Friday 17 April 2015

RIP IDA: Policy as a Dashboard (PaaD)

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, now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)",
is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme.
And it's dead.

Here's a selection of GDS posts and a film in the week leading up to purdah:

24-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Chris Mitchell
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
26-03-2015
Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn
26-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
David Rennie
27-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
Mike Beavan
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Liam Maxwell
30-03-2015
Martha Lane Fox

Let's take a look at Janet Hughes's 25 March 2015 offering, New hopefuls join the cortège for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) ... something like that.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) have managed to appoint nine "identity providers" for the second phase of the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) obsequies. You could respond with the obvious objections yourselves.

But there is something new in Ms Hughes's post:
Procurement 2: New identity suppliers to join GOV.UK Verify

We've completed our procurement exercise for a new framework for certified companies ...
Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO, executive director of GDS and senior responsible owner of the pan-government identity assurance programme now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)", has strict rules for the vassals in his manor. "Be consistent, not uniform", for example.

You risk eternal damnation if you break these rules.

Not least in the case of: "Don't procure, commission".

What was Ms Hughes thinking of? Not only has she embarked on a procurement exercise, she admits (a) to having completed it and (b) to the fact that it's the second time – an open source of shame.

You may wonder what else she's supposed to do. How do you go about establishing an identity management scheme for 60 million Brits without doing a bit of procuring?

Shows how much you know.

In the new world of GDS you have to route round Whitehall. That's what Mr Bracken says. You have to change the organising principle of Whitehall. That's all there is to it. Don't argue, JFDI. Be agile. Don't let the law stand in your way. Think Estonia. Security is in the cloud and vice versa. Forget policy, make a dashboard. This is government as a platform. That's what the user needs. Write it on a Post-it® note and bake it into a cake. Because internet.

That is the superior wisdom. Now do you understand the error of Ms Hughes's ways?

RIP IDA: Policy as a Dashboard (PaaD)

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, now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)",
is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme.
And it's dead.

Here's a selection of GDS posts and a film in the week leading up to purdah:

24-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Chris Mitchell
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
26-03-2015
Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn
26-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
David Rennie
27-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
Mike Beavan
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Liam Maxwell
30-03-2015
Martha Lane Fox

Let's take a look at Janet Hughes's 25 March 2015 offering, New hopefuls join the cortège for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) ... something like that.

Thursday 16 April 2015

RIP IDA – what they omitted from the obituary

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, now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)",
is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme.
And it's dead.

Here's a selection of GDS posts and a film in the week leading up to purdah:

24-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Chris Mitchell
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
26-03-2015
Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn
26-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
David Rennie
27-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
Mike Beavan
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Liam Maxwell
30-03-2015
Martha Lane Fox

Let's take a look at Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn's 26 March 2015 offering, GOV.UK Verify (RIP): objectives while still technically just about alive, or whatever it's called.

Like a lot of the best obituary-writing, it's what's not said that is telling.

They open with a modest amount of flannel. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) was meant one day to be the default way for people to demonstrate to public services that they are who they say they are, we are told. And then:
  • Under the heading What 'live' means for GOV.UK Verify the obituarists tell us what 'public beta' means for GOV.UK Verify.
  • And under We've made a lot of progress in our public beta, they fail to mention that the service was meant to be "fully operational" by March 2013.
  • Six of the 10 services to which GOV.UK Verify is connected are as invisible to the public as dark matter.
  • Of the remaining four services, one of them, the Basic Payment Scheme operated by the Rural Payment Agency, has had to be all too visibly disconnected – farmers have gone back to using paper.
  • Meanwhile, the Government Digital Service is promoting its apply-to-register-to-vote system, to which GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is mysteriously not connected.
Getting down to business, Ms Hughes and Mr Dunn put up the Post-it® notes that will guide GOV.UK Verify (RIP) along the path to mass consumer deployment, Objectives for live:
  1. Readiness for services to adopt GOV.UK Verify
  2. Demographic coverage: 90% for services using GOV.UK Verify by April 2016
  3. Success rate: 90%
  4. Everyone can use GOV.UK Verify to access services
  5. A range of high quality certified companies for people to choose from
  6. The product and service are scaled, resilient and operationally ready for live
There's something missing, isn't there.

Where's the nationwide information campaign?

Normal people have never heard of GOV.UK Verify (RIP). GDS want the system to be live in a year's time, by April 2016. Some time soon GDS are going to have to tell 60 million people what GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is. And how it works. And why they should use it.

The media feed us a daily diet of cybercrime. Everyone knows that it exists. The impression is that there is no defence, even for experts in security. That is the background against which GDS have to create trust or confidence in GOV.UK Verify (RIP). It won't be simple. It may be impossible.

60 million people are going to have some questions. Like who will compensate them if they are defrauded as a result of the operation of GOV.UK Verify (RIP). And GDS are finally going to have to answer. They are going to have to be transparent, or open. They need a No.7 Post-it® note.

Without that information campaign, the Objectives for live look like a fine example of what GDS claim to find abhorrent, The Post-it® notes amount to six ways to make life easier for officials and for their chosen suppliers, while we, the users, can just like it or lump it.

Post-it® note ##2 and 3 call for more personal information to be made available to GOV.UK Verify (RIP).

At the moment, the system relies on our credit records. When you try to register with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) you have to answer questions based on what Experian knows about you. Experian is a credit referencing agency and it is one of GDS's three "identity providers".

Apparently that's not enough. It doesn't achieve the 90% success rate for 90% of the population that GDS hope for. They need more data. More than "just" your credit record.

More data such as what? Medical data? Education data? Travel data? Energy usage data? Mobile phone data? Insurance policy data?

Will 60 million people give their informed and voluntary consent to share all this personal data of theirs? Who knows? GDS have to convince people that the rewards outweigh the risks. Good luck with that.

GDS have appointed nine "identity providers":
  • Including Digidentity. Who? A Dutch company. What data do they bring to the party to help to achieve 90% coverage for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) in the UK?
  • And GB Group. Who?
  • And Morpho, a French company with a claimed expertise in biometrics. Are GDS going to ask us all to record our fingerprints? That's the interesting sort of topic that an information campaign might tackle.
  • And Verizon. Who? A US mobile phone operator. How do they extend the type of information available to register people in the UK?
Post-it® note #5 tells us that: "Having more certified companies [what GDS used to call "identity providers"] will offer people more choice". In what way more choice? You can choose between three overseas companies who know nothing about you and that's more choice than being restricted to choosing between only two overseas companies who know nothing about you – try putting that on a poster.

Post-it® note #4 tackles the problem of people who can't or won't use digital public services. Ms Hughes and Mr Dunn say: "We've recently started looking at how we can help services allow people to complete at least some of their task in the digital channel rather than having to resort to offline methods".

"Recently"?

"Started"?

GDS decided years ago that all public services should be digital by default. Anyone who can't or won't use digital public services is consequently excluded by default.

You can't have that in a liberal democracy. Public services are for everyone.

So, also years ago, on or before 28 July 2011, GDS dreamt up what they called the "assisted digital" programme to help these wretched non-digital members of the public. We have commented on this matter before, please see GDS & assisted digital – the project that keeps on starting. That was on 29 October 2013 and clearly assisted digital still hasn't made any progress. There's only a year left now ...

... and an awful lot to cover in the unmentioned information campaign for GOV.UK Verify (RIP).

You see? Obituaries? It's the bits they leave out.

RIP IDA – what they omitted from the obituary

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, now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)",
is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme.
And it's dead.

Here's a selection of GDS posts and a film in the week leading up to purdah:

24-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Chris Mitchell
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
26-03-2015
Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn
26-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
David Rennie
27-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
Mike Beavan
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Liam Maxwell
30-03-2015
Martha Lane Fox

Let's take a look at Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn's 26 March 2015 offering, GOV.UK Verify (RIP): objectives while still technically just about alive, or whatever it's called.

Tuesday 14 April 2015

@gdsteam invent the right angle

Here's a selection of GDS posts and a film in the week leading up to purdah:

24-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Chris Mitchell
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
25-03-2015
Janet Hughes
26-03-2015
Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn
26-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
David Rennie
27-03-2015
Mike Bracken
27-03-2015
Mike Beavan
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
28-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Mike Bracken
29-03-2015
Liam Maxwell
30-03-2015
Martha Lane Fox

Let's take a look at Chris Mitchell's 25 March 2015 offering. It won't take long.

Digital self-assessment is ready to go live. That's Chris's message:
The Digital Self-Assessment service has passed its live Digital by Default Service Standard Assessment. You can now access this via your tax dashboard online. It will make self-assessment fully digital for about 10 million people.
"10 million people". That's a lot of people. "Tax dashboard"? Clearly this is something to do with tax, self-assessment, tax returns, ... Digital self-assessment. It's big:
This exemplar service has been public beta since June 2014 and we have over 1.24 million customers ...
Hang on a minute. "June 2014"?

This service Chris Mitchell is talking about was first released to the public in June 2014?

But DMossEsq clearly remembers receiving his user ID for Self Assessment Online, as Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs called it then, all of seven years ago. You can see HMRC's letter dated 31 January 2008 when they sent DMossEsq's user ID and activation PIN for the service.

So just what is this service that Chris Mitchell, a service manager for GDS, has been incubating for months and years?

Take a look at his 25 March 2015 blog post. What he and his team claim to have added to the work already done by HMRC is an option to go paperless. You were already able to submit returns on-line. You could already see your old returns on-line and HMRC's letters calculating how much you owed them and their new tax codes for you, year by year. That was already on-line.

What Chris and the team seem to have added is a switch to do it all on-line, don't send the taxpayer a letter, send them an email instead. That's fine, as far as it goes.

But that's not what people are going to understand from "it will make self-assessment fully digital for about 10 million people" – which is that Chris and the team have just made self-assessment fully digital for about 10 million people. They haven't and it's misleading to suggest in any way that they have.

"Ready for Live: Digital Self-Assessment"? Obviously you weren't going to fall for that inadvertent sleight of hand. But there are MPs out there, and even Cabinet Secretaries, who might. Not to mention impressionable people in Australia and the US.

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Updated 15.4.15

Hat tip Bryan Glick, extract from the The Conservative Party Manifesto 2015 (p.49):
We have already created 20 high-quality digital services, which include apprenticeships applications and tax self-assessments. We will save you time, hassle and money by moving more services online, while actively tackling digital exclusion. We will ensure digital assistance is always available for those who are not online, while rolling out cross-government technology platforms to cut costs and improve productivity – such as GOV.UK.
The "tax self-assessments" facility mentioned there was available in early 2007 and possibly before that.