy. Let's get back to terror firmer ...

... terror firmer, and midata, the realistic and meticulously planned initiative thoroughly thought through by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) to empower the consumer, to nudge everyone into a better lifestyle and to make the UK economy grow.

How will midata empower the consumer?

By inverting the customer relationship management (CRM) whereby major suppliers currently sit at the centre of a web and manipulate us consumers and creating instead a world where the consumer sits at the centre, stroking his or her cat, and using vendor relationship management (VRM) to manipulate the suppliers. Each consumer's data will be under his or her own control, the suppliers will only see what the consumers allow them to see. That – according to BIS, or at least according to BIS's advisors Ctrl-Shift and Mydex – is the route to consumer empowerment.

If you can't make head nor tail of it, it's all explained better in a new post on the Mydex blog, Do people care about personal data? – yes, if they can get it easily!: "The business of living is easier if you are in a position to receive, without effort, the telemetry of your life" – says it all.

Maybe a picture will help. This one, for example, from the Mydex CEO's talk given last November:

David Alexander Mydex CIC CEO talk at BCS Nov 2013 Trust online (11'14")
There's the user, you see, manipulating various branches of government – HMRC, DWP, DVLA, ... – and puppetmastering huge suppliers – banks, phone companies, energy suppliers, ... – completely in control, empowered, right at the very centre of his or her own web.

Can you see that?

Or do you see ... Mydex, and a Cheshire cat's grin at the centre?

midata, mimegalomania



"Ernst Stavro Blofeld is a fictional character and a supervillain from the James Bond series of novels and films, who was created by Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory. An evil genius with aspirations of world domination, he is the archenemy of the British Secret Service agent James Bond. Blofeld is head of the global criminal organisation SPECTRE and is commonly referred to as Number 1 ..."

Thank you, Wikipedia, that's quite enough of that.

Bond, Blofeld and SPECTRE are all in another dimension. Fantasy. Let's get back to terror firmer ...

... terror firmer, and midata, the realistic and meticulously planned initiative thoroughly thought through by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) to empower the consumer, to nudge everyone into a better lifestyle and to make the UK economy grow.

How will midata empower the consumer?

RIP IDA – care.data

No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but, just in case it isn't obvious to all, IDA is dead.

IDA is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme. And it's dead.

----------

The care.data initiative is marketed on the basis that it would support medical research. As long as you only look at that aspect of HSCIC's initiative, it looks unimpeachable.

There are other points of view:
  • The Health and Social Care Information Centre are said by some to want to make money out of selling our previously confidential GP medical records. Is the objective health? Or wealth?
  • The claim that these records can be anonymised or pseudonymised is false. Why are HSCIC pretending that we can't be identified by our medical records when, in fact, we can?
The picture becomes more complicated. Our automatic trust in HSCIC begins to be undermined. MPs on the House of Commons Health Select Committee said on Tuesday 25 February 2014 that they didn't want their medical records to be bought and sold like a commodity and that they didn't trust HSCIC, so much so that they had already opted out of care.data.

Can you opt out? There is some doubt, identified by the tireless Professor Ross Anderson. HSCIC may still take your records from your GP even if you have opted out. They will pseudonymise the records before filing them. But that doesn't work. See above. You can still be identified.

At which point you start to ask yourself why there is this rapacious desire for our medical records. Is it just the research? There's already lots of research going on. Do we need more? Why wasn't care.data a priority ten years ago? Why now?

Is it perhaps that identification is the point of care.data? You don't know – but DMossEsq knows – that he over-produces calcium, great lumps of the stuff gather in his joints and occasionally make movement difficult. "Which mineral chosen from the following three do you over-produce ..." would be a good question to help to verify DMossEsq's identity. Only he knows the answer. At least until a few minutes ago. Now millions of people do.

care.data is something to do with the Government Digital Service's Identity Assurance Programme (IDA)?

There have been hints that that is the case.

In midata's marketing campaign for cretins, for example:

midata Innovation Lab (1'58")
midata would like your medical records (that's the nurse in the blue uniform, bottom right) and your travel records and your educational history to help to identify you. In addition to your banking records, of course, your mobile phone data and your utilities usage. All in your personal data store (PDS).

And there was a hint in the talk given in November 2013 by the CEO of Mydex. Mydex is a purveyor of PDSs. To midata. And to IDA, where it is one of the UK's five designated "identity providers". More than a hint – a detailed diagram:

David Alexander Mydex CIC CEO
talk at BCS Nov 2013 Trust online (13'29")
The blue cylinder at the top is HSCIC and the green lozenge underneath is DWP. The yellow, green and pink blobs to the right of DWP are your GP medical records, which fly all over the place via the "Government Citizen Identity Assurance Hub (when available)" in "seamless customer journeys" across the "open market for personal applications" with "innovation driven by market and NHS" – new apps to help you make the right lifestyle choices.

The whole structure is supported on Mydex (the purple bit) and its PDSs.

And there supporting Mydex is the trusty shield of tScheme, which "Gives you Confidence by independently Assuring that the Trust Services you are using meet rigorous Quality Standards". Even though Mydex isn't on the list of tScheme approved services or a registered applicant.

That's where your medical records are headed. Into the trusted "Integrated Customer Services Platform" (the great big blue lozenge to the left of DWP) of IDA.

RIP IDA – care.data

No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but, just in case it isn't obvious to all, IDA is dead.

IDA is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme. And it's dead.

----------

The care.data initiative is marketed on the basis that it would support medical research. As long as you only look at that aspect of HSCIC's initiative, it looks unimpeachable.

There are other points of view:
  • The Health and Social Care Information Centre are said by some to want to make money out of selling our previously confidential GP medical records. Is the objective health? Or wealth?
  • The claim that these records can be anonymised or pseudonymised is false. Why are HSCIC pretending that we can't be identified by our medical records when, in fact, we can?
The picture becomes more complicated. Our automatic trust in HSCIC begins to be undermined. MPs on the House of Commons Health Select Committee said on Tuesday 25 February 2014 that they didn't want their medical records to be bought and sold like a commodity and that they didn't trust HSCIC, so much so that they had already opted out of care.data.

Can you opt out? There is some doubt, identified by the tireless Professor Ross Anderson. HSCIC may still take your records from your GP even if you have opted out. They will pseudonymise the records before filing them. But that doesn't work. See above. You can still be identified.

At which point you start to ask yourself why there is this rapacious desire for our medical records. Is it just the research? There's already lots of research going on. Do we need more? Why wasn't care.data a priority ten years ago? Why now?

Monday 24 February 2014

care.data, midata & PSI/open data


Whitehall's Misfeasance in Public Office (MiPo) Express hurtles on.


Once again the UK's NHS (National Health Service) is in the news, this time as a result of its care.data initiative.

care.data is a threat to medical confidentiality. The campaign to protect medical confidentiality has been conducted by medConfidential, among others. The other day they were able to celebrate one battle won – the introduction of care.data has now been delayed for six months:


Congratulations to medConfidential. And also to the BMA (the British Medical Association) and to NHS England:
Tim Kelsey, national director for patients and information at NHS England, said:

“NHS England exists for patients and we are determined to listen to what they tell us. We have been told very clearly that patients need more time to learn about the benefits of sharing information and their right to object to their information being shared. That is why we are extending the public awareness campaign by an extra six months.”
The NHS already has access to patients' hospital records, which can be used to measure the performance of hospitals. That data is also an invaluable resource for medical research. The idea of care.data is for the first time to add patients' GP records to the hospital data to make an even greater resource for audit and for research.

An Englishman's relationship with his or her family GP (General Practitioner) is very personal and the thought of scores of strangers sifting through all our currently confidential records is bringing a lot of us out in spots. Few of us can make the case for the prosecution cogently. So let's hand that job over to Ben Goldacre, a doctor, the author of Bad Science, a journalist and public speaker, and an enthusiastic advocate of care.data.

Writing in the Guardian the other day, The NHS plan to share our medical data can save lives – but must be done right, he said that care.data ...
... is being put at risk, by the bungled implementation of the care.data project. It was supposed to link all NHS data about all patients together into one giant database, like the one we already have for hospital episodes; instead it has been put on hold for six months, in the face of plummeting public support. It should have been a breeze. But we have seen arrogant paternalism, crass boasts about commercial profits, a lack of clear governance, and a failure to communicate basic science properly.
"Bungled implementation"? "Plummeting public support"? "Arrogant paternalism"? "Crass boasts about commercial profits"? "A lack of clear governance"? "A failure to communicate basic science properly"? He doesn't seem to be very impressed with NHS England, does he.

Nor with Tim Kelsey:
Tim Kelsey is the man running the show: an ex-journalist, passionate and engaging, he has drunk more open-data Kool-Aid than anyone I've ever met. He has evangelised the commercial benefits of sharing NHS data – perhaps because he made millions from setting up a hospital-ranking website with Dr Foster Intelligence – but he is also admirably evangelical about the power of data and transparency to spot problems and drive up standards. Unfortunately, he gets carried away, stepping up and announcing boldly that no identifiable patient data will leave the Health and Social Care Information Centre. Others supporting the scheme have done the same.
The claim that patient records can be anonymised is false. DMossEsq readers know that – Professor Martyn Thomas told us last June. And Ben Goldacre agrees. He takes himself as an example and demonstrates in his Guardian article how he could be identified in a few simple steps even if his name, address and date of birth are not included in his medical records.

DMossEsq readers will also recognise this syndrome of evangelising "the commercial benefits of sharing NHS data" or any other Public Sector Information (PSI). We have come across someone else who's over-indulged in the Kool-Aid, in the form of Stephan Shakespeare.

"Forecasting future benefits is also hard to predict", he told us, and yet he felt confident that "it seems a straightforward decision to invest £143m to make Trading Fund data widely available is a relatively small price to pay to leverage wider economic benefits far exceeding this by orders of magnitude". Which is it? "Hard to predict"? Or "a straightforward decision"? It can't be both.

There's a lot of it about. Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt's midata project is another example: "A data-enabled online market place will create new services that will take your data and do some really interesting things with it". What "really interesting things"? Once it was put to the test in the midata Innovation Lab, the answer turned out to be none – no really interesting things, not one.

So much for the bold claim made for midata by Ctrl-Shift, the consultancy advising the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS): "Access to such data represents a ‘holy grail’ data to companies because it explains why people do what they do and predicts what they are going to do next". Not only would midata allow BIS to know the future but, conveniently enough, "Ctrl-Shift’s research finds that the market for these new streams of information could grow to be worth £20bn in the UK over the next ten years" (p.14).

Deceitful promises to be able to predict the future are familiar enough throughout history. The only innovation here is how small the Kool-Aid budget is at only £2 billion p.a.

As Ben Goldacre says:
Trust, of course, is key here, and that's currently in short supply. The NSA leaks showed us that governments were casually helping themselves to our private data. They also showed us that leaks are hard to control, because the National Security Agency of the wealthiest country in the world was unable to stop one young contractor stealing thousands of its most highly sensitive and embarrassing documents.
Trust has been punctured by the "crass boasts about commercial profits" and by the false claims as to anonymisation. As for the security of our centralised personal medical records, it's not just the behaviour of GCHQ and the NSA which raises doubts. Ben Goldacre is wrong there.

It's also the daily occurrence of breaches of security on the web. There is no such thing as a secure website. They don't exist. Any more than unicorns.

And where does NHS England's Health and Social Care Information Centre want to put our care.data? In the cloud – just take a look at the extract below from G-Cloud's sales figures as at November 2013. In the cloud where, as DMossEsq readers know, they are guaranteed to lose control of it:


Customer: Health and Social Care Information Centre





Supplier
For Month
Product / Service Description
Total Charge £(Ex VAT)
EMERGN LTD
Jul-13
Agile Coaching
9,900.00
Info-Assure
Nov-13
IT Security
8,820.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Aug-13
IaaS
9,500.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Aug-13
IaaS
9,300.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Sep-13
IaaS
9,300.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Sep-13
IaaS
9,500.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Sep-13
IaaS
52,618.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Sep-13
IaaS
49,560.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Oct-13
Compute
9,300.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Oct-13
Compute
900.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Oct-13
Compute
9,300.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Oct-13
Compute
9,500.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Oct-13
Compute
10,440.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Nov-13
IaaS
9,500.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Nov-13
IaaS
9,500.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Nov-13
IaaS
9,500.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Nov-13
IaaS
9,500.00
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
Nov-13
IaaS
9,500.00
Mastek UK Ltd
Oct-13
Agile Development for Identity and Access Management
73,458.64
Mastek UK Ltd
Oct-13
Agile Development for Identity and Access Management
75,433.74
Mastek UK Ltd
Oct-13
Agile Development for Identity and Access Management
42,236.82
Mastek UK Ltd
Oct-13
Agile Development for Identity and Access Management
24,308.96
Valtech Ltd
Aug-13
Spine 2 Agile development service: initial 10 week term to complete the supplier evaluation
100,000.00







560,876.16

The case he makes against care.data is so convincing that, understandably, as a supporter, Dr Goldacre gets a bit hysterical towards the end of his article ...
... we need stiff penalties for infringing medical privacy, on a grand and sadistic scale. Fines are useless, like parking tickets, for individuals and companies: anyone leaking or misusing personal medical data needs a prison sentence, as does their CEO. Their company – and all subsidiaries – should be banned from accessing medical data for a decade. Rush some test cases through, and hang the bodies in the town square.
"Just what the doctor ordered", you may say, "hang the bodies in the town square".

But no. There's no need for hangings. No need for grand sadism, as he puts it. NHS England have already irrevocably forfeited the trust of patients and GPs and a six-month delay isn't going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Dr Goldacre's faith in the transcendent virtue of care.data may be misplaced:
  • Knowledge of all their parishioners' personal data doesn't always help an agency to do good – it didn't stop the Child Support Agency spreading misery all around.
  • Auditing the hospitals didn't stop the atrocities of Stafford Hospital.
  • Nor did the best regulatory efforts of the Treasury, the FSA (RIP) and the Bank of England prevent the credit crunch of 2008.
  • There is no reason to believe that care.data would root out under-performing GPs any more reliably than the systems the NHS already has.
  • As to the benefits of research, the NHS already has masses of raw data to investigate, as Dr Goldacre tells us.
No more hysteria, please:
We have a golden opportunity in the UK, with 60 million people cared for in one glorious NHS ... the government ... have a good chance of saving a vital data project, and permitting medical research that saves lives on a biblical scale to continue.
And no more "arrogant paternalism" either. "Trust me, I'm a doctor"? Pace Dr Goldacre, we mere laymen are not too stupid to know what's good for us:
Opt-outs would destroy the data, and the growing calls for an opt-in system would be worse: opt-in killed people by holding back organ donation, and more than that, it would exacerbate social inequality around data, because the poorest patients, those most likely to be unwell, are also the least engaged with services, the least likely to opt in. They would become invisible.
The best of luck to medConfidential in the further battles to come over the next six months.

----------

Updated 26.2.14

Whitehall's Misfeasance in Public Office (MiPo) Express hurtles on.

On 23 February 2014 the Telegraph published Hospital records of all NHS patients sold to insurers:
... a report by a major UK insurance society discloses that it was able to obtain 13 years of hospital data – covering 47 million patients – in order to help companies “refine” their premiums ...

... “uniquely” they were able to combine these details with information from credit ratings agencies, such as Experian, which record the lifestyle habits of milllions of consumers.

The calculations were used to advise companies how to refine their premiums, resulting in increased premiums for most customers below the age of 50 ...
There was a helpful follow-up the next day –  Patient records should not have been sold, NHS admits. The records shouldn't have been sold. But they were. What is there to stop that happening again? Nothing, as Ben Goldacre had told us in his Guardian article, the HSCIC haven't worked out their procedures yet ...

... a subject which arose at yesterday's evidence session held by the House of Commons Health Select Committee. Three hours of unmissable TV during which officials refused to answer MPs' questions and MPs stated that they had already opted out of care.data because they don't trust HSCIC:



The Twittersphere distinguished itself during the course of the hearing. For example:



For those of you who don't have time to watch the proceedings or to plough through the tweets, some kind soul has summarised the matter in 3'50" flat, see Tim Kelsey discovers that care.data is in trouble:


What applies to the NHS's care.data applies equally to Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt's Open Data Institute (ODI). And to Stephan Shakespeare's related National Data Strategy for Public Sector Information (PSI).

And to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills's midata initiative.

And to the Government Digital Service's identity assurance programme, IDA (RIP) – and, thereby, to the whole business of transacting with government via GOV.UK. And to G-Cloud – if people (and companies and partnerships and trusts and charities and ...) can be inveigled into putting all their data in the cloud, they will voluntarily have lost control of it. Instantly.

They're all on the same express. The MiPO Express.

care.data, midata & PSI/open data


Whitehall's Misfeasance in Public Office (MiPo) Express hurtles on.


Once again the UK's NHS (National Health Service) is in the news, this time as a result of its care.data initiative.

care.data is a threat to medical confidentiality. The campaign to protect medical confidentiality has been conducted by medConfidential, among others. The other day they were able to celebrate one battle won – the introduction of care.data has now been delayed for six months:


Congratulations to medConfidential. And also to the BMA (the British Medical Association) and to NHS England:
Tim Kelsey, national director for patients and information at NHS England, said:

“NHS England exists for patients and we are determined to listen to what they tell us. We have been told very clearly that patients need more time to learn about the benefits of sharing information and their right to object to their information being shared. That is why we are extending the public awareness campaign by an extra six months.”
The NHS already has access to patients' hospital records, which can be used to measure the performance of hospitals. That data is also an invaluable resource for medical research. The idea of care.data is for the first time to add patients' GP records to the hospital data to make an even greater resource for audit and for research.

An Englishman's relationship with his or her family GP (General Practitioner) is very personal and the thought of scores of strangers sifting through all our currently confidential records is bringing a lot of us out in spots. Few of us can make the case for the prosecution cogently. So let's hand that job over to Ben Goldacre, a doctor, the author of Bad Science, a journalist and public speaker, and an enthusiastic advocate of care.data.

Sunday 23 February 2014

Weight Watchers: try the new low HB diet

What is weight?

You know the answer to that one. You went to school. It's a force.

And what do we know about forces?

They're something to do with acceleration. F=ma. Force = mass times acceleration. That's what Newton said.

When DMossEsq was at school, 300 years after Newton, we were taught that here on planet Earth the rate of acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 metres per second per second. It's fixed. So how come different people have different weights?

Answer, because they have different masses, obviously, so if you want to reduce your weight, you need to reduce your mass.

But what is mass?

Newton kept pretty quiet about that question. Or so we were told at school. But things have moved on now.

Now we know that particles have mass because Higgs Bosons give it to them. No Higgs Bosons, no mass. If you want to reduce your mass and, thereby, reduce your weight, you need to stop eating Higgs Bosons. You need to eat food that is low in Higgs Bosons. A healthy diet is a low-HB diet.

It is unbelievable that the marketing men haven't already unleashed a blizzard of advertisements for low-HB food. And it's downright irresponsible of the UK health fraternity not yet to have set up a single HB watchdog. Where is our HB Tsar? Are expectant mothers to be allowed to continue consuming Higgs Bosons to their heart's content with no thought for the baby? How many HB trawler research projects have been funded so far? None. Use an HB trawler before boarding a plane and the airlines could charge less for your ticket as less fuel would be required for your flight – new dry-cleaned and freshly pressed Higgs Bosons could be returned to you on arrival, adding 10 years to your life expectancy. The possibilities are endless and the authorities don't seem even to have started yet. It's pitiful.

They'll catch up, though, in the end. Just remember when you're filling in your requirements on a dating website and you see your first chance to specify HB preference, you read it here first.

© Weight Watchers 2014 – not a single reference to the Higgs Boson

Weight Watchers: try the new low HB diet

What is weight?

You know the answer to that one. You went to school. It's a force.

And what do we know about forces?

They're something to do with acceleration. F=ma. Force = mass times acceleration. That's what Newton said.

When DMossEsq was at school, 300 years after Newton, we were taught that here on planet Earth the rate of acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 metres per second per second. It's fixed. So how come different people have different weights?

Answer, because they have different masses, obviously, so if you want to reduce your weight, you need to reduce your mass.

But what is mass?

Wednesday 19 February 2014

The science of political strategy



Public service reform: credible treatment requires bold diagnosis:
... imagine a centre which saw its role as based not on power, control of money and regulation but influence, expertise and networks. What a happier, more attractive, more open and mroe effective place Whitehall would be.
Digital Efficiency Report
Cabinet Office
November 2012 (p.19):
If the proportion of savings estimated to relate to staff costs (from Fig. 6) is applied to the total estimated annual savings and then divided by an average cost per FTE [full-time equivalent, what we used to call a "person"], this amounts to a total FTE savings estimate of at least 40,000.
----------

 Public service reform: credible treatment requires bold diagnosis:
David Moss on Your comment is awaiting moderation. Tue, 18th Feb 2014 2:08 pm

… from a passing reference he makes to expanding the work of the Government Digital Service, it seems Cruddas knows an incoming Labour Government should try to preserve the best of what is going on in the Cabinet Office …

The Government Digital Service (GDS) have created GOV.UK which replaces the previous central government departmental websites. GOV.UK supports Whitehall’s publishing requirements, just as the previous websites did. Net progress – nil.

The progress GDS is aiming at is to make public services digital by default, as called for by Martha-now-Lady Lane Fox in her revolution not evolution paper. The revolution involves centralising policy-making and budget control and news dissemination in GDS. Centralisation on steroids.

For digital by default to work citizens have to be able to transact with government on-line. Two problems.

Firstly, something like 16 million people in the UK can’t or won’t transact on-line.

Second, for those of us who can and will, we all need to be identifiable on-line. We need the on-line, dematerialised, digital equivalent of an ID card.

For that, GDS have the Identity Assurance Programme,IDA. IDA is already late. It creates a new institution in the unwritten British Constitution – the “identity provider” (IDP). GDS have five IDPs.

Will the British public trust these IDPs with all their personal data? Will companies trust them? It’s unlikely. The media are full of stories all day every day about breaches of security on the web. If even US military contractors can’t protect themselves – and they can’t – why should the IDPs be able to? No reason.

Without IDA, it is impossible for GDS to move on from publishing to transacting. Which is why the dial on their “transformation dashboard” is stuck stubbornly at 1 – of 25 transformation projects on the table, only 1 has gone live.

GDS show no sign of being able to get IDA off the ground. They also seem to have a blind spot about security. They just can’t take it seriously.

If Mr Cruddas is relying on GDS for transformation, he may like to consider the points above.

He may also care to consider GDS’s promise, if digital-by-default ever does take off, to make 40,000+ public servants redundant, replaced by intelligent software agents and applications program interfaces. That would be the effect of the Lane Fox prerogative – massive centralisation and standardisation. Let us hope that IDA remains late for a long time to come.

The science of political strategy



Public service reform: credible treatment requires bold diagnosis:
... imagine a centre which saw its role as based not on power, control of money and regulation but influence, expertise and networks. What a happier, more attractive, more open and mroe effective place Whitehall would be.
Digital Efficiency Report
Cabinet Office
November 2012 (p.19):
If the proportion of savings estimated to relate to staff costs (from Fig. 6) is applied to the total estimated annual savings and then divided by an average cost per FTE [full-time equivalent, what we used to call a "person"], this amounts to a total FTE savings estimate of at least 40,000.

Monday 17 February 2014

Skyscape – the Surprise as a Service company

It was such a surprise that everyone can remember where they were the day that Skyscape Cloud Services Ltd won the contract to host GOV.UK.

Skyscape was so young then that the company hadn't even submitted its first set of accounts to Companies House. One man alone owned all the shares in the company. There was plenty of competition from long-established cloud services companies with measurable track records. How did Skyscape beat them?

How did Skyscape go on to win contracts with the MOD? And HMRC? And the Home Office?

How did they qualify for pan-government accreditation?

Last month Skyscape surprised the world again with its open letter to the Government Digital Service and the Government Procurement Service. G-Cloud sales are rising "exponentially", they said, but that's not fast enough for Skyscape. G-Cloud is transforming government IT, they said, but again, not enough. Were they really saying that G-Cloud isn't working? And won't work, as currently designed?

There is a mystery exercising some of us about that open letter of Skyscape's. How did they get Bird & Bird to sign it?

Bird and Bird are solicitors. Red hot, no doubt, at drafting agreements, what are they doing signing a public complaint about operational matters drafted by a little splinter group of malcontents and addressed to what must be Bird and Bird's (prospective) clients?

While we were all pondering that, Skyscape slipped in yet another surprise. They submitted their 2013 statutory accounts to Companies House. 19 pages of surprises. They need to be rationed. You can have one now, just to be going on with.

Skyscape have used the Business review and future developments section of the Directors' report to do a hard sell. Among other things, the directors say:
With a current G-Cloud market share of circa 50%, Skyscape is the leading supplier of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the UK government's G-Cloud framework and delivers services directly to an increasing range of government departments including ...
50%?

A company that barely existed a year ago has been given 50% of G-Cloud business?

Is that the sign of a market operating efficiently?

What's the point of any other suppliers trying to sell through G-Cloud?

Those and many other questions would need to be answered if the 50% claim was accurate but, as it happens, it isn't.

Let's assume that a "current G-Cloud market share" is a share as at 23 December 2013 when Skyscape's accounts were signed. G-Cloud have published their sales figures to the end of November 2013 and Skyscape account for £1.3 million out of a total of £77.8 million. 1.7% of the G-Cloud market. Not 50%.

As for being the "leading supplier" of IaaS, according to the G-Cloud sales figures again, Skyscape do precisely no IaaS business, they make their money out of hosting, compute and storage. G-Cloud's IaaS business, such as it is, goes mainly to Intechnology plc. N Please see update below, 23 February 2014.

What will Skyscape come up with to entertain us next?

----------

Updated 23 February 2014

N Alan Mather has kindly corrected a DMossEsq mistake here.

Search through the November 2013 sales figures for G-Cloud, looking for occurrences of "IaaS", and you find 15 of them as follows:
Lot
Supplier
Product / Service Description
Total Charge
£(Ex VAT)
4
Actica Consulting Ltd
IaaS procurement
11,900.00
4
Actica Consulting Ltd
IaaS procurement
12,275.00
4
Actica Consulting Ltd
IaaS contract set-up support
11,175.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
9,500.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
9,300.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
9,300.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
9,500.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
52,618.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
49,560.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
9,500.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
9,500.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
9,500.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
9,500.00
1
INTECHNOLOGY PLC
IaaS
9,500.00
1
SPECIALIST COMPUTER
CENTRE
GCLOUD IAAS VPN
TERMINATION
4,120.00







226,748.00

No sign of Skyscape in the list, and thus the "Skyscape do precisely no IaaS business" comment above.

But that's not how you do it. The G-Cloud framework is divided into four Lots – 1, 2, 3 and 4 – and the whole of Lot 1 is classed as IaaS, see G-Cloud ‘Simple’ Procurement Instructions:
  • Lot 1 - Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
  • Lot 2 - Platform as a Service (PaaS)
  • Lot 3 - Software as a Service (SaaS)
  • Lot 4 - Specialist Cloud Services
On that basis, Skyscape had 38.86% (£1,299,765.53) of G-Cloud's IaaS business (£3,344,877.25) which, in some circles, could be described as "circa 50%", as long as you don't accidentally give the impression that you have 50% of the total market (£77.8 million) when, in fact, you only have 1.7%:
With a current G-Cloud market share of circa 50%, Skyscape is the leading supplier of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the UK government's G-Cloud framework and delivers services directly to an increasing range of government departments including ...

Updated 18.8.17

Just to keep DMossEsq's millions of readers bang up to date, it should be noted that Skyscape changed its name a year ago to UKCloud, please see Skyscape Cloud Services relaunches as UKCloud.

Why did they change their name? ElReg suggest that Skyscape rebrands to UKCloud following legal challenge by Sky. Computer Weekly magazine seem to agree, please see The Sky's the limit: Why UK Cloud has become the new name for Skyscape Cloud Services. Diginomica magazine ditto, David v Goliath – Skyscape rebrands as UKCloud after taking Sky to court.

ElReg et al may be partially right but "UKCloud" is undeniably a more appropriate name than "Skyscape". UKCloud's strategist Bill Mew argued in January this year that organisations including government departments are wrong to trust the big US cloud suppliers. In Only one cheer for the government’s public cloud endorsement he singled out Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure (Microsoft) in particular. It would be wrong to trust them with your data.

He says you'd be safer using UKCloud, who respect data sovereignty.

So now it's not just UKCloud v. Rupert Murdoch's Sky but also UKCloud v. Amazon and UKCloud v. Microsoft ...

... and UKCloud v. GDS, the Government Digital Service – Mr Mew is not impressed with GDS's failure to argue in favour of UK data sovereignty. DMossEsq agrees. GDS have consistently shown a complete lack of interest in the matter.

"... it was this largely inaccurate perception that public cloud is less secure than private cloud that was the main factor holding back cloud adoption. GDS’s recent very clear rebuttal of this central perception and its clear endorsement of public cloud is therefore very welcome", says Mr Mew. Cloud security is a problem and GDS saying it isn't won't comfort anyone.

Cloud security is a problem. And so is data sovereignty in the cloud. They always were and they still are. The case for cloud remains ... insubstantial.