University of London Computer Centre Newsletter No. 53 March 1973 |
what marketing suggested | |
what management approved | |
as designed by engineering | |
what was manufactured | |
as maintenance installed it | |
what the customer wanted |
University of London Computer Centre Newsletter No. 53 March 1973 |
what marketing suggested | |
what management approved | |
as designed by engineering | |
what was manufactured | |
as maintenance installed it | |
what the customer wanted |
"Thank you, ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken", Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, may say, "for your support and hard work. It has been noticed inside of government as well as outside".
GDS has avoided becoming fully involved in projects such as Universal Credit, where big data and big government collide. The UK government’s flagship welfare reform is having problems which would be familiar across the Atlantic, such as integrating multiple databases, managing a project with dozens of separate teams and dealing with what Mr Bracken calls “oligopolistic supply chain[s]”.
PRESS RELEASE
The Universal Credit tragedy
4 November 2013
It is over a year since Frank Field wrote The universal credit programme is on course for disaster. He was right then and he still is.According to an internal DWP report leaked to the Guardian, a decision will be made in the next few days what to do about Universal Credit. DWP are said to have backed themselves into the anomalous position where there are only two options to choose between, Aor B, and neither of them will help, please see:Universal Credit and GDS – think twiceWill DWP waste hundreds of millions of pounds more of public money and add another government IT failure to our unenviable tradition?Or will they turn Act IV of a tragedy into Act I of a new play where Whitehall starts to behave rationally and responsibly?----------
Notes to editors
The word “agile” is endlessly incanted in favour of option B. That’s all it is. A word. A noise made by people clinging helplessly to the mirage of £38 billion of savings to be made by Universal Credit.
About David Moss
David Moss has worked as an IT consultant since 1981. What started 10 years ago as a campaign against the Home Office’s plans to introduce government ID cards into the UK has turned into a campaign against Whitehall’s misfeasance in public office.
Updated 16.11.13:
First G-Cloud Cookie land: This may indeed be a very sensible approach towards providing a common front-end to citizen-facing on-line and commodity services (like Payroll and HR) that have been unnecessarily "customised". But it is, as yet "unproven" for "heavy lifting" service delivery. Cabinet Office has not yet demonstrated that it can deliver anything more than comparative trivia (e.g. website rationalisation) - although it has demonstrated that it can help prevent others from wasting money.
We know who lost in the battle between DWP and Cabinet Office over ID Policy - the taxpayer and the private sector bidders. Who won, apart from the fraudsters?
Company | Market cap ($bn) | |
Exxon Mobil | 385.65 | |
Apple | 378.25 | |
259.13 | ||
Wal-Mart | 258.49 | |
Microsoft | 241.45 | |
General Electric | 236.04 | |
Johnson & Johnson | 234.67 | |
IBM | 233.68 | |
Chevron | 223.04 | |
Pfizer | 221.82 |
Company | Market cap ($bn) | |
Exxon Mobil | 385.65 | |
Apple | 378.25 | |
259.13 | ||
Wal-Mart | 258.49 | |
Microsoft | 241.45 | |
General Electric | 236.04 | |
Johnson & Johnson | 234.67 | |
IBM | 233.68 | |
Chevron | 223.04 | |
Pfizer | 221.82 |
Option A is said to be "not achievable within the preferred timescales", "unrealistic" and "vulnerable to security flaws". It is also said to offer poor value for money.
A Stick with the existing contractors and make UC work. B Start again with new contractors, using a more "web-based" approach to the development of UC.
The UC choice facing DWP may be presented like Beauty and the Beast.
1 Despite GDS's agile approach, the G-Cloud CloudStore was "temporarily unavailable" to its users for four days last week. A four-day outage in a relatively tiny system like CloudStore is one thing. Four days without UC could be a disaster. 2 GDS have started their assisted digital project several times over the past two years but despite that agility there is still no sign of progress. Just like DWP, they may try to press the reset button repeatedly with UC. 3 A GDS-style web-based UC would be no more immune to security problems than the alternative. 4 Working with them on an individual electoral registration (IER) data-mining pilot, the Electoral Commission found that GDS: The Commission's conclusion is that a national roll-out of data-mining is not justified, it won't help IER – GDS's efforts identified both people who are already on the electoral roll and people who are ineligible to vote as needing to be prompted to register.
- Caused delays.
- Made it impossible to assess the results of their pilot by changing procedures in mid-stream.
- Failed to support some participants in the pilot.
- Failed to provide the Commission with the cost of their work on the pilot, making it impossible to say how much the pilot cost or how much live operation would cost.
- Provided poor data specifications/inconsistent postal address specifications, leading to a failure to identify eligible voters who are not registered.
5 GDS's identity assurance programme depends on a new pan-government "ID hub" which has been certified by no-one and which is impossibly meant to offer both anonymity and an audit trail, simultaneously. 6 GDS acknowledge their responsibility for the identity assurance programme (IDAP), which was first meant to go live in the autumn of 2012 and then the spring of 2013. There was no explanation for the absence of IDAP then and there is no news of the IDAP trial which was meant to be conducted with HMRC last month, October 2013. On 21 January 2013 GDS held an event called The future is here at which they announced that they had 400 days to transform government, which might suggest that IDAP should be live in February 2014 but there are no guarantees and it may yet transpire that the future was, in the event, somewhere else all the time. 7 The privacy principles which should govern GDS's digital-by-default plans for public services have still not been agreed. GDS have been quite cavalier with privacy. And their public consultation followed none of the recognised procedures. 8 GDS's attempt to depict public expenditure in a series of "infographics" was described as "either an attempt to obscure the data under the guise of transparency or the work of people who have no knowledge of data visualisation ...The charts in every case are either inappropriate for the data or appropriate but ineptly designed". Among other things, the charts omitted interest on the national debt. 9 GDS promise that their development work will be "open" and say that openness is "the best way to make sure that we’re accountable for the things we build. As our design principles say, if we make things open, we make things better". They promise that but do not deliver. 10 Four IT professors reviewed GDS's IT strategy and in their draft findings published on 7 January 2013 they declare it to be inadequate. Among other things the professors say: "It is appealing to hope that a radical change in digital service delivery can be accomplished simply through adoption of open source technologies, introduction of agile development practices, and contractual support for encouraging more SMEs with their high-levels of energy and diversity. However, this view is much too simplistic and highly risky". 11 It's not just the opinion of the Electoral Commission and of the four professors that GDS ignore. The National Audit Office have expressed doubts about digital-by-default, so have the BBC, and so have 52 members of parliament in an early day motion – they, too, have been ignored. How would GDS avoid people with no web skills becoming excluded by default? They don't say. Nor have they made any progress on assisted digital, please see 2 above. Digital-by-default is being promoted in denial of reality. Like any service organisation, GDS claim to put the users' needs first and they were even allowed to make that pitch to the Cabinet on 29 October 2013. But it looks as if UC claimants who can't use the web would be ignored by GDS. 12 The repeated claim that GDS's award-winning GOV.UK has replaced all central government department websites and the websites of several agencies and arm's length bodies requires some qualification. In particular, HMRC's website has not been incorporated into GOV.UK despite claims to the contrary. 13 The awards won by GOV.UK are for publishing government data. GDS's ability to cope with high-volume, complex transactions like UC which calls for quite different skills is unknown. 14 The billions of pounds of savings that GDS promise depend on making a minimum of 40,000 public sector workers redundant and replacing them with computer systems. Ministers have already been warned that agile is untested at these scales. DWP may find that there is no saving to be made – they may have to pay for both the agile digital-by-default public services computer systems and the staff. The four professors warn that public services are complicated transactions. More complicated than buying a book on Amazon, for example. It may simply be impossible to replace the mature judgement of human beings with a computer system. 15 The "web-based" approach includes certain fashionable components. You have to be besotted by Apple's products and you have to embrace cloud computing, please see 1 above. Cloud computing is marketed as a utility. For people struggling with fuel poverty this will hardly be a recommendation – we will not want to add IT poverty to our woes. GDS elected to host GOV.UK in the cloud. Placing the details of 21 million UC claimants in the cloud will expose their data to hackers against whom, judging by the daily stream of stories in the media, there seems to be no defence. The founder of Google has warned everyone of the dangers of cloud computing as has the Managing Director of Microsoft UK. Putting your data in the cloud means losing control of it. What do GDS have to say on this matter? Nothing. 16 The "web-based" approach has its exemplars, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and eBay/PayPal among them. The veneration of these companies may not be shared by the rest of the population. Their aggressive tax avoidance in some cases and their reliance on slave labour in the third world in some cases could make it politically embarrassing to pay them to act as custodians of the nation's benefits data. 17 If public services are to become digital-by-default – and that is GDS's mission – then everyone must have an on-line identity. Thus the identity assurance programme, please see 5 above. To that end, GDS have appointed eight so-called "identity providers" for the UK. Everyone will be enjoined to maintain one or more personal data stores (PDSs) on the web. PDSs are being marketed by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills through their midata initiative as a way to "empower" consumers and a way to make the economy grow – they imagine that a thriving market in apps will develop advising us all what to eat and what films to watch. People should be warned that downloading an app may be little different from downloading a virus. It is not clear that consumers will be empowered by midata or that PDSs will bring economic growth with them ... 18 ... What they will bring, to all intents and purposes, is ID cards, without the card. It is now mandatory in the UK to register to vote, registration is to be on-line and we will identify ourselves using our PDSs. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister, talks of a new way to conduct the national census, presumably via PDSs and/or the IER electoral rolls. UC claimants in a web-based scheme would have to identify themselves on-line via their PDSs in order to claim. Does the government really want to go through the ID cards debate all over again?
They have chosen the unachievable, unrealistic, wasteful, unproven, no idea option.
Written Ministerial StatementThursday 5 December 2013THE DEPARTMENT FOR WORK AND PENSIONSUniversal Credit progress
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith MP) ...
Once fully implemented, Universal Credit will account for £70 billion of benefit spending each year, and bring a £38 billion economic benefit to society over 10 years ...
- As part of the wider transformation in the development of digital services, the Department will further develop the work started by the Government Digital Services [B] to test and implement an enhanced online digital service, which will be capable of delivering the full scope of Universal Credit and make provision for all claimant types.
- Meanwhile, we will expand our current pathfinder service [A] and develop functionality so that from next summer we progressively start to take claims for Universal Credit from ...
CloudStore will be unavailable from 9am (GMT) Mon 28 - Tues 29 Oct 2013 while we update services for the G4 framework. |
UK Backup Limited Announces the availability of its services on G-Cloud 4 http://t.co/PfEmMR18vh @G_Cloud_UK #gcloud #cloudstore |
We got @G_Cloud_UK ! So pleased to announce selection to provide Due Diligence services under Lot 4! #gcloud #duediligence #cloud |
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For four days his users were left with no service.
Most encouraging for me though was hearing from ministers just how strongly the principles behind our work have resonated with them. The questions they asked all came from the perspective of ‘What does this mean for users? How does it meet their needs?’
Starting with the needs of users has led to a radical shift in the way we build and provision government services. That’s a huge thing. It means an end to big IT, it means smarter and cheaper services which meet users needs, and it means digital sitting at the heart of teams all around government.
Delivery, eh? And user needs. It's not just "big IT" that fails.
What is your reaction to HealthCare.gov and what you're reading and seeing regarding failures of what was meant to be an Expedia shopping for health coverage?
Yeah ... I'll say this with no sense of enjoyment whatsoever, but it feels a bit like Groundhog Day to where we were three or four years ago. Hundreds of millions of dollars, large-scale IT enterprise technology, no real user testing, no real focus on end users, all done behind a black box, and not in an agile way but in a big waterfall way, which is a software methodology. And basically not proven good value, and I'm afraid to say I've got example after example in the U.K. in the past where we've had that experience. So it looks just like one of those.
My hope is that the current shockwaves of what you're going through here are strong enough to implement a new approach and actually to get political will behind having digital skills in the center. Because delivery is the only thing that will solve this problem ...
@G_Cloud_UK Hi, any news on when suppliers will be able to access the #cloudstore admin area to edit their services? |
finally on #cloudstore http://t.co/rDx9tHIdro thanks @G_Cloud_UK ! #cloud #gcloud |