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.
Last heard, 26 March 2015, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) was in maudlin mood, brooding about the meaning of life and the objectives for its vanishing future.
Speaking through its faithful assistants Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn from its deathbed in the Kingsway hospice destined to be its final resting place, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) expatiated ungrammatically on its Objectives for live and "what ‘live’ means" for it as the end approaches. Ominously, there hasn't been a word from GOV.UK Verify (RIP) in the five weeks since.
So much for expanding "the range of evidence people can use to verify their identity". Another credit referencing agency. What is a person? As far as GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is concerned, a person is a credit history.
There is one consolation for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) as it goes into that dark night. For some unknown reason the Americans have decided to model their public services IT on the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS), the operators of the Kingsway hospice whose achievements are the stuff of legend. Two US organisations, USDS and 18f, lose no opportunity to acknowledge their debt to GDS. The consolation is that at least GOV.UK Verify (RIP) will leave that American legacy, a visible testament to its short sojourn among us.
But just as the oscilloscope attached to GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s wrist shows wan signs of life and a single pulse ping echoes around the intensive care unit what do 18f go and do? On 18 May 2015, et tu Brute, knife in the back, 18f only go and announce MyUSA – your one account for government. Is MyUSA modelled faithfully on GOV.UK Verify (RIP)? It doesn't look like it. They're not relying on Verizon. Or Digidentity. Far from the adolescent science fiction world of "identity providers", if anything the treacherous 18f's MyUSA looks more like the Scots myaccount initiative.
That was on 14 May 2015. The bulletin covers GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s vital signs. E.g. the HMRC tax code/company car application. Number of users expected by November 2015? 20,000. That's 20,000 car-driving taxpayers, all identified by GOV.UK Verify (RIP), in six months time.
The doctors put out the same bulletin on 20 February 2015. Only that time they forecast 20,000 users by August 2015. The 5 January 2015 bulletin reckoned there would be 20,000 users by July 2015 and the 29 October 2014 version confidently promised 20,000 users by April 2015, a month or two ago.
The dates keep changing. But nothing else. GOV.UK Verify. RIP.
----------
Updated 20.12.17
2½ years ago we wrote:
On 18 May 2015, et tu Brute, knife in the back, 18f only go and announce MyUSA – your one account for government. Is MyUSA modelled faithfully on GOV.UK Verify (RIP)? It doesn't look like it. They're not relying on Verizon. Or Digidentity. Far from the adolescent science fiction world of "identity providers", if anything the treacherous 18f's MyUSA looks more like the Scots myaccount initiative.
How's it going, you ask? Tell us about MyUSA. And myaccount. And GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
Alright.
Here's Jason Miller of Federal News Radio to tell you that, following the failure of Federal Bridge and then E-Authentication and then Connect.gov and then MyUSA, the latest attempt at an identity assurance service for people to interact with on-line public services in the US is Login.gov. Quoting 18F, Mr Miller writes:
“To build this login platform, we’re using modern, user-friendly, strong authentication and effective identity proofing technology. This new platform will leverage the extensive lessons we’ve gained from agency efforts in the past, including lessons learned from our counterparts in the UK who built GOV.UK Verify [RIP].”
Mr Miller was writing in May 2016. MyUSA was already dead by then. So was GOV.UK Verify (RIP), of course, although that was the month when the surrealists at the Government Digital Service (GDS), 18F and USDS's "counterparts in the UK", declared the service to be live.
GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s death notice was published last Friday 15 December 2017. Not by GDS, of course. In their Whitechapel terrarium GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is thriving. In the real world, Bryan Glick, the estimable editor of Computer Weekly magazine, delivered a masterly eulogy:
We will not see 25 million users of Gov.uk Verify – ever ...
A recent review of digital identity by McKinsey, commissioned by the Cabinet Office, focused on alternative schemes around the world ...
NHS England is now going its own way on digital identity, building its own platform for ID verification, according to its chief digital officer Juliet Bauer ...
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), ... has rejected Verify in favour of redeveloping its existing Government Gateway ID system ...
Mr Glick predicts that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) will become a brand name, a fig leaf for GDS. Working identity assurance schemes will be declared to be GOV.UK Verify (RIP)-compliant.
"Back in 2012, then-GDS chief Mike Bracken was clear in an interview with Computer Weekly [about] government’s role in online identity assurance", he says, and then quotes Mr Bracken: “It isn’t about building a product, it’s about supporting a protocol”. So why did Mr Bracken promptly set about building a product?
Piffle.
"The story will be that the money has been an important investment in understanding the requirements and getting the UK to a point where we can create a viable digital identity ecosystem".
More piffle.
We already had that understanding.
The identity ecosystem has done what all ecosystems do – killed all the useless adaptations. Federal Bridge, E-Authentication, Connect.gov, MyUSA and GOV.UK Verify (RIP) are all dead. The only survivor is the quite remarkably fit Government Gateway, which GDS in their ignorant arrogance ignored back in 2011 because they somehow knew better.
And how are the Scots getting on with myaccount? Another failed species, another victim of the ecosystem, not up to it, please see Stewart Hamilton's blog post on Scotland's new programme plan for on-line identity assurance:
David Moss says:
December 18, 2017 at 7:07 pm
Your Scottish Government Online Identity Assurance Programme Plan looks as though it has the same objectives as myaccount and involves pre-discovery and discovery work that must surely already have been done for myaccount.
In what way has myaccount failed?
It must have failed. Otherwise you wouldn’t be launching a new plan. Given that you are launching a new plan it is surprising that you would look to GOV.UK Verify (RIP) for inspiration.
GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has been rejected by most departments of central government and by local government and by the private sector.
It has a failure rate of over 60% when people try to use it, it can’t handle legal persons, it sprays personal information all over the world to so-called “identity providers”, their subsidiaries and their sub-contractors, its functionality has barely changed since it went “live” in May 2016 and the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) team stopped talking to the public months ago – no sort of an example to the Scottish Government Online Identity Assurance Project Team.
Take a look at ‘On digital identity in the UK – and the likely future for Gov.uk Verify’ [*] and you’ll see that the imminent demise of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is predicted. Whatever the problems are with myaccount it’s unlikely that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is any part of the solution.
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.
Last heard, 26 March 2015, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) was in maudlin mood, brooding about the meaning of life and the objectives for its vanishing future.
Speaking through its faithful assistants Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn from its deathbed in the Kingsway hospice destined to be its final resting place, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) expatiated ungrammatically on its Objectives for live and "what ‘live’ means" for it as the end approaches. Ominously, there hasn't been a word from GOV.UK Verify (RIP) in the five weeks since.
GaaP. Government as a platform. There's a lot of chatter about it at the moment, it's got something to do with the future of public services in the UK, but what is GaaP? And why is anyone interested?
... Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO, executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS) and senior responsible owner of GOV.UK Verify (RIP)? No.
... and hats off to him, Mr Wardley does one of the best jobs on the circuit debunking management consultants. Treat yourself, now, for 13 minutes and 9 seconds:
He can predict the future. He knows what's going to happen although, unlike a proper astrologer, he can't say when ...
... which means he can devise strategies for companies. What is a strategy?
Strategies are what army generals have. How do they make them?
They use maps. Does Mr Wardley have a map?
You bet he has. See below. Companies are value chains, value chains consist of components, competition causes components to evolve and Mr Wardley maps the value chain-evolution surface.
Mr Thompson is another management consultant, like Mr Wardley, and he has worked out precisely how to achieve GaaP. He offers a "simple methodology":
This approach is based on Simon Wardley’s work, extended to enable a clear distinction between “product” and “capability” from which we then derive a simple methodology for achieving government as a platform.
We'll come back to the distinction between products and capabilities later. First, in case you thought we had taken a wrong turn and strayed out of the ballpark, note that it looks to followers of Twitter as though Mr Wardley advises GDS and Mr Thompson locates GDS at the heart of GaaP:
Digital business change will be achieved to the extent that, stewarded and supported by GDS, everyone can gradually maximise shared capability (platforms), and minimise departmental “product” (bespoke services) ...
Common Capabilities ... Owned centrally in GDS (central plat) ...
Functions to be migrated to the growing set of shared capabilities (stewarded centrally in GDS) ...
It's not clear how much Mr Thompson knows about GDS. He seems to be under the impression that GDS succeeded in deploying its 25 exemplar services:
GDS has already achieved much in driving digital change in government – particularly in securing some quick transformational wins via the25 targeted service exemplars.
GDS are a long way from securing "quick transformational wins" with the exemplars.
But Mr Thompson would be quite at home there when it comes to user needs, whatever they are. Like GDS, and everyone else, he thinks you have to focus on user needs.
He also thinks that user needs exist in a value chain. And that the job of Whitehall's generals is to "determine what components are required to meet those needs".
Although that includes some of the same words, it's not what Mr Wardley said. Don't confuse the two.
And it poses a problem. In Mr Thompson's value chain diagram, how do you distinguish a need from a component required to meet that need?
We've got a lot of circles with black borders, some of them are connected by black lines and some aren't, and one of them has an arrow coming out of the top. Which one is a need and which one a component required to meet a need?
What, you may ask, about the dark ellipse? Forget it. By Step 3, it's disappeared.
Meanwhile, why does the value chain axis range from "invisible" to "visible"?
Step 3 involves adding Mr Wardley's evolution axis to the diagram, thereby making it into a map.
These are the first three steps of Mr Thompson's "simple methodology for achieving government as a platform". At Step 4 we "need to apply this consistent logic to identifying whether we should be developing specific services or common capabilities".
Which brings us back to the products v. capabilities tension identified above. We need "a clear distinction between 'product' and 'capability' ...", Mr Thompson said, if you remember.
We shouldn't. You don't have any trouble distinguishing a product from a capability, do you?
The problem is exacerbated because Mr Thompson repeatedly refers to services as "products". Why? Public services, the domain of this discussion, are definitely services. Not products. What we pay for with our taxes are services. Whitehall is a service organisation. Not a factory. Ditto local government.
To be fair, that is of minor interest to Mr Thompson. It's not the services he cares about, but the exciting "ubiquitous web-based infrastructure to enable commonly shared capabilities":
Achieving more of this sort of service model will require a rigorous distinction between “product” – essentially, bespoke services - and shared capabilities, which are far more important for achieving digitally-enabled public service redesign ...
... everyone can gradually maximise shared capability (platforms), and minimise departmental “product” (bespoke services) ...
The gradual maximisation and consumption of shared capability must therefore be the primary concern and stream of work for all transformation activities across the public sector. Although very important, improving “product” (bespoke services) is a secondary concern ...
With his "clear methodology" explained, Mr Thompson moves on to the "clear operating model and enabling methodology" which is needed to "prime the pump" of the "digitisation engine". The trick is to identify the "public organisations with the highest clusters of potential shared capabilities (SC)", which means developing a "digital profile" for each public organisation.
Digital profiles look at first like Wardley maps but, instead of more or less visible value chain and evolution, this time you have to plot ubiquity against certainty, and draw an ogive on it:
The blue blobs, of course, aren't user needs. User needs are long gone. They're products, i.e. services, or capabilities.
What you're looking for is organisations with "promising clusters" (PCs).
Once you've found a couple of them, you develop a single system which they can share. At which point, the blobs stop being blue. They get greyed out. And here at last is the answer to our first question, what is Gaap. As Mr Thompson tells us, these greyed out blobs "will literally constitute the government as a platform".
It's been a bit of a slog, perhaps, but well worth it. With GaaP:
There are enormous opportunities for rationalisation and simplification across government ...
All we have to do is ...
• Identify & agree existing, vertically siloed business models for each public organisation • Convert these into digital profiles, and; • Add the segmented profiles into separately-run backlogs
... and within a generation:
This will encourage the evolution of a service architecture that is based on a service-oriented view, supports an ecosystem of providers around a core set of capabilities, and opens up access to a broad community through standard interfaces ...
... which is what we all want because:
The inescapable DNA of a digitally-enabled public service model is a set of clean, agreed, and common capabilities, distilled and evolved from the currently duplicated and siloed functions, processes, roles and even organisations that exist across government.
He doesn't like silos, does he. Silos are 19th century DNA. Strange that Mr Thompson's own business comprises a holding company (Methods Corporate Ltd) with six separate subsidiary companies, or silos, under it. Look at the duplication that must lead to. Seven audits. Seven annual returns to Companies House. Seven payrolls to operate. Seven "enormous opportunities for rationalisation and simplification". Seven blue blobs all surely pleading to be greyed out.
But that's irrelevant because, turning our attention once again to Whitehall, when it comes to GaaP ...
... and £35 billion p.a. is a lot of money. There's the answer to our second question, why is anyone interested in GaaP.
How does Mr Thompson come up with this figure? Click on the link and you be the judge. It's all something to do with a Dutch community nursing agency, Buurtzorg, whose operation is unmistakably analogous to Whitehall offering public services products:
The Dutch model has a ratio of back office to frontline workers of 30 to 7000. If the UK could adjust its ratio accordingly, it would need fewer than 23,000 back office staff to support 5.3 million frontline workers. Reducing the number of back office staff from 1.5 million to just 23,000 would generate possible salary savings of up to £35.5bn.
The logic is impeccable. 1½ million useless public servants out the door and 35 billion quid off the deficit – that's GaaP.
Be afraid. The previous government’s “elite digital team” which so brilliantly borked most of Whitehall’s websites, and that failed to meet its own targets, may be put in charge of handling real money: your money.
New Cabinet Office Minister Matthew Hancock hinted at the opportunity at a gentle public grilling today. Although Hancock didn't mention GDS by name, he told the Institute of Government:
The Government has a multitude of platforms for paying people money. And receiving money. What we don’t have is a platform all across government for receiving and paying money. Departments collect debts, for example.
Armed with the Wardley-Thompson wisdom above, what do you make of the suggestion to create a government-wide payments platform?
How is General Hancock supposed to devise a strategy without seeing where payments is on the value chain-evolution terrain? What is the payments digital profile? Is its certainty high or low? What is its ubiquity score? Where is it in relation to the ogive? How many back office staff can Whitehall get rid of? How much money will be saved? In what way will user needs be better satisfied?
And who should General Hancock put in charge of this battle? "Hancock didn't mention GDS by name", we are told. Hardly surprising. GDS is a front-end shop. They don't hold themselves out as experts in purchase ledger. And for good reason – it's not their bailiwick, GDS do user interfaces.
The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) brings together policy, advice and direct buying; providing commercial services to the public sector and saving money for the taxpayer.
GDS would just embarrass themselves if they accepted this commission. So they won't accept it.
"What could possibly go wrong?", Mr Orlowski asks. Remember Rural Payments, Agile@DEFRA, GDS's Dunkirk.
"Be afraid"? There's nothing for us to be afraid of from that quarter. The whole idea is just a flight of Mr Orlowski's whimsical fancy.
Mr Thompson suggests that turning payments into a platform would unleash "unprecedented innovation, efficiency, and savings". Examples, please. Innovation such as what? What efficiencies? What savings?
General Hancock will no doubt demand a bit more detail before sanctioning the engagement. He won't want to find his troops tied down in a campaign of trench warfare for the next five years only to have nothing to show for it at the end.
Updated 26.5.15
Methods Corporate Ltd and its subsidiaries comprise constitute the Methods Group.
Mark Thompson, the man who plots ubiquity against certainty and deduces that GaaP could reduce the UK deficit by £35 billion (see post above), is the strategy director of the Methods Group.
£35 billion? Every year? Really? The chief executive of the Methods Group, Peter Rowlins, has had to step in to calm down expectations. He has written an article, GaaP: it's not just about the platform, with Mr Thompson,
UK GaaP* is now £35 billion lighter. Not a mention. It's gone. Replaced with the more vanilla "potentially colossal savings".
How does HMG lock in these colossal savings? It's our old friends standardisation and consolidation. And a new one – deverticalisation.
---------- * Apologies for confusing any accountants who've dropped in. We're talking about Government as a Platform, not Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
... there is "little evidence" departments are making expected savings from digital services
A report by the influential National Audit Office (NAO) into central government staffing costs has warned that despite the extensive work going into digital services across Whitehall, those efforts have yet to deliver significant staff cost savings.
Although the government expects digital services to reduce staff costs by processing transactions efficiently and introducing more customer self-service, with departments developing and implementing digital exemplars, so far, the NAO says, "we have seen little evidence that departments are making the expected savings." ...
The NAO has previously pointed out that for digital services, particularly in relation to efforts in moving towards Government as a Platform , there must also be a convincing economic case as well as a vision behind the government's digital strategy. Although at a macro level, the potential for cost saving is high, it was "missing learning and case studies from individual service transformations."
Updated 5 April 2018
It's been a long time, over three years, since Mark Thompson, please see above, told Guardian newspaper readers on 12 February 2015 that there are far too many non-performers on the UK public payroll and that "reducing the number of back office staff from 1.5 million to just 23,000 would generate possible salary savings of up to £35.5bn".
The £35.5 billion p.a. figure has become £46 billion: "taking our public services as a whole, assuming a similar 14% of our total 2018 government spend of £814bn goes on management and administration, streaming just 40% of this could save £46bn year-on-year" (p.35).
If £35.5 billion gets rid of 1½ million useless staff, then £46 billion must allow us to part company with something like 1.9 million of the blighters, 400,000 more. Unfortunately, as there were only 23,000 of them left after Mr Thompson's previous putative clear-out, that's impossible. On the other hand, who's going to say no to £46 billion?
How will we know which staff to get rid of? Easy: "Public value assesses services from the citizens’, not the managers’, end of the telescope. Put simply, unless you add public value, your tenure within the state is negotiable" (p.38).
How do you measure public value? Obviously you use a "public value index" (p.86). And how do you create that index?
Never mind, the important point is that "both the digital commons and Public Value Index would be dead in the water without energetic support from a team of perhaps 25 to 30 peripatetic specialists who live and breathe capability mapping and open architecture" (p.93). It is understood that Mr Thompson would be one of those energetically peripatetic capability cartographers and that the rest might be close friends or employees of his at the Methods group of companies. That, at least, should be clear even if you're struggling a bit with the concept of the "digital commons".
What hasn't changed is the redemptive quality of the internet, the lessons from which teach us how to operate public services. At least that's the assumption. "The arrival of the internet enables people to exchange value in more direct ways that bypass traditional, command-and-control models ... This was foreseen by Marx, who explained how technological innovations eventually undermine monopoly situations" (p.25).
That assertion may surprise you a little. After all, it is precisely the technological innovations of the internet that have created the monopolies enjoyed by Amazon, Google, Facebook and the like. It is capitalist anti-trust laws that broke the late 19th century US monopolies and which may yet need to break today's. Nevertheless, "we think Marx, and the notion of economic rent, is as good a place as any for us to start" (p.37), so forget it.
Marx has been added in this latest version of Mr Thompson's dream: "What if our public services became as flexible, streamlined and easy-to-use for citizens as Uber – but with higher wages and in public ownership? As efficient as Amazon’s operations, and as intuitive as Google – but with 100% of the money invested into ethical and trusted public services, instead of pocketed by shareholders and a small elite of businesses? And all while securing and protecting citizens’ personal data, working with us in partnership, rather than monetising and exploiting our personal information like the worst of the private sector?" ...
... but sadly there is no mention any more of "promising clusters", please see above, ...
... and no recognition of the historical fact, inevitable or not, that, for 100 years, ethical and trusted Marxist politicians the world over have destroyed their national economies, starved their populations and terrorised and massacred them, while capitalism, replete with its hated profits and shareholders and tax payments, tends to feed, clothe, warm, pay, look after the health of and educate people.
"A Victorian civil servant awakening from a lengthy slumber would find the way our public sector still works comfortably familiar: largely centralised, hierarchical, and organisation-centric" (p.8). Nonsense.
That civil servant would be astonished at the colossal size of the 21st century UK state. Why does it have to be so big? It's not as though there's an empire to run. How can the gentleman in Whitehall claim to know better than the people what is good for them? Is public administration for an entire country comparable to running a nursing agency (Buurtzorg, please see above), as Mr Thompson continues to believe? Are the internet giants the right model to copy? Take away the monetisation of personal information and they wouldn't be giants any more.
And that civil servant would be astonished at the loss of power in the UK's local government. Mr Thompson wants to finish the job by obliterating local government in the name of efficiency. All that duplication? It's got to go: "the Marxian perspective implies that a managerial and administrative 'class', located across both public and private sectors, extracts 'rent' from frontline public employees, as well as from the public they serve" (p.24).
Enough.
Enough of this mendacious bilge.
In addition to the green paper we've been quoting from, there's a manifesto and a set of blog posts, including this one (sadly) by Jerry Fishenden and this one: "These final documents are the work of Jerry Fishenden, Mark Thompson and Will Venters. However, they draw upon valuable insights, critiques, pushback, feedback and improvements contributed by Andy Beale, Alan Brown, James Duncan, James Findlay, Sally Howes, Renate Samson and Simon Wardley. And some others who prefer to remain anonymous".
The starting point for Messrs Fishenden, Thompson et al is that the Government Digital Service has failed to transform government: "The recent efforts of the Government Digital Service have had little substantive modernisation impact, ultimately reverting to the usual displacement activity of website redesign and tinkering on the periphery of government by updating the look and feel of the central government website" (p.17). Their nostrums would fare no better.
GaaP. Government as a platform. There's a lot of chatter about it at the moment, it's got something to do with the future of public services in the UK, but what is GaaP? And why is anyone interested?
... Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO, executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS) and senior responsible owner of GOV.UK Verify (RIP)? No.
John Manzoni took over from Sir Bob Kerslake last year as chief executive of the UK civil service. Following the general election 10 days ago, Matt Hancock takes over from Francis "JFDI" Maude as Cabinet Office minister. Mr Manzoni wants everyone to know that Mr Hancock wants Whitehall departments to collaborate.
Hardly controversial. Mr Manzoni is unlikely to have reported that Mr Hancock wants to see all-out war between Whitehall departments and the Devil take the hindmost:
The new minister for the Cabinet Office wants to see a more "collaborative" relationship between departments and the centre of government, the chief executive of the civil service has said, as he signalled the end of the "Francis Maude era".
This surely increases the likelihood of the Government Digital Service (GDS) being slimmed down and much of its delivery responsibilities handed back to departments. I'd suggest this was always the eventual plan - GDS looks after strategy, departments look after delivery, and outsourcers are brought in once a service or system is into the support and maintenance phase.
GDS should look after strategy? It's up to the departments to deliver? And outsourcers should be in charge of maintenance and support?
Again – hardly controversial. Most people will regard these suggestions as anodyne and barely worth reporting. How else, most people may ask themselves, could the world be arranged?
Tim O’Reilly said of the Government Digital Strategy: “This is the new bible for anyone working in open government”
But the pulse of the Francis Maude era digital insurgents will be racing, dangerously, as they remember that early sermon, 6 January 2013, and the words of Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO, chief executive of GDS and senior responsible owner of GOV.UK Verify (RIP), On Strategy: The strategy is delivery. Again.:
... in an analogue world policy dictates to delivery, but in a digital world delivery informs policy ...
Does Mr Manzoni understand those words?
Has Mr Hancock even heard them?
Battle-hardened after years of daily stand-ups cutting code at the very front-end of the revolutionary renew-your-vehicle-excise-duty application, the agile veterans' minds will turn to that other lesson, read on 16 October 2013 to the Code for America Summit when Mr Bracken explained not only that strategy is a waste of time but also that Whitehall is there to be routed round, not collaborated with, Routing round Whitehall. And local government too, UK local government – dating websites for no-brainers.
As recently as 20 October 2014, Mr Bracken revealed to the Institute for Government that "delivery to users, not policy, should be the organising principle of a reformed civil service" and that "traditional policy-making is largely broken", there is a "needless separation of policy and delivery", the two of them constitute a "false binary".
Last year, the UK's Cabinet Office asked an external management consultancy to examine staff morale and high turnover at the Government Digital Service. After interviewing more than 100 civil servants, its scathing confidential analysis described an organisation beset by low morale and run by a “cabal” management of old friends, who bypassed talent in favour of recruiting former associates – while Whitehall viewed GDS as “smug” and “arrogant”.
As to outsourcing, clearly it has its place. GDS know that. Issuing on-line IDs to every person and every organisation in the UK is a job for Experian and Verizon or, preferably, Google. But not Whitehall.
Otherwise, no. The organisation that has already conquered the front-end of the renew-your-vehicle-excise-duty application has no need for lumbering giant systems integrators. How hard can it be for GDS to write and maintain the computer systems needed by HMRC, for example, to collect the nation's tax revenue?
That article in Civil Service World is more controversial than it first appears. Hanzoni still hasn't grasped what Mr Maude did, that the UK's destiny is to become Estonia.
John Manzoni took over from Sir Bob Kerslake last year as chief executive of the UK civil service. Following the general election 10 days ago, Matt Hancock takes over from Francis "JFDI" Maude as Cabinet Office minister. Mr Manzoni wants everyone to know that Mr Hancock wants Whitehall departments to collaborate.
Hardly controversial. Mr Manzoni is unlikely to have reported that Mr Hancock wants to see all-out war between Whitehall departments and the Devil take the hindmost:
The new minister for the Cabinet Office wants to see a more "collaborative" relationship between departments and the centre of government, the chief executive of the civil service has said, as he signalled the end of the "Francis Maude era".
This surely increases the likelihood of the Government Digital Service (GDS) being slimmed down and much of its delivery responsibilities handed back to departments. I'd suggest this was always the eventual plan - GDS looks after strategy, departments look after delivery, and outsourcers are brought in once a service or system is into the support and maintenance phase.
GDS should look after strategy? It's up to the departments to deliver? And outsourcers should be in charge of maintenance and support?
Again – hardly controversial. Most people will regard these suggestions as anodyne and barely worth reporting. How else, most people may ask themselves, could the world be arranged?
Mr Bracken wears a lot of hats. He is the executive director of GDS. He is the senior responsible owner of GOV.UK Verify (RIP). He was already the UK government's chief digital officer (CDO) when he was unexpectedly made chief data officer (CDO) as well.
All of which may explain the need to produce no less than five self-assessments (see list above) in four days, 26-29 March 2015. Obviously tiring, we only get 650 words this time, culminating in:
While the next wave of platforms has yet to be finalised, what is clear is the enthusiasm government has for the concept; taking a join-up approach to service provision that’s going to be genuinely transformational. I’m excited for what’s to come.
Onwards!
While we may accept that the purpose of digital transformation is to excite Mr Bracken, it is not clear why "government" should be enthusiastic.
This time it's going to be "genuinely" transformational apparently. What does that say about Mike Beavan, who has for the past several years been the "Transformation Programme Director for GDS"?
Government as a Platform (GaaP) is the next phase of digital transformation according to the title of Mr Bracken's post but half way through it turns out to be the present phase as well:
We aren’t starting from scratch. We’ve already built platforms that are delivering better services at a much lower cost.
Ended? Beginning? Future? Present? All of those, plus new and five years old:
Government as a Platform is a new vision for digital government ... Government as a Platform is a phrase coined by Tim O’Reilly in a 2010 paper ...
Reinventing the wheel every single time we build a service has led to far too much duplication and waste. That’s not good enough.
How much money has been wasted? Mr Bracken doesn't tell us. How much will be saved? Ditto. When? Ditto.
Homework obviously not done, this is very thin gruel. "Onwards"? "Inane", more like.
GOV.UK is a publishing platform, Mr Bracken says. Whitehall already had one of those before the creation of GDS. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is an identity assurance platform, Mr Bracken alone says. No-one knows any more how many of the 25 exemplars are actually live, not least because GDS have stopped updating https://www.gov.uk/transformation.
The question arises therefore, given that it's obviously none of the above, just exactly what has inspired the "enthusiasm" of senior officials all the way up to the Cabinet Secretary?
Of all the unlikely places, the suggested, guessed-at answer comes from the Guardian newspaper, 12 February 2015, UK voters are being sold a lie. There is no need to cut public services. Mr Mark Thompson, the author, suggests that if only Whitehall emulated Buurtzorg Nederland, a community nursing business in Holland, then we could get rid of 1½ million back office public servants and save £35.5 billion p.a.:
Reducing the number of back office staff from 1.5 million to just 23,000 would generate possible salary savings of up to £35.5bn.
Public services should be delivered on the same model, Mr Thompson suggests, as "Spotify, eBay, Airbnb, Rightmove, Uber and Amazon".
There are lots of discussion going on at the moment about digital “platforms”, and the impact they might have on UK public services. A rough and ready calculation suggests such an approach could save the UK £35bn each year – but the jury is still out on how best to go about making it happen ...
For central government, the logical steward for these shared capabilities is the Government Digital Service (GDS), which can help to migrate progressive departments/agencies onto common platforms ...
How do we achieve it?
Good question.
And unlike Mr Bracken, Mr Thompson has a map of how to achieve it, a graph plotting the evolution of components against the value chain. He's got his own consultancy company, Methods Corporate Ltd, him and Peter Rowlins. And he's a lecturer at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School – of course he's got a graph plotting the evolution of components against the value chain.
The powers that be may not be all that interested in the graph.
They may have their doubts about comparing the operation of Whitehall with Spotify, eBay, Airbnb, Rightmove, Uber and Amazon.
They may realise that Spotify, eBay, Airbnb, Rightmove, Uber and Amazon don't all use the same customer information services, for example, as is proposed for GaaP.
They may notice that the community nurses didn't waste their time re-writing the Dutch government website before getting out into the community and actually doing some nursing.
The DMossEsq guess is that Whitehall knows the pitch is utterly preposterous, if they think about it, but ... £35 billion a year ... every year ... onwards!
There's a big prize there for Whitehall in the future (if they suspend disbelief) and Methods Corporate Ltd is already being paid well, judging by their 30 April 2014 annual report and accounts – you don't see a lot of consultancies trying so desperately to keep their profits down that (along with famous footballers) they're investing in film finance partnerships.
There are signs that Messrs Rowlins and Thompson are becoming restive. The managing director of one of their subsidiaries found it opportune to publish Are Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) Good for Public Services? on 27 April 2015, deep into purdah:
At their very worst they can be single issue fanatics ill equipped to lead an organisation through complex, enterprise wide change, backed by a Board who don’t really understand what the CDO is doing. On top of this they are filled with an evangelical zeal that will tolerate no dissent or requirement for them to learn as well as teach.
The "next phase of digital transformation" may be, to quote from the lexicon of consultants' favourite euphemisms, "disruptive" and involve "creative destruction".
“It reminds me of that old joke – you know, a guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, hey doc, my brother's crazy! He thinks he's a chicken. Then the doc says, why don't you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs.
