Thursday 7 May 2015

The next phase of digital transformation could be Dutch

Here's a selection of Government Digital Service (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 Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO's 29 March 2015 offering, Government as a Platform: the next phase of digital transformation.

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.

The executive has been offered joined up government before. Transformational Government – Enabled by Technology is a 25-page paper published by the Cabinet Office in November 2005. 9½ years later, we're still waiting.

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"?

The answer is confused. Talking about the programme of 25 exemplar services which were meant to transform government in 400 days, Mr Beavan says "now the programme’s ended ... We’re only just beginning".

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 ...
And what is GaaP? It means not reinventing the wheel. Who knew?
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.

All we know for sure is that one of the exemplars has had to be withdrawn completely, Online farm payment system abandoned after 'performance problems'.

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".

No mention in the Guardian of GaaP. For that, you have to turn to Mr Thompson's article in Computer Weekly magazine, What is government as a platform and how do we achieve it?:
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".

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Hat tip: @NoDPI
Hat tip: Mark Ballard

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“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.
Hat tip: Woody Allen

The next phase of digital transformation could be Dutch

Here's a selection of Government Digital Service (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 Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO's 29 March 2015 offering, Government as a Platform: the next phase of digital transformation.

Monday 4 May 2015

Over-promoted

Here's a selection of Government Digital Service (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 Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO's 28 March 2015 offering, Not the HMRC of old.

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.

The present object of our attentions examines three HMRC-related digital services:
These services all went live in the week ending 30 March 2015, 800 days after GDS gave themselves 400 days to transform the UK government by deploying 25 exemplar digital services which they still haven't.

In what sense is HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs) now no longer the "HMRC of old"?

According to Mr Bracken:
This is unconvincing. The Rural Payments digital service, exemplar #8, had the benefit of agile development, a multidisciplinary team including Mr Bracken himself, iteration, user research and Github and yet it failed.

Being written about in Wired? There's nothing new about organisations managing their PR. HMRC always have. And so have the GDS of old, see for example their coverage on BBC radio and in the Guardian newspaper, and the Times newspaper, twice, at least, not to mention their appearance (together with DMossEsq) in the 11 April 2014 issue of Wired.

As for there being a "huge amount of tax-related data" on the award-winning GOV.UK's performance platform, so what? The Office for National Statistics (ONS) are likely to be polite ...


... but wary of the government's new chief data officer. You don't measure the value of open data by weighing it. Are the figures on the performance platform accurate? What, if anything, do they mean, how are they to be interpreted correctly? What's being hidden from the viewer, what figures are missing?

It's hard work producing official statistics. You have to be able to defend them in open argument. There's an academic discipline there, to be respected with rigorous logic.

Mr Bracken told a US audience in October 2013 that:
  • £10 billion was 4 percent of UK gross domestic product. At the time, it was more like 0.6 percent.
  • The £10 billion figure he quoted hadn't been audited.
  • It was supposed to be the total value of savings made by the Cabinet Office over a vaguely specified period ...
  • ... achieved largely, it turned out later, by making a number of public servants redundant and by negotiating better rates with suppliers – but Mr Bracken gave the impression to his US audience that the saving was all thanks to GDS.
It's not just unconvincing. It's irrelevant. It's a technician's answer to the question in what way is this a new HMRC. Few small or medium-sized business users of the Your Tax Account service are going to name MongoDB as one of the innovations they're looking for in HMRC.

If anything in Mr Bracken's post is going to make the case that we now enjoy a new HMRC thanks to GDS, it's got to be the digital services themselves. But in that case, they're being hopelessly over-promoted. They're not up to the job.

DMossEsq took a look at the Your Tax Account digital service for one of his companies. You too can take a look.

Some identifying codes like the Unique Tax Reference have been edited. You may imagine that the company name also has been edited but, no, Mark Dearnley chose to omit it or perhaps he simply forgot to include it.

This company, whatever it's called, has paid all its corporation tax. That's what Your Tax Account says. The company owes 55 pence of pay-as-you-earn PAYE tax and it's up to date with its VAT (value added tax/sales tax).

How does Your Tax Account know that?

Presumably it is fed the figures by HMRC. It certainly can't work them out itself. Don't run away with the idea that GDS has suddenly learned how to calculate VAT and how to keep track of how much has been paid.

According to Mr Bracken:
Your Tax Account makes paying tax much simpler. More like paying your gas or electricity bill. It shows you a dashboard page that summarises everything in one place - what your company owes (or perhaps is owed) and when it needs to be paid. Click a link to pay there and then. It will save time and money for millions of small business owners across the UK.
No.

How does summarising everything in one place save time and money? The company still has to work out how much VAT, if any, is due and then tell HMRC who, in turn, have to check it and perhaps correct it. Ditto the PAYE and National Insurance Contributions. Ditto the corporation tax. Time saved for the company by Your Tax Account? Nil. Money saved? Nil.

"Your Tax Account makes paying tax much simpler". How? No it doesn't. "More like paying your gas or electricity account". Nonsense. The energy suppliers calculate the bill for you. Then you pay it.

Companies, by contrast, have to calculate the bills themselves. They need book-keepers and often auditors who keep up with the law and with the latest developments in HMRC procedures. They have to operate RTI. HMRC say so. They have to produce accounts in iXBRL format. HMRC say so. These people and their professional indemnity insurance and their continuing professional education have to be paid for by the company to act as HMRC's agents. It's time-consuming and expensive to prepare your own bills and far from constituting a saving Your Tax Account is just another cost – now we have to pay for Mr Dearnley in addition.

The energy bills tend to be correct. High. But correct. Not so HMRC – Five million UK workers face uncertainty after tax bills wrongly calculated twice in HMRC blunder. GDS often make the analogy between government and retail. This is another case where it doesn't work.

HMRC will not get it out of their head that DMossEsq receives thousands of pounds of benefits in kind. The tax code they issue him is wrong. Tax returns and letters sent to HMRC haven't corrected the mistake and neither have telephone calls. It would be marvellous if Mr Bracken's PAYE for employees service worked, "making it easier for people to tell HMRC about changes that affect their tax code (such as using a company car)".

Unfortunately, when he says "such as using a company car" he means "as long as using a company car is the only problem with your tax code because the service can't help with anything else".

"The digital service does the hard work for you" – no it doesn't.

He could sign up for Mr Bracken's Digital Self Assessment service. Surely that would allow DMossEsq to self-assess, digitally?

No. "Instead of being bombarded with paperwork, you’ll be sent emails. Everything will be stored for you online. The service sounds simple" and that's because it is. The name of the service is misleading. Instead of being bombarded with paperwork, DMossEsq would simply be bombarded with emails. Progress, nil.

"Over 2 million users" of Your Tax Account so far, says Mr Bracken. Is that true? So what if it is? Given that he looked at the page, is DMossEsq now one of those two million users? Given that he refreshed three times, is he four of those two million users? Who knows? "1.2 million" people have already "gone paperless" using Digital Self Assessment, Mr Bracken says. Huge amounts of tax-related data on GDS's performance platform, 2 million this and 1.2 million that, but what does it tell us? Nothing.

Mr Bracken discerns a message in the figures: "With this level of transactions, it is impossible for any Government agency to claim the agile approach does not scale or is unsuited to transactional services". No-one else does.

"I'm delighted by the success of these exemplars, but it’s the structural reform of our tax system which they help enable which pleases me most", says Mr Bracken. But these exemplars don't help to enable a structural reform of our tax system. He's making a category mistake. A structural reform of our tax system would be, for example, making GDS's friends pay their UK taxes. That happy prospect is not going to be enabled by GDS's exemplars.

It seems fair to conclude that there are many points in Mr Bracken's post with which a Cabinet Secretary might take issue. Among others, these three exemplars are being, as noted, hopelessly over-promoted.

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Updated 8.5.15

"you can see a huge amount of data
on the performance platform"

Two days ago on 6 May 2015 the Guardian newspaper published The seats to stay up for – and the numbers that matter – on election night. On the basis of the best political polling available, they predicted that the Labour party would win 273 seats and that the Conservatives would win the same, 273 seats.

Yesterday we had the election.

Today, Labour have 232 seats in the House of Commons and the Conservatives 331. 41 fewer than predicted and 58 more, respectively.

Understanding the data you have collected is clearly difficult, even for experienced professionals with the eyes of the nation on them.

How much more so for the rest of us, including GDS?

At the time of writing, GDS operate 797 service dashboards crammed full of data collected automatically to tell viewers all about the performance of GDS's digital public services.

It's hard to collect meaningful data and hard to understand it. Ask the ONS. Ask a chief data officer.

We all need to be sceptical when interpreting those figures on the digital service dashboards. Everyone. Including GDS.

One day you may take a set of figures on a dashboard to imply the digital equivalent of a Labour-led coalition only to find yourself facing a Conservative majority government the next day.

Over-promoted

Here's a selection of Government Digital Service (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 Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO's 28 March 2015 offering, Not the HMRC of old.