RIP IDA – what they omitted from the obituary

No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but,

just in case it isn't obvious to all,

IDA is dead.

IDA, now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)",

is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme.

And it's dead.

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

24-03-2015	Janet Hughes	Introducing GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Chris Mitchell	Ready for Live: Digital Self-Assessment
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	Procurement 2: New identity suppliers to join GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	GOV.UK Verify and Mydex CIC
26-03-2015	Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn	GOV.UK Verify: Objectives for live
26-03-2015	Mike Bracken	It’s people who make transformation happen
27-03-2015	David Rennie	Working with the private sector to verify identity
27-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Turning the tanker: digital transformation done right
27-03-2015	Mike Beavan	Looking back at the exemplars
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Not the HMRC of old
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Data as a public asset
29-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Government as a Platform: the next phase of digital transformation
29-03-2015	Liam Maxwell	Better for less
30-03-2015	Martha Lane Fox	The Richard Dimbleby Lecture (text) (text) (text)

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

@gdsteam invent the right angle

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

24-03-2015	Janet Hughes	Introducing GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Chris Mitchell	Ready for Live: Digital Self-Assessment
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	Procurement 2: New identity suppliers to join GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	GOV.UK Verify and Mydex CIC
26-03-2015	Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn	GOV.UK Verify: Objectives for live
26-03-2015	Mike Bracken	It’s people who make transformation happen
27-03-2015	David Rennie	Working with the private sector to verify identity
27-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Turning the tanker: digital transformation done right
27-03-2015	Mike Beavan	Looking back at the exemplars
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Not the HMRC of old
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Data as a public asset
29-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Government as a Platform: the next phase of digital transformation
29-03-2015	Liam Maxwell	Better for less
30-03-2015	Martha Lane Fox	The Richard Dimbleby Lecture (text) (text) (text)

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

@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	Introducing GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Chris Mitchell	Ready for Live: Digital Self-Assessment
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	Procurement 2: New identity suppliers to join GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	GOV.UK Verify and Mydex CIC
26-03-2015	Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn	GOV.UK Verify: Objectives for live
26-03-2015	Mike Bracken	It’s people who make transformation happen
27-03-2015	David Rennie	Working with the private sector to verify identity
27-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Turning the tanker: digital transformation done right
27-03-2015	Mike Beavan	Looking back at the exemplars
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Not the HMRC of old
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Data as a public asset
29-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Government as a Platform: the next phase of digital transformation
29-03-2015	Liam Maxwell	Better for less
30-03-2015	Martha Lane Fox	The Richard Dimbleby Lecture (text) (text) (text)

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.

@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	Introducing GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Chris Mitchell	Ready for Live: Digital Self-Assessment
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	Procurement 2: New identity suppliers to join GOV.UK Verify
25-03-2015	Janet Hughes	GOV.UK Verify and Mydex CIC
26-03-2015	Janet Hughes and Stephen Dunn	GOV.UK Verify: Objectives for live
26-03-2015	Mike Bracken	It’s people who make transformation happen
27-03-2015	David Rennie	Working with the private sector to verify identity
27-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Turning the tanker: digital transformation done right
27-03-2015	Mike Beavan Beaven	Looking back at the exemplars
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Not the HMRC of old
28-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Data as a public asset
29-03-2015	Mike Bracken	Government as a Platform: the next phase of digital transformation
29-03-2015	Liam Maxwell	Better for less
30-03-2015	Martha Lane Fox	The Richard Dimbleby Lecture (text) (text) (text)

Let's take a look at Mike Beavan's Beaven's 27 March 2015 offering.

#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.

#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.

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

Online farm payment system abandoned after

'performance problems'

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".

Agile@DEFRA

Just another government IT failure, BBC news website:

Online farm payment system abandoned after 'performance problems' A multi-million pound government IT system to process EU subsidy payments for farmers has been largely abandoned following "performance problems". The system will be re-launched next week with farmers asked to submit Basic Payment Scheme claims on paper forms. Farmers say they have struggled with the £154m website for months ...

Or is it?

Budget travel to Estonia

The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered his 2015 Budget report yesterday.

The media have clocked all the good jokes, please see for example How George Osborne's Budget jokes cost Britain £81m.

The lesson of the web? There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. A. Secure. Website.

There is no such thing as a secure website.

You know that.

You've read the papers, listened to the radio, watched TV and browsed the web. You know Sony were hacked. You know JP Morgan Chase were hacked. And Lockheed Martin and the US State Department.

You know that. They know it and so does everyone else – there is no such thing as a secure website.

Knowing that, if someone offers you a web service and promises that it's secure, how do you react?