Monday 13 April 2015

@gdsteam and the revolution in cosmetics

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

We've already taken a look at Martha Lane Fox's 30 March 2015 offering. Two looks, in fact, here and here, both concluding that MLF's argument is illogical.

But there's something else.

Saturday 11 April 2015

@gdsteam, success and ... candy floss

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 Mike Beavan's 27 March 2015 offering.

The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) continue to recruit for their GOV.UK Verify (RIP) system. Just at the moment they're looking for three WebOps engineers to assist in the funeral rites:
Our GOV.UK Verify team are recruiting for three WebOps Engineers that love to solve technical problems relating to security, identity management and scaling in a cloud based environment. We need them to have an understanding of common web application architectures coupled with experience configuring and managing Linux servers.
"Working with sensitive data and in a secure environment" is a skill GDS would like you to bring to the graveside, but it's only "desirable", not "essential".

Which is not strictly relevant to Mr Beavan's post except for one thing – under "Perks" the sit. vac. advert says:
• annual leave allowance of 25 days (rising to 30 days after five years) with 8 days’ bank and public holidays and also the Queen’s Birthday privilege holiday
That tells us how many working days there are in the GDS year. 25 + 8 + 1 = 34 days off out of 52 X 5 = 260 weekdays in a year. The working year is 260 - 34 = 226 days long. Remember that.

Now start again.

He seems to have misplaced it since then but back on 11 January 2013, Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO, executive director of GDS and senior responsible owner of GOV.UK Verify (RIP), assured us that The Future is Here:
We have 2 years, or 400 days, to deliver fundamental transformation of our mainstream services, including digitisation of tax, agriculture, justice, health, and transport.
That turned out to be 400 business days. Using a 226-day business year, the expected date of delivery for "fundamental transformation of our mainstream services" was 19 October 2014. That's 400 business days or 646 calendar days after 11 January 2013.

Did it work? Did GDS succeed? Were central government services transformed six months ago in October 2014?

"Yes", said Mike Bracken, 760 days after firing the starting pistol, on 10 February 2015 when he published That was 400 days of delivery, the future has arrived. Under this picture ...

... he said:
Our exemplar programme is a great success, with 17 out of 25 projects now live or in public beta phase. The transformed services have already seen 5.8 million user transactions ...
The target was 25 live transformed central government services. GDS achieved 8. Or "17", as Mr Bracken calls it. And that was a "great success".

That was on 10 February 2015. By the time the future had moved house to 27 March 2015 and Mr Beavan's post, the picture had changed:

Candy floss
Now 805 days after the starting pistol, Mr Beavan said:
Two years ago, we set out to change government. We gave ourselves 400 working days to transform 25 major public services, building digital “exemplars” so good that people would prefer to use them. Those 400 days are up [and how, they're up]. Here’s how we did.

Of the 25 services, 20 are publicly accessible. Fifteen of those are fully live and the rest are in beta – safe to use, but we’re still tweaking the user journey. This is a huge achievement and we’ve done it by putting user needs first.
400? 805? What's the difference?

Live? Or still in beta? What's the difference?

8? 17? 20? 25? What's the difference?

Who cares? It doesn't matter what the numbers say about the promises made for transformation. Or the words. The point is that "this is a huge achievement", a "huge achievement" of which GDS can be proud. So proud that:
As we’ve said before, GOV.UK isn’t finished, and the same goes for the exemplars ... The programme has ended ... We used the transformation page on GOV.UK to track the progress of the exemplars. Now the programme’s ended we’re archiving that ... We’re only just beginning.
... although these 25 exemplars aren't "finished", they have "ended", and GDS are "just beginning" by deleting archiving the evidence.

How did GDS achieve this unfinished but ended and deleted archived success right at the start of transformation? "We've done it by putting user needs first".

We have examined this slippery claim before, please see Putting the user first – what does it mean?. The answer wasn't clear then. "Putting the user first" seemed to mean either nothing or whatever you want it to mean.

That was back in November 2013.

Since then we have had the débâcle of rural payments, exemplar #8 out of 25:
You’ll be able to submit accurate and verifiable information online about how you use your land, so you can claim subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy
The digital system has had to be withdrawn and farmers now submit their claims on paper. ("We’re still tweaking the user journey", as Mr Beavan put it.)

Rural payments failed despite Mr Bracken being heavily involved in its development, please see Agile@DEFRA:
They're going with an agile build out of a whole new programme ... It's going to help us deal with Europe in a different way, and quite rightly we're building it as a platform. It's going to be another example of government as a platform ... I'm on the Board, and I'm trying to help them every week, and GDS will be working very closely with them to deliver that.
And GDS's attitude to the users – the farmers – during the course of this "huge achievement"? The system is fine. It's the wretched users that don't work.

They're too old. They're not computer-literate. And they live in the countryside, where broadband is either slow or non-existent. That's what GDS told the esteemed editor of Computer Weekly, that's what he faithfully reported and that's what "putting the user first" means at GDS.

Since then, the esteemed editor has gone on to point out that GDS are trying to airbrush exemplar #8 out of history. So much for their candy floss claims of openness. And a real live farmer has suggested that it was precisely because of GDS's oversight and meddling that the rural payments system failed.

During purdah, GDS have only limited opportunities to promote their cause. So they're getting other people to do it for them, please see At 18F, The U.S. Looks to Fail Fast on Government IT Projects Instead of Failing Big:
As I reported earlier this month, 18F, a new development unit within the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), named for its location, is primed to tap into the success of the United Kingdom's Government Digital Services.
It might help him and the applicants for the WebOps jobs to read GDS's achievement before we move on to the other pre-purdah posts in the table above.


----------

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 list of the 8 or 17 or "20 high-quality digital services" mentioned there has been deleted archived. The Rural Payments Agency have saved farmers "time, hassle and money" by moving the "high-quality" Basic Payment Scheme off-line and onto paper.


Updated 20.4.15

The WebOps jobs mentioned in the post above are now being offered on the stackoverflowcareers website. We knew about most of the benefits of working at GDS. Cake, and so on. Stickers, bunting, ... But the on-site massages/reflexology come/comes as a bit of a surprise. Is that the secret of GDS's achievement?



Updated 1.9.15

Revolving doors

Only the other day, we were asking


Shame we can't spell the man's name – "Beaven" – we might have got the answer sooner.

Whatever, now we know. Mike Beaven, previously director of transformation at the Government Digital Service is now director of digital at Methods Digital, the people who think the UK can transform £35 billion off the deficit by firing 1½ million useless public servants thanks to Government as a Platform.


Updated 22.9.15

The National Audit Office (NAO) have just published A Short Guide to the Cabinet Office: "The primary purpose of this Short Guide is to help new members of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee gain an informed understanding of the Cabinet Office".

On p.21 (or "6/12" as the NAO call it) the Committee are told  about the Government Digital Service's exemplar programme: "By its deadline 20 exemplar services were publicly available, 15 of which are live".

The NAO say that the deadline was April 2015. It wasn't. It was 19 October 2014, please see above.

On 10 February 2015 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)", published That was 400 days of delivery, Even he didn't think the deadline was as late as April.

And even he didn't think that 20 exemplars were "publicly available". He only claimed eight live services and nine in public beta.

8 out of 25 is a poor score. Embarrassing enough for Mike Beaven, the director of transformation, to hide the transformation dashboard in the National Archives and to announce on 27 March 2015 that: "The programme has ended ... We’re only just beginning".

Both Mr Bracken and Mr Beaven have subsequently resigned.

April 2015? Or October 2014? 20? Or 8? Or 15? The Committee may find that the picture painted by the NAO is not entirely clear.

The NAO say that: "The Cabinet Office is directly responsible for 1 exemplar, Individual Electoral Registration, which allows people to register to vote online". IER does not allow people to vote on-line. Nor does it allow us to register on-line. It's up to Electoral Registration Officers to register us or not. It's not up to GDS.

All that GDS's on-line IER system does, we are told, is to collect applications to register and forward them to EROs. The applications could come from anyone. It's up to EROs to do their own identity assurance.

The GDS system doesn't stop people from submitting multiple applications, which they may be inclined to do as the GDS system doesn't provide any feedback to applicants. We don't know until polling cards arrive if our application has been successful. Meanwhile, the EROs have to contend with all the old problems and now the problem of multiple applications in addition.

Still on p.21, the NAO mention GDS's plans for Government as a Platform (GaaP).

GOV.UK is a platform. A publishing platform. A publishing platform that centralises control. GDS can and do refuse to host transaction facilities the departments of state want to offer to the public. If these facilities do not meet GDS's standards, the departments are stumped – they no longer have their own websites to publish on. Is that healthy for public administration?

GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is meant to be a platform. An identity assurance platform. An insecure identity assurance platform if the four academics who reviewed it are right.

The NAO say that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) was "delayed several times in 2014" (p.22). Not for the first time. We were previously told that it would be "fully operational" by the spring of 2013, ready for use by 21 million claimants on DWP's services.

It wasn't fully operational then and it still isn't. GDS's progress reports, of which we have had five so far, successively move the deadline forward, always six months or more into the future.

The description of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) on GOV.UK makes it sound as though it's all about helping people to transact with government. To submit tax returns, and so on. Which means it comes as a surprise to discover that Janet Hughes, the programme director, spent 4 September 2015 telling 200 entrepreneurs gathered together by some venture capitalists that they would be able to make money out of GOV.UK Verify (RIP).

Even more of a surprise when you remember that we already have a platform for transacting with government – the Government Gateway – and have had for 15 years.

Sentiment in the decision-making corners of Whitehall has moved against the Government Gateway. And towards GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Why? What makes GOV.UK Verify (RIP) a desirable platform and the Government Gateway an undesirable one? What is a platform?

One of GDS's advisors, a consultant called Simon Wardley, explains that it's a matter of plotting value chains against evolution. Janet Hughes told her 200 entrepreneurs that she finds Wardley "maps" very useful when considering GOV.UK Verify (RIP) although they don't tell her what's going to happen or when.

Even more inscrutably, a consultant called Mark Thompson, who now employs Mike Beaven, or soon will, please see above, starts with Wardley "maps" but then plots certainty against ubiquity on a mission to find "promising clusters" which will, under some circumstances, "literally constitute the government as a platform".

Mr Thompson goes on to estimate that GaaP could save the Exchequer £32 billion p.a. and make 1½ million public servants redundant, a fact not included in the NAO briefing to the Committee.

@gdsteam, success and ... candy floss

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 Beaven
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 Mike Beavan's Beaven's 27 March 2015 offering.

Tuesday 7 April 2015

#DimblebyLecture: DotEveryone and the new logical order

"DOT EVERYONE must help us navigate the multiple ethical and moral issues that the internet is presenting and will continue to present", Martha Lane Fox told us in the Dimbleby Lecture last week, 30 March 2015.

She was thinking of problems like mass surveillance by the security services, she said. And children's on-line rights. The implications of wearable technology and the Internet of Things. "Smart cities" and robots. And cybercrime.

She gave no hint what the solutions to those problems might look like, except to say that they would embed our national values – British values – in the digital world: "That, for me, would be DOT EVERYONE’s third big task – help us embed our national values in the digital world".

You might think that no progress can be made by DotEveryone before those problems have been solved.

Wrong.

Six months ago on 14 October 2014 the Guardian newspaper published Online voting should be made mandatory, says Martha Lane Fox. Can the security of on-line voting be guaranteed? Would the outcome of elections be determined by the voters or by the best hackers? Should voting be mandatory? Can you strip non-voters of their citizenship or their right to benefits?

DotEveryone can't answer those questions. It can't tell the digital world where British values would embed the solutions. But that doesn't stop DotEveryone from legislating for on-line, compulsory voting. This is a new logical order. Either you get it or you get out: "Of course we can cover for all the fraud and I don’t think it makes the procedure any less robust, in fact quite the opposite".

The Open Rights Group, incidentally, and the University of Michigan have thought about this matter as well and, "quite the opposite", they think that eVoting is "less robust".

In the same Guardian article, Martha Lane Fox says that people should have the right to delete everything from the web which might suggest a misspent youth: “We should be able to create these safe places for kids to be OK and for it not be okay for that to then come back to haunt you at a later date ... That feels quite urgent and important and manageable”.

She also says that people shouldn't have that right: "somebody might want to go into politics but hasn't announced it yet and might want to take off everything about their lives previously, there might have been some kind of terrible corruption in the past".

A contradiction?

No.

Not a bit of it, not with new added British values, not in the new logical order of DotEveryone.

#DimblebyLecture: DotEveryone and the new logical order

"DOT EVERYONE must help us navigate the multiple ethical and moral issues that the internet is presenting and will continue to present", Martha Lane Fox told us in the Dimbleby Lecture last week, 30 March 2015.

She was thinking of problems like mass surveillance by the security services, she said. And children's on-line rights. The implications of wearable technology and the Internet of Things. "Smart cities" and robots. And cybercrime.

She gave no hint what the solutions to those problems might look like, except to say that they would embed our national values – British values – in the digital world: "That, for me, would be DOT EVERYONE’s third big task – help us embed our national values in the digital world".

You might think that no progress can be made by DotEveryone before those problems have been solved.

Wrong.

Sunday 5 April 2015

#DimblebyLecture: down with sash windows

Suppose that Nigel Farage said:
It is within our reach for Britain to leapfrog every nation in the world and become the most digital, most connected, most skilled, most informed on the planet ... Britain grabbed the industrial revolution by the throat – we became the powerhouse of the world – and we can do that again.
He would be accused of dog-whistling. Opprobrium would be heaped on his head from all bien-pensants quarters for appealing to that aggressive nationalism for which the British empire will forever be infamous and the only proper response to which is abjectly to acknowledge our guilt.

But then Mr Farage is the leader of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, a youngish political party which campaigns against the UK's membership of the European Union and in favour of traditional Conservative values. He is not Martha Lane Fox, the person who actually uttered those words last Monday 30 March 2015 when she delivered the BBC's annual Dimbleby Lecture, only to be greeted by proud and benign smiles from all the great and the good in the audience.

Suppose you said the same thing. "It is within our reach ...", etc ... You wouldn't get to say it in the Dimbleby Lecture and the great and the good wouldn't be there to smile. You wouldn't even get the opprobrium – you don't matter that much.

On the other hand, you might get some useful criticism. Britain can't leapfrog every nation in the world. Britain is one of the nations in the world and it can't leapfrog itself.

And if you went on to say ...
A new institution could be the catalyst we need to shape the world we want to live in and Britain’s role in that world ... It would be an independent organisation that is given its power by government but has a strong mandate from the public.
... as Martha Lane Fox did, you might be asked if perhaps you weren't over-reaching yourself. What kind of institution can shape the world and Britain's rôle in it while at the same time being backed by the government but controlled by the public?
This is no normal public body [you can say that again] ... It’s time to balance the world of dot com, so I would call it DOT EVERYONE.
Always supposing that it was possible to create this world-dominating institution, DotEveryone, why would we want to? Apparently, if only we became more digitally adept ...
... it would not only be good for our economy, but it would be good for our culture, our people, our health and our happiness.
That, of course, could be the stated objective of any political ideology. Including UKIP's. And the BBC's. If the Archbishop of Canterbury claimed the same benefits for adherence to our new go-ahead Church of England a plague of contumely would rain down on Lambeth Palace for 40 days.

Not so Martha Lane Fox, even when she explained that the distinctive appeal of DotEveryone is that it would see the end of mahogany desks, sash windows, three-piece suits and men with grey hair:
It’s 1998. I am 25. I am sitting in a huge central London office, with long sash windows, and a grey haired man in a three piece suit is at the far end, behind a big mahogany desk.
1998 is 17 years ago. Now:
76% of Britons use the internet every day. Our nation of shopkeepers is now home to the most enthusiastic online shoppers on the planet. In 2014, e-commerce accounted for about 15% of total UK retail sales ... A report from Tech City in February this year found that there are now 1.4 million people in the UK employed in digital businesses and venture capital. The sector is 20 times what it was just five years ago ...That makes it bigger than health or education or construction.
It looks as though the internet is getting on famously without DotEveryone. But no, progress isn't fast enough for some fundamentalists ...
We just need to go much, much faster and we need to make sure all of us are included ... There are currently 10 million adults in the UK who cannot get the basic benefits of being online ...
...and it's all the fault of our ignorant politicians, public officials, business leaders and journalists. In fact, men in general:
DOT EVERYONE our new organisation, must figure out how to put women at the heart of the technology sector. That alone could make us the most digitally successful country on the planet and give us a real edge.
Why has women's lib been fighting for so long? So that women can code in Java. (The programming language. Not the place.) The fight is still not won. How will DotEveryone succeed? Give money to unemployed women, obviously:
Why not launch a national challenge to find the best ideas to tackle this problem? ... Why not offer every unemployed woman free education and training? ... Surely there must be a couple of new Ada Lovelaces lurking in this land?
If poor old Natalie Bennett, leader of the UK's Green Party, had suggested that, "poor woman, she can't be expected to understand", the commentators would have said, but Martha Lane Fox was still being listened to seriously.

DotEveryone has other tricky problems to solve before we climb the hill to "the inspiring, brave new world ahead". Martha Lane Fox mentions mass surveillance by the security forces services. The protection of minors on-line. The implications of wearable technology and the Internet of Things. The public good v. private profit. Cybercrime.

And her proposed solutions? She doesn't have any. All she can say is:

That, for me, would be DOT EVERYONE’s third big task – help us embed our national values in the digital world ... It will make sure the UK fills the moral and ethical gap that exists at the heart of discussions about the internet.
This Dimbleby Lecture contributes yet another gap to discussions about the internet.

----------

Updated 6.4.15

The following comment was submitted to the Martha Lane Fox blog and awaits moderation:
dmossesq says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
April 5, 2015 at 10:58 am
What have you got against sash windows?
Reply

#DimblebyLecture: down with sash windows

Suppose that Nigel Farage said:
It is within our reach for Britain to leapfrog every nation in the world and become the most digital, most connected, most skilled, most informed on the planet ... Britain grabbed the industrial revolution by the throat – we became the powerhouse of the world – and we can do that again.
He would be accused of dog-whistling. Opprobrium would be heaped on his head from all bien-pensants quarters for appealing to that aggressive nationalism for which the British empire will forever be infamous and the only proper response to which is abjectly to acknowledge our guilt.

But then Mr Farage is the leader of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, a youngish political party which campaigns against the UK's membership of the European Union and in favour of traditional Conservative values. He is not Martha Lane Fox, the person who actually uttered those words last Monday 30 March 2015 when she delivered the BBC's annual Dimbleby Lecture, only to be greeted by proud and benign smiles from all the great and the good in the audience.

Saturday 21 March 2015

The system is fine. It's the users that don't work



It has fallen to Bryan Glick, the estimable editor of Computer Weekly, to perform the first post mortem on the Rural Payments Agency's (RPA) computerised Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) which was discontinued yesterday and replaced with paper – "successive software releases failed to resolve the problems with the mapping tool".

We have known for two years that Mr Mike Bracken, the executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS), was heavily involved in the development of BPS. "I'm on the Board", as he told us, "I'm trying to help them every week ... GDS will be working very closely with them ... it's going to help us deal with Europe in a different way, and quite rightly we're building it as a platform. It's going to be another example of government as a platform".

Mr Glick reveals that in addition, Mr Liam Maxwell, the Government's Chief Technology Officer is also the senior responsible owner of BPS, "overseeing progress", and that this is a mark of "the importance of RPA to the GDS strategy".

These are highly respected people:
Highly respected, but it doesn't seem to have helped with BPS.

Perhaps the cheerleaders who voted for Messrs Bracken and Maxwell should have looked harder at that GDS strategy, which was heavily criticised at the time by at least four professors:
  • The professors deemed the strategy to be too flimsy, the detail was missing, it was going to be of no practical assistance to a large local authority or, as it turns out, to RPA.
  • The strategy underestimated the complexity of ultra-large-scale government systems, it ignored the relevant academic studies that might have helped GDS to understand the "complex cultural, political and regulatory environment" in which the "technologically diverse, long-lived set of transactional services" of government have to operate.
  • Against that, the appeal to open source, agile, the cloud and SMEs is "over-simplistic", the professors said. "There are risks that rapidly changing [agile] services will deter the takeup of digital services, not encourage it" and "the [Government Digital Strategy] is remarkably (perhaps alarmingly) silent on the issue of how to coordinate SMEs in project delivery":
  • Both of those problems have been experienced by BPS according to Mr Glick. "The iterative development process was also causing problems for farmers. “The system is frequently going down at short notice for upgrades, making it difficult for farmers and agents ...".  One of the suppliers is a "Belfast company that uses offshore developers in Gdansk, Poland", there are "hundreds of IT experts" also involved and more than 100 products that need to be integrated.
  • "We see little discussion of a concrete and practical change management process to support the 'digital by default' strategy", the professors said, back in January 2013. Two years later, that is clearly still a problem.
And what does Mr Glick say?
... the complex guidelines for the new Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) runs to 84 pages ... the situation differed considerably from the days of SPS [the predecessor system].
Clearly we're not dealing with anything "ultra-large-scale" here. That can't be the problem. Nor can the considerably different situation – there are still only 84 pages and the RPA have had at least two years and £154 million to work on BPS with the assistance of GDS's agile expertise.

"Scalability of the system had already been identified as one of the biggest challenges", according to Mr Glick:
GDS chief Mike Bracken acknowledged the complexity involved in a blog post in December 2014. “It’s not just the policy that’s complex. For this exemplar alone, we’re talking about roughly 110,000 farmers and 1,200 land agents,” he wrote.
By no stretch of the imagination is 112,200 111,200 people a large user base, 84 pages do not make for a complex policy – wait till GDS see the 15,000 pages of our tax code – and if the problem of scalability had been identified why did anyone inflict the system on the poor unfortunate users, particularly GDS, who claim to put the user uniquely first?

Mr Bracken is further quoted as saying:
Farmers themselves are a diverse group of people, whose properties can range from a smallholding to an industrial-scale business. The average age of farmers in the UK is also quite high, with many in their 60s and 70s.
Is Mr Glick complaining or being asked to complain that farmers aren't standard enough? And that they're too old, damn them? And too stupid: "There must have been question marks around how less digitally literate farmers would cope"? And even worse, that they live in the countryside?
Broadband access in remote rural areas was another issue, said ... a report in Farmers Guardian.
The system is fine? It's the users who don't work?


GDS will be working very closely with them ...
It's going to be another example of government as a platform ...

The system is fine. It's the users that don't work



It has fallen to Bryan Glick, the estimable editor of Computer Weekly, to perform the first post mortem on the Rural Payments Agency's (RPA) computerised Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) which was discontinued yesterday and replaced with paper – "successive software releases failed to resolve the problems with the mapping tool".