Monday 14 January 2013

Whitehall – front page misfeasance

... put the departments of state out to tender ...

This morning's Times newspaper leads with:
No, Minister: Whitehall in ‘worst’ crisis

Roland Watson, Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson
Published at 12:01AM, January 14 2013

An increasingly bitter power struggle between ministers and mandarins is poisoning relations across Whitehall and threatening to derail David Cameron’s reforms, The Times has learnt.

Tension over the pace and scale of coalition policy has given way to outright mistrust in some departments with ministers feeling blocked by an unwieldy and unwilling Civil Service.

One Tory Cabinet minister said that the working relationship was akin to both sides waging a permanent “cold war” ...
The Times have conducted an investigation they say involving "dozens of ministers, past and present", and the article names David Cameron, Michael Gove, Eric Pickles, Francis Maude, Tony Blair, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield and Nick Herbert. Whitehall is in a power struggle with Westminster, apparently – not news to DMossEsq readers – and accuses Whitehall of being obstructive, untrustworthy and in need of reform. There is an accompanying editorial, Office Politics.

The public administration bubble was identified in OBITUARY: Whitehall 1947-2012. Is the bubble now, as predicted, bursting before our eyes?

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Updated 14:30:

The Times has published a longer version of the report on its investigation, A covert war conducted with the utmost courtesy.

Benedict Brogan in the Telegraph thinks that Whitehall aren't to blame, it's all the politicians' fault, Ministers v Whitehall: Don't let the politicians duck their responsibility.

Some thoughts
There is nothing new about the power struggle between Westminster and Whitehall. It is 60 years since Professor GW Keeton published The Passing of Parliament in which he declared that Whitehall had won, and now exists in a state of “administrative lawlessness”, beyond the reach of either Parliament or the common law, where it behaves remarkably like the Stuart kings we rebelled against before.

The Times don't seem to have noticed but Francis Maude does have a plan to improve public administration which revolves around the Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG). Will it work?

Mr Maude is preyed upon by the advocates of making public services digital by default. Fire public servants, replace them with computers, deal with the public over the web, emulate Amazon, PayPal/eBay, Google and Facebook and the problems of public administration will be solved. That’s the suggestion and it’s nothing but infantile, credulous, inane, quasi-religious fervour. That part of the plan is bound to fail. Good job, too. Otherwise, we would end up being governed by Amazon, PayPal/eBay, Google and Facebook, they would have become part of the Constitution and we would be no better off.

Part of the problem with Whitehall is centralisation. Mr Maude’s plan involves more of the same – more centralisation. Power would be called in from the satrapies which are the departments of state, and concentrated in ERG. That would make matters worse. Not better. It looks like a Whitehall suggestion in response to the threat of localism. So one suggestion is, try more localism. Much more localism.

Whitehall is a monopoly. That is one of the problems. No incentive to compete, nothing to drive up quality, nothing to keep prices down. How should Mr Maude introduce competition? One suggestion – put the departments of state out to tender. Perhaps the US would win the contract to run the Department for Business. Who would get the Treasury? Perhaps Hong Kong? Singapore? New Zealand? Israel to run the Ministry of Defence. And so on.

Localism and competition – two matters for debate.

One element of Mr Maude’s plan, or what should be his plan, has been debated enough. We know the answer. Openness. Public money is public. Public servants are public. The powers of the Freedom of Information Act should be increased and enforced. That would be a start, at least, on the road to Parliament getting back control of Whitehall and of our public administration.

Footnote





Whitehall – front page misfeasance

... put the departments of state out to tender ...

This morning's Times newspaper leads with:
No, Minister: Whitehall in ‘worst’ crisis

Roland Watson, Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson
Published at 12:01AM, January 14 2013

An increasingly bitter power struggle between ministers and mandarins is poisoning relations across Whitehall and threatening to derail David Cameron’s reforms, The Times has learnt.

Tension over the pace and scale of coalition policy has given way to outright mistrust in some departments with ministers feeling blocked by an unwieldy and unwilling Civil Service.

One Tory Cabinet minister said that the working relationship was akin to both sides waging a permanent “cold war” ...
The Times have conducted an investigation they say involving "dozens of ministers, past and present", and the article names David Cameron, Michael Gove, Eric Pickles, Francis Maude, Tony Blair, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield and Nick Herbert. Whitehall is in a power struggle with Westminster, apparently – not news to DMossEsq readers – and accuses Whitehall of being obstructive, untrustworthy and in need of reform. There is an accompanying editorial, Office Politics.

The public administration bubble was identified in OBITUARY: Whitehall 1947-2012. Is the bubble now, as predicted, bursting before our eyes?

----------

Updated 14:30:

Saturday 12 January 2013

#1 of many lessons about GDS and the external digital thought-leaders

Ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken, executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS) and senior responsible officer owner for the government-wide Identity Assurance Programme (IDAP), produced not one blog post yesterday but two.

The Future is Here is an invitation to Sprint 13Strictly limited to 300 guests, no more room in the Ark, be there or be nobody, this is the party for the "ambitious" (we're going to be seeing a lot of that word).

Videos, speeches and workshops at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Monday, 21 January 2013 from 08:45 to 13:00 (GMT), come and meet "Government and Agency Board Members, Officials, Policy Makers, Ministers, Press and External Digital Thought-Leaders". Who could resist?

"Book your place", it says on the invitation. So DMossEsq did:
  • And back came the response on screen, "Thank you! See you at the event!", followed by the names of all the other registered attendees!
  • Followed by a cheery confirmation email from Eventbrite, a Californian firm of event organisers (please see Cheers below).
  • Followed by an email from GDS explaining regretfully that the invitation wasn't meant for DMossEsq, there must have been a misunderstanding.
There's a lesson there. About the future. Which is here.

Eventbrite now have the names and email addresses of about 300 civil servants "working across Government and its agencies to deliver our digital ambition statement". Why? Eventbrite may (definitely do) also have the attendees' job titles, employer's name (government department) and mobile phone number, all of which are also entered on the booking form. No warning. No permission sought. Quite unnecessary.

To a marketing man, that sort of data is apparently invaluable. Which is why the Eventbrite service is "free", like Google and Facebook and Twitter.To GDS, with their devil-may-care attitude to personal data, it means nothing. 300 civil servants? 62 million Brits who use public services? Privacy? What's that all about?

(to be continued)
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Added 13.1.13:
GDS have corrected their mistake, the 'Book your place' link now takes the browser to a 'This event is invite-only' page.

Cheers (confirmation email from Eventbrite):


From: Eventbrite [mailto:ebhelp@eventbrite.com]
Sent: 11 January 2013 17:58
To: bcsl@blueyonder.co.uk
Subject: Greetings from Eventbrite
Eventbrite

Hi David,
The organiser of SPRINT 13 is using Eventbrite to sell tickets or collect online registrations. If you have any questions, here's the best way to find what you're looking for:
Looking to...
  • View order details or print tickets
  • Review general event info
  • Share events with friends
Have questions about...
  • Event specifics like transportation, parking, dress code
  • Guest and refund policies
Go to Eventbrite Contact the organiser
We hope you enjoy SPRINT 13 !
Cheers,
The Eventbrite Team
Keep in touch!
Facebook Twitter RSS

From workshops and art shows to reunions and charity events, for 20,000 or 20 people, Eventbrite makes the hard part of hosting events, easy. Best of all, it's free if your event is free! Learn more.

#1 of many lessons about GDS and the external digital thought-leaders

Ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken, executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS) and senior responsible officer owner for the government-wide Identity Assurance Programme (IDAP), produced not one blog post yesterday but two.

The Future is Here is an invitation to Sprint 13Strictly limited to 300 guests, no more room in the Ark, be there or be nobody, this is the party for the "ambitious" (we're going to be seeing a lot of that word).

Videos, speeches and workshops at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Monday, 21 January 2013 from 08:45 to 13:00 (GMT), come and meet "Government and Agency Board Members, Officials, Policy Makers, Ministers, Press and External Digital Thought-Leaders". Who could resist?

Thursday 10 January 2013

Mooncalves, marketing, midata, my money and yours

We live in a new world, so we're told. Revolution all around us. Is that true?

Is it dishwasher-proof?
Here's Murad Ahmed in the Times newspaper, 9 January 2013, reporting from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:
For just £60, the world’s first “smart fork” can be yours, boosting your cutlery drawer’s IQ while changing your eating habits and making you thin ...

The HAPIfork gets smarter over time, tracking a person’s rate of eating across several meals and slowly increasing the seconds before it buzzes as you learn to eat more slowly. After a meal, it send the information to your mobile phone.

“People have never questioned how a fork works before,” said a rather trim Andrew Carton, the president of HAPIlab, who says that he once was obese. “They’ve been eating all their lives and think, who are you to tell me I’m not using a fork correctly? But we think the fork can and is evolving.”
Good luck to Mr Carton.

Enough with the "guru"
It's not just the products and services that are changing. Now if you want to sell anything you must use social media. But you don't know anything about social media, do you. It's new. You need an expert.

And luckily, there are more and more of them available. Ms BL Ochman has been keeping count. In 2009, only 60,000 Twitter uses included the phrase "social media" in their bio/profile. As 2013 opens, that's up to a whacking 181,000, including 174 "social media whores", as Ms Ochman tells us, and 10 "social media veterans", one of whom has 17 months experience.

And there are 18,363 "social media gurus". That's a lot of gurus. As Ms Ochman says, realistically:
... let's save "guru" (Sanskrit for "teacher") for religious figures or at least people with real unique knowledge.
Multimedia? See also, profane video from Ms Ochman's website.

Camels in at the deep end
Some of these self-appointed gurus sound as though they're in a bit of a state. Psychologically. Here's Peter Vander Auwera, 8 January 2013, Who am I, Really?
We probably have to invent a new word for this “one environment of me”: maybe the word “Dysical” – as a contraction of Digital and Physical – could do the job? But it is more than one word we need. We need a new language, a new vocabulary, a new grammar; new ways to create the sentences and the narrative that can capture this new form of being. And when we have developed basic literacy in this new language, we’ll perfect it like art, like literature, like poetry, for deep and rich self-expressions ...

We swim in a sea of data and the sea level is rising rapidly. Tens of millions of connected people, billions of sensors, trillions of transactions now work to create unimaginable amounts of information. This is a new environment requiring lots of adaptability. We are a species from the land that have to learn to live in the ocean. Like camels that used to live in the desert, that now have to survive in the ocean ...
"Poetry" – that's the giveaway. Mr Vander Auwera is Belgian, a bit like being French, and they've always gone in for this sort of flowery narcissistic melodramatic stuff, it's nothing new, and he's not nearly as confused (or young) as he sounds.

Marketing funnels
You don't have to be Belgian to use this new grammar. Here's Jamie Beckland. He wants to tell you about post-revolutionary psychographics. Apparently it's The End of Demographics: How Marketers Are Going Deeper With Personal Data:
Marketers have built a temple that needs to be torn down. Demographics have defined the target consumer for more than half a century – poorly. Now, with emerging interest graphs from social networks, behavioral data from search outlets and lifecycle forecasting, we have much better ways of targeting potential customers ... that entire system has broken down ... Fragmentation is now the norm because the pace of change is accelerating. Generations have been getting smaller ...

They were targeting 14 million consumers to sell 50,000 units – that means they were hoping for 3.5 sales for every 1,000 people with whom they connected through their marketing ... What if, instead, you could get 500 sales from every 1,000 people you marketed to? ... It’s possible through psychographic profiling. Psychographics look at the mental model of the consumer in the context of a customer lifecycle ...

Social profile data is the critical cornerstone of psychographic insights. The level of nuance and insight provided by social data, when compared to standard demographics, is the difference between performing surgery with a scalpel or a butter knife. Previously unimaginable questions are now routine: Are customers who kayak more likely to buy water shoes than those who canoe? ... companies such as GraphEffect are measuring purchase intent by doing semantic analysis on Facebook status updates. This type of qualitative analysis can move users into specific marketing funnels from their very first online experience with your brand ...

The next generation of ad targeting will focus more on telling the customer a story over time, based on specific behavior triggers. That means ad networks and clickstream data aggregators will work together to trigger when a customer moves forward in a mental model toward a purchase event ...

Social profile data can also be used to predict customer lifecycle ...These patterns are predictable, so you know the future behavior of ... This vision is starting to gain traction among serious marketers. At the 2009 Internet Strategy Forum, Xerox’s VP of Interactive Marketing, Duane Schulz, said that a 1% clickthrough rate was a huge failure – even though it is 10 times the industry average. In his mind, a successful campaign would never waste 99% of its impressions. Using psychographic data, you don’t have to waste any impressions.
"You don't have to waste any impressions"
In amongst the verbiage, the truth is beginning to be discernible, isn't it. For all the talk of torn-down temples and shorter generations, the sales pitch is the oldest lure in the book – we can foretell the future. Or even, we can create the future – we can make people want to buy intelligent forks.

It's baloney. It's false. They can't.

They can't predict the future but we all fall for it sometimes. Stockbroker X has the best record in the City, he'll make you a small fortune (as long as you give him a big one in the first place). Astrologers in India are still called upon to calculate the most propitious date and time of day for the chairman of a multi-national to sign his next big agreement. Kings and queens have always been susceptible, just as much as the common man or woman or mooncalf ...

midata
... or Whitehall mandarin:
  • Buy these biometrics, Sir Humphrey, and you can eradicate crime.
  • Maintenance costs out of control? Stick your IT in the cloud.
  • Public services to become digital by default? I can provide identity assurance using social profile data.
  • Give me access to everyone's transaction data, and I'll have the economy growing in no time.
What the gurus find when faced with a Whitehall mandarin is that "measuring purchase intent by doing semantic analysis on Facebook status updates, this type of qualitative analysis can move mandarins into specific marketing funnels from their very first online experience with our brand" and by "telling the mandarin a story over time, based on specific behavior triggers, ad networks and clickstream data aggregators will work together to trigger when a mandarin moves forward in a mental model toward a purchase event" funded with large quantities of public money – your money and mine.

Is there any way to stop them falling for it? Maybe. A revolution?

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Updated 24.3.14

It's a long time now – November 2012 – since Ctrl-Shift introduced us all to the "quantified self space". And over a year since the post above was published with its cast of delightful eccentrics all animatedly creating the future to order.

Where are they now? Have they all disappeared?

Not a bit of it.

All our favourite self-certified social media whores, veterans and gurus – see Ms BL Ochman above – were gathered together in London last week, 20 March 2014, for PIE2014, the Bretton Woods of the Personal Information Economy.

Peter Vander Auwera remains European champion phrase-turner at this essentially ludic event, with:
and
Hugo Pinto is his only challenger:
Between them, we learn that the consumer value serum of robot creepiness algorithms uncannily interacts with ad based trust models driven deep into the human data valley, and that's the dynamics of the personal information economy laid bare in a nutshell.

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt was in the PIE as was William Heath, of course, and Christopher Graham, the UK's strangely supportive Information Commissioner. Do they really think this sort of encounter group session furthers the cause of midata and open data?

They do these things differently in the US. While our chaps are busy chatting about uncanny valleys, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg just gets on the phone to President Obama and tells him what he wants, Mark Zuckerberg tells Barack Obama he is 'frustrated' over US government surveillance.

Updated 27.10.14

Here's a new departure in pronouncements on web marketing – a warning that it will be 25 years before anyone including investors can rely on the guru's predictions – "alas, it'll take about 25 more years (on top of the past ten) to collect enough data to prove significance":