Monday 31 August 2015

RIP IDA – as tactfully as possible, the intensive care team take the family aside and prepare them for the inevitable


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.


OIX, the intensive care team, is well known to DMossEsq's millions of regular readers but for the rest of you:
Open Identity Exchange UK (OIXUK)

This is the UK arm of a global organisation working directly with governments and the private sector developing solutions and trust for online identity, specifically for the British citizen.

OIX UK works closely with the Cabinet Office on the Identity Assurance Programme.  This is the development of the GOV.UK Verify service.  The identity assurance process can also be applied to other, non government websites where proof of identity is wanted.

The OIX goal is to enable the expansion of online identity services and adoption of new online identity products.

We work as a broker between industries designing, testing and developing pilot projects to test real use cases.  All project results are published for the public in the form of white papers.

OIX UK is open to new members.  Non members are welcome to attend our workshops,  membership is preferred for participation in projects – contact us for further information.
OIX has just published not one but two white papers:
Jointly and severally conveyed, the message is the same – there's no hope, IDA is dead, GOV.UK Verify (RIP).

GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is designed to rely on so-called "identity providers" (IDPs). There are currently four IDPs – Experian, Digidentity, the Post Office and Verizon. Together, they are said to constitute a "market" in identity services.

According to OIX's first paper, The use of bank data for identity verification:
  • The current market for identity assurance identity services is not able to serve 100% of the population (p.4).
  • At this time of publication of this paper the GOV.UK Verify [RIP] service is a beta service. It has set a number of objectives to achieve before becoming a fully live service (p.5).
  • In this early market the supply chain of data sources to support the creation of digital identity has not yet evolved to support the GOV.UK Verify [RIP] initiative (p.5).
  • The Digital Data Deficit section below describes how many users assertions of identity cannot be digitally verified (p.5).
  • As a result, some people who don’t have credit accounts (such as a loan, mortgage or credit card) are not able to assert financial evidence (p.7).
  • ... providers are not able to refer to bank account data to establish that an identity has been active over time (p.7).
  • ... resulting in variable results for users and problems can occur when users attempt to validate money evidence (p.9).
  • ... there is insufficient evidence of activity history in currently available data sources (p.9).
  • The current market has need for more data sources to accurately verify identities across a wide demographic (p.12). 
OIX is being as diplomatic as you have to be on these occasions, dealing with the distraught family in the waiting room outside intensive care, but it is clear that as long as GOV.UK Verify (RIP) depends on the current IDPs, it's not going to get out of the beta phase and become live, it's dead.

The banks are thought by OIX to provide the solution to all the current GOV.UK Verify (RIP) problems. In that case, why bother to have the IDPs? They add nothing. They are irrelevant. Appendix B of OIX's paper is a list of the problems faced by the IDPs which can be solved by the banks. Everything that needs to be done can be done by the banks alone.

There is no reason for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to retain the IDPs and OIX identifies two reasons not to mix them up with the banks:
  • ... digital identity services delivered by non-bank Identity Providers could erode the relationship between banks and their retail customers (p.11).
  • If a financial institution refuses to compensate a customer for the loss of funds arising from misuse of credentials because the customer granted access for an Identity Provider, then broader consumer confidence in the scheme will be undermined by adverse publicity (p.13).
We were originally told that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) would be live by Spring 2013. It wasn't and it still isn't. We are currently meant to believe that it will be live by March 2016. From what OIX tells us, that is clearly impossible.

GOV.UK Verify (RIP) will not survive the amputation of Experian, Digidentity, the Post Office and Verizon. What comes out at the other end will no longer be GOV.UK Verify (RIP). That's what OIX is telling us in its first paper.

We may look at the second paper in a later post, wherein you will discover that there is a keen desire to ignore the privacy guidelines for GOV.UK Verify (RIP), but that's quite enough for now.

----------

Updated 1.9.15

In Whitehallspeak, Experian, Digidentity, the Post Office and Verizon were part of GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s first "framework".

Out of 80 initial expressions of interest, eight suppliers proceeded to sign a framework agreement with the Government Digital Service (GDS). Cassidian pulled out, as did Ingeus and PayPal, and despite promising repeatedly that they would, Mydex didn't become an IDP after all, which left GDS with just the four above.

A year ago, GDS launched a second framework, and six months later they'd netted five new IDPs – Barclays, GB Group, Morpho, PayPal again and Royal Mail. So now there are nine IDPs supplying GOV.UK Verify (RIP)?

No.

Just four.

The five new prospective IDPs still haven't been "on-boarded", as they say. In fact, they haven't been heard from for six months. Why? Where are they? What's going on?

RIP IDA – as tactfully as possible, the intensive care team take the family aside and prepare them for the inevitable


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.


OIX, the intensive care team, is well known to DMossEsq's millions of regular readers but for the rest of you:
Open Identity Exchange UK (OIXUK)

This is the UK arm of a global organisation working directly with governments and the private sector developing solutions and trust for online identity, specifically for the British citizen.

OIX UK works closely with the Cabinet Office on the Identity Assurance Programme.  This is the development of the GOV.UK Verify service.  The identity assurance process can also be applied to other, non government websites where proof of identity is wanted.

The OIX goal is to enable the expansion of online identity services and adoption of new online identity products.

We work as a broker between industries designing, testing and developing pilot projects to test real use cases.  All project results are published for the public in the form of white papers.

OIX UK is open to new members.  Non members are welcome to attend our workshops,  membership is preferred for participation in projects – contact us for further information.
OIX has just published not one but two white papers:
Jointly and severally conveyed, the message is the same – there's no hope, IDA is dead, GOV.UK Verify (RIP).

Sunday 23 August 2015

iRevolutionaries firing blanks

• "From the super smart @LouiseDowne"
Ben Terrett, Director of Design, GDS
• "it's the narrative we've been lacking
about why it's vital to focus on user …"
Neil Williams, Product Lead, GOV.UK
• "I will be referring people to this often"
Neil Williams again
Two months ago on 22 June 2015 Louise Downe published Good services are verbs, bad services are nouns on the GDS design notes blog. Her point? Apparently "verbs will change the way your service works".

Ms Downe is the Head of Service Design at the Government Digital Service (GDS) and considerable effort was put into divining what she meant. To no avail. It remains unclear what her advice is how to improve the design of government services.

On 6 August 2015 she published Better services with patterns and standards on the main GDS blog. She's talking about Government as a Platform (GaaP) and she's talking about service patterns. What is a service pattern?

Service patterns, she tells us, are "consistent (but not uniform)" standards that "will provide better interoperability between services, meaning that we can more easily join them up across government" and they will give government "a way to know how to provide a particular type of service well". Also, "service patterns will be our instruction manual for using platforms and registers to build better services".

No example of a service pattern is given. What do they look like? How do they promote interoperability? How do they raise standards? How will people learn from them? And what have service patterns got to do with verbs? All the reader knows is that "we’re still working out how the creation and management of a service pattern works" and "there’s still a lot to work out".

Service design is important. What does the UK criminal justice system (CJS) need? The answer was given on 18 August 2015 by 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)": "It needs a good dose of proper service design thinking".

To that end, a multi-disciplinary team has been assembled to examine the CJS which shows that "digital people, technology, and thinking could transform the justice system". How does it show that? The team drew "a map of the entire criminal justice system". What's more, "this is something that's not been done before":


Mr Bracken couldn't be more wrong in this instance. It's been done thousands of times. Search Google for "criminal justice system flowchart" and you get about 157,000 hits. Click on "Images" and you can see as many maps as you like including this one, for example:


You can see the multi-disciplinary team's map but you can't read it. Even the bigger version is illegible. It's impossible as a result to tell whether the team have delivered on Mr Bracken's promise and re-designed the service to replace the present alleged mess which is the UK's criminal justice system.

"Of course it was never designed to work this way", Mr Bracken tells us, "but that's because it was never actually designed. The system we have today is the result of years of accretion, ad-hoc process on top of ad-hoc process, letter by letter, form by form".

While casually debunking the efforts of thousands of law-makers, lawyers and public officials over the centuries – "it was never actually designed" – it seems that it is Mr Bracken's team who have failed to design anything.

They haven't converted the CJS from a noun to a verb. There is no sign of a service pattern, whatever a service pattern is. The one innovation Mr Bracken lays claim to is that the latest map omits mention of any "organisations or government departments. That’s because that's not how users see the system". Says who?

Ignoring the distinctions between government departments is a conceit of the GaaP School. According to Mr Bracken, what would government without departments look like? How would it work? He hasn't told us.

Instead, he has announced his resignation and the government departments will have to soldier on as best they can without a Bracken – "he admits he is tired, and seems worn down by the demands of the job". That's what Computer Weekly magazine tell us in a long report of an interview with him conducted by the editor.

The media feed us a daily diet of cybersecurity breaches. Everyone knows that digital services are not secure. GDS are promoting digital public services. That looks tantamount to luring the public into danger. Despite its great length, there is no mention in the interview of security.

What Mr Bracken did tell the editor is: "It is a matter of fact, not opinion, that despite spending over £6bn a year on technology, digital and associated operations, there isn't a government service [developed by a department] that could be considered as a platform, as in that it works for all parts of government. That is a matter of fact".

No, it's not. It's not a matter of fact. As a matter of fact, we have had the Government Gateway system, a platform which works across all departments, since the turn of the century. It was developed by the Cabinet Office and has been subsequently maintained by the Department for Work and Pensions. For Mr Bracken to ignore it is once again to debunk the efforts of his colleagues.

The Gateway has been starved of resources for years now on the basis that it would soon be replaced by Mr Bracken's GOV.UK Verify (RIP). Years late, the benefits of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) remain on the horizon.

Talking about his four-and-a-half years at GDS, Mr Bracken says "for most of this period, digital has not been an institutional challenge. Now it is". In fact, life in Whitehall did not start with the birth of GDS, Whitehall was digitising where it could for 60 years before GDS existed and digitisation remains a challenge despite the gift of four-and-a-half years of GDS. "We, as a group of public administrators, have confidence we can create digital public services – that just wasn't there when I came". Yes it was.

"We've delivered billions of pounds of savings". Mr Bracken's numbers have turned out to be wrong before. Let's wait to see what the National Audit Office say about the value of savings made thanks to GDS.

Francis Maude, Sir Gus O'Donnell and Sir Jeremy Heywood all called for a revolution in Whitehall. All gave it their active backing through the establishment and subsequent support of GDS.

Revolutions are nasty violent events in which innocent people are hurt while megalomaniacs fight for power. Thank goodness our revolutionaries were firing blanks – "be consistent, not uniform", "show, don't tell", "don't procure, commission", "putting the users first", "good services are verbs", "agile", "cloud", "same, but different", ...

Perhaps "transformation" is a more appropriate word in this case. The UK would not benefit from a revolution but we could certainly do with a major transformation of public administration.

"We have shown we have a track record of delivery". No. Despite all the support they have received, transformation has not been delivered by GDS. It will take time and dedication. Too much time and dedication for Mr Bracken, who after a mere four-and-a-half years is off to work for the Co-op three days a week.

iRevolutionaries firing blanks

• "From the super smart @LouiseDowne"
Ben Terrett, Director of Design, GDS
• "it's the narrative we've been lacking
about why it's vital to focus on user …"
Neil Williams, Product Lead, GOV.UK
• "I will be referring people to this often"
Neil Williams again
Two months ago on 22 June 2015 Louise Downe published Good services are verbs, bad services are nouns on the GDS design notes blog. Her point? Apparently "verbs will change the way your service works".

Ms Downe is the Head of Service Design at the Government Digital Service (GDS) and considerable effort was put into divining what she meant. To no avail. It remains unclear what her advice is how to improve the design of government services.

On 6 August 2015 she published Better services with patterns and standards on the main GDS blog. She's talking about Government as a Platform (GaaP) and she's talking about service patterns. What is a service pattern?

Service patterns, she tells us, are "consistent (but not uniform)" standards that "will provide better interoperability between services, meaning that we can more easily join them up across government" and they will give government "a way to know how to provide a particular type of service well". Also, "service patterns will be our instruction manual for using platforms and registers to build better services".

No example of a service pattern is given. What do they look like? How do they promote interoperability? How do they raise standards? How will people learn from them? And what have service patterns got to do with verbs? All the reader knows is that "we’re still working out how the creation and management of a service pattern works" and "there’s still a lot to work out".

Tuesday 11 August 2015

Groundhog Day

We all woke up in the UK yesterday morning to the Daily Telegraph newspaper, among others, warning us about a ...
Government crackdown on firms employing illegal immigrants

Immigration minister James Brokenshire says the government [is] determined to act against businesses denying work to British nationals and driving down wages

Rogue employers who give jobs to illegal immigrants will be hit with the "full force" of the government machine ministers have warned.

Immigration minister James Brokenshire said the Government was determined to act against businesses which were denying work to British nationals and driving down wages ...
Yesterday was 10 August 2015.

But it might has well have been 28 December 2007, when we all woke up in the UK to the BBC, among others, telling us about a new advertising campaign:
Ads target illegal migrant hiring

A government campaign will warn bosses that they face large fines and prison sentences if they are caught employing illegal migrant workers.

The Home Office will run radio and print adverts ahead of a tightening of the law on illegal labour in February.

Employers could be fined up to £10,000 for every illegal worker they negligently hire, or could face up to two years in prison.

The immigration minister said firms would have no excuse to break the law.

Liam Byrne said: "Illegal working attracts illegal migrants and undercuts British wages. That's why we're determined to shut it down.

"The message is clear for employers - we will not tolerate illegal working."
We've moved on 7½ years and Liam Byrne has been replaced by James Brokenshire but otherwise nothing has changed. The Home Office continues to fulminate about hitting employers with the full force of the government machine which will not tolerate illegal working. That may give the impression of the Home Office taking action but of course that's just what they're not doing. As usual. Nothing changes.

In December 2006, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) published their Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Scheme. IPS was part of the Home Office and they promised at Annex 1 (p.25) that an "enhanced employee checking service" would be "available for employers" by June 2007. It wasn't available in June 2007 and it still isn't. IPS has now become HMPO, Her Majesty's Passport Office. Otherwise, nothing has changed.

UK Border Force technology 2015
IPS promised that ID cards would solve the illegal immigration and illegal working problems. They would also stop sex offences, false asylum claims, terrorism, identity fraud and inefficient public services, all thanks to biometrics, according to their 13-page October 2006 cost report on ID cards in which they promoted biometrics as the magic solution no less than 41 times.

The biometrics didn't work, they still don't, neither does the Home Office and now it's up to the Government Digital Service (GDS), part of the Cabinet Office, to identify us all and, presumably, to provide the means for proving our right to work.

It's not ID cards this time. Now it's GOV.UK Verify. Same difference.

Groundhog Day

We all woke up in the UK yesterday morning to the Daily Telegraph newspaper, among others, warning us about a ...
Government crackdown on firms employing illegal immigrants

Immigration minister James Brokenshire says the government [is] determined to act against businesses denying work to British nationals and driving down wages

Rogue employers who give jobs to illegal immigrants will be hit with the "full force" of the government machine ministers have warned.

Immigration minister James Brokenshire said the Government was determined to act against businesses which were denying work to British nationals and driving down wages ...
Yesterday was 10 August 2015.

Tuesday 21 July 2015

The underwater vote

You don't need to think about it. In fact, it helps not to think about it. But local election turn-outs in the UK are low. People are disengaged from politics. More people vote for Britain's Got Talent than in European elections. It's easier to vote for Britain's Got Talent, we can do it in total security with our phones. Which is how we do everything else. So why do we have to go all the way to the local church hall and pencil a cross on a piece of paper to vote in general elections?

Some people are convinced by these points. The Electoral Reform Society, for example, and the Speaker of the House of Commons. Even the Electoral Commission on a bad day. They shouldn't be.

People dance outside a polling station in Pyongyang
Instead, they should take their inspiration from North Korea where yesterday "there was dancing in the streets of Pyongyang, according to North Korea’s state-controlled media, as voters turned out in droves to cast their ballots in elections for assemblies at provincial, city and county level". How often do we see that in Wimbledon?

Apparently "the official turnout in Sunday’s election was 99.97 per cent, the KCNA news agency said. The perfect 100 was spoilt only by 'those on foreign tour or working in oceans', with elderly or ill voters able to use mobile ballot boxes".

The first tentative step has been taken in the UK towards electronic voting. We can now submit an application to register to vote using the Government Digital Service's individual electoral registration system, which totters along for the moment with no identity assurance and no reassurance that our application has been successful.

North Korea asks the questions. The UK has no answer. Secure electronic voting in the UK is still a long way off, whatever Martha-now-Lady Lane Fox says. Even if we get there, what promise is there that we will be able to vote underwater?

The underwater vote

You don't need to think about it. In fact, it helps not to think about it. But local election turn-outs in the UK are low. People are disengaged from politics. More people vote for Britain's Got Talent than in European elections. It's easier to vote for Britain's Got Talent, we can do it in total security with our phones. Which is how we do everything else. So why do we have to go all the way to the local church hall and pencil a cross on a piece of paper to vote in general elections?

Thursday 9 July 2015

Paradise Disrupted

“Every industry and business constantly needs to adapt its internal processes and governance to accommodate digital disruption. We are no different in government.”

- Mike Bracken, GDS Blog 14 March 2013

In blogs, interviews and articles during Mike Bracken’s time at the helm of GDS, the theme of disruption has been at the heart of the GDS approach to government ...

As Mike Bracken said in Civil Service World in February this year “be innovative, experimental, and disruptive” ...
Why did Steven Cox include those quotations in his 6 July 2015 blog post, A welcome disruption? And who is he?

Fujitsu is one of the giants of the UK public sector IT outsourcing oligopoly and Mr Cox is Executive Director for Public Sector, Fujitsu UK & Ireland.

Fujitsu sponsored the recent Policy Exchange seminar about digital government which we mentioned the other day, The Future of Digital Government: What's worked? What's not? What's next?.

Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO, executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS) and senior responsible owner of the pan-government identity assurance programme now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)", gave the main talk and then four people responded briefly, including Mr Cox, before the concluding question and answer session.

Mr Bracken's response to Mr Cox at the Policy Exchange seminar 29 June 2015

Sure. Well firstly the build versus buy debate is just a false dichotomy. Of course we buy an awful lot of stuff; it’s how we buy, and we move from very large aggregated procurement over many years to standards-based commissioning which can be changed quickly, where we can drive value. So from memory the digital marketplace is over half a billion pounds, these are not inconsequential amounts of money that we have been using, so yes, we have, in that context, a small but highly talented number of people who are adept at building and integration. So the idea of this build versus buy is simplistic. I mean I like conversations like this, I like them openly, but the reason I’m slightly irritated by that is just it’s the putting GDS in a box. There are many days I’d love to put some of my colleagues in a box, but … and it’s time to deliver – well, there’s a lesson in the GDS experience in the last parliament for all of us in government. So we’re looking about 400 people or so, with maybe 150 at peak spread across the country. Today GDS is delivering … if you voted we delivered that, if you’re delivering most of our motoring services, an awful lot of tax systems and indeed the data architecture for the newer services, delivered that. Critical national infrastructure, if you’re writing a ticket or a complaint or a feedback to government, pretty much centrally we’re delivering that, as well as running obviously all the programmes like gov.uk and so on. Also if you’re using the internet in a place in local government you’re probably using PSM [PSN, the Public Services Network]. The point today is that GDS is the critical national infrastructure that is delivering digital government. To pretend that it is somehow some disruptive force which is challenging and not delivering is … you could only do that frankly through ignorance. Nobody would pretend we’re doing that because the real challenge is if 400-500 people can do all that [all what?], what on earth have the other 8,000 been doing in the digital and technology profession, and actually what they've been doing is man-marking really poor contracts that are not fit for purpose. So I’ll take all the money you've got Matt [a reference to Matt Warman MP, who spoke immediately before Mr Cox], we’ll double the size of that, but the real lesson isn’t that you can characterise GDS by being some disruptive force; it’s a delivery force. I have written twenty times more rules than we have broken. We write rules on standards, on commissioning, on procurement, the data service, these rules are copied round the world. We’re not rule breakers; we’re rule makers. We’re civil servants. And yet to characterise there’s some disruptive force on the side, yes we've done a fair degree of disruption, but what we've been disrupting is a previous arrangement which has been delivering shocking value for money and shocking services in some cases. So let’s be really clear about that, I don’t mind criticism but let’s be really clear about what it is we’re criticising. God knows there’s enough to criticise us on, but criticising purely as being disruptive, that’s not good enough!
You can watch the proceedings on YouTube and there's a transcript available. "You should get out more", said DMossEsq's friend L_____. Unlike L_____, some of you will recognise a tense battle being fought.

GDS expressly set out to disrupt the current settlement whereby Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Capgemini, Accenture, Capita, Tata and their peers oligopolise UK government IT. That's what Mr Cox is reminding us about in the blog post quoted from above, A welcome disruption?.

In his talk, Mr Cox complimented GDS on their disruptive powers. He also accused GDS of a lack of follow-through/delivery, he suggested that GDS must now make its mind up whether it's a supplier to government or a consultant, he questioned GDS's grasp of security and he wondered whether GDS could scale up. Five minutes with Mr Cox or 500 blog posts on DMossEsq? Take your pick.

The effect was to provoke the response from Mr Bracken quoted alongside.

There is a wealth of material to mine in that response. "Today GDS is delivering … if you voted we delivered that ..." will remind some of you of Mr Bracken's claim after the 7 May 2015 UK general election: "It was great to see GOV.UK handle the change of government so smoothly".

But let's leave that mining for another day and concentrate here on Mr Cox's reservations about GDS's ability to scale up.

Let's take as our benchmark HMRC's Aspire contract with Capgemini which provides the IT needed to raise around £650 billion a year from taxpayers. Aspire cost HMRC £7.9 billion between 2004 and 2014 of which £2.8 billion was spent with Fujitsu, Capgemini's main sub-contractor.

Mr Bracken said "what we've been disrupting is a previous arrangement which has been delivering shocking value for money and shocking services in some cases" after talking about "really poor contracts that are not fit for purpose".

Fine. As far as it goes. But what would GDS follow through with and deliver instead? Suppose that HMRC do not renew Aspire with Capgemini and Fujitsu. What then?

Digital transformation? GDS gave themselves 400 days to transform 25 exemplar public services. After 760 days of the transformation programme just eight of these services had been transformed and GDS's Transformation Programme Director announced that: "Now the programme’s ended ... We’re only just beginning". Not confidence-inspiring for HMRC.

One of GDS's transformation targets was DEFRA's rural payments application. The GDS exemplar collapsed in March 2015 and farmers have had to go back to using paper application forms for their payments. What was the problem? One explanation offered was: "the complex guidelines for the new Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) runs to 84 pages". What are HMRC supposed to make of that? The UK tax code is around 15,000 pages.

Do GDS grasp the scale of the problem? When they started at HMRC one of their first complaints was about submitting VAT returns: "Plain English is mandatory for all of GOV.UK. This means we don’t use formal or long words when easy or short ones will do ... For example, we normally talk about sending something ... rather than ‘submitting’ it ...".

Will HMRC be reassured by learning that GDS "communicate in an open forum, with daily stand-ups for 15 minutes every morning in front of our wall ... This is the continuously iterative process known as agile delivery"? That was back in 2013, only 43 years after the world was warned about the dangers of relying exclusively on the continuously iterative process known as agile delivery. Perhaps the lesson has been learnt now? Perhaps not:



Design in an #Agile Environment Periscope with Ben Terrett

There's more to transforming HMRC's services than just adopting agile methodology. According to GDS's head of service design:


It's questionable whether GDS have been transforming public services or transforming the way they're accessed. The menu in a restaurant may be attractive but, if you're hungry, it's the food you need.

And then there's the question how GDS staff should comport themselves, a matter addressed by their boss at the recent Digital Leaders 100 awards ceremony:

1. Say no to get to yes
2. Hierarchical management techniques are largely bunkum
3. Use words to weaponise change agents
4. [lost to history]
5. [lost to history]
6. Try to get fired daily [next to impossible for a civil servant?]

The same man told the Policy Exchange seminar that: "We’re not rule breakers; we’re rule makers. We’re civil servants".

It's up to the hierarchical management of HMRC to answer Mr Cox's question and to decide whether GDS can scale up from re-writing the 10 year-old on-line car tax renewal application to implementing yesterday's UK Budget changes to our 15,000-page tax code.

In HMRC's eyes, GDS's cause may or may not have been advanced by two of their staff who still haven't been fired staying up all night to render the Red Book into HTML:


Despite all the weaponised change agents, Capgemini and Fujitsu's position may still not be appreciably disrupted.

----------

Updated 12.7.15

Can you help?


Can anyone help?


Updated 26.7.15

It's odd how much Steven Cox's biting reference to disruption, please see above, seems to have stung.

Mr Bracken's latest post on the GDS blog, Hire the head and the body will follow, continues to scratch at it and ends with:
As you can see, digital thinking is no longer a disruptive thing. It’s becoming part of the fabric of government. Through the services and platforms we build and, as vitally, through people.
It remains unknown what GDS have to offer gigantic IT applications such as HMRC's and the NHS's. How would GDS replace the work of Capgemini and Mr Cox's Fujitsu? "Government as a Platform" is four words and no answer.

Publishing the words in bold doesn't alter the fact that digital thinking has been a growing part of the fabric of UK public administration for 50 years. There's nothing new there and nothing new in the claim that public administration requires people – no-one in their right mind would ever suggest that it didn't.

Hire the head and the body will follow sounds like a viable precept but we know that it's false. GDS had to call in human resources management consultants to try to sort out the morale problems of its own body.

"Hierarchical management techniques are largely bunkum", says the non-disruptive Mr Bracken above, and "traditional policy-making is largely broken", but what does he have to replace this alleged bunkum? Nothing. He has to tweet for ideas: "Help me pls. Ideas for governance model for digital&tech at very top of my organisation".

Mr Bracken is not just the UK's Chief Digital Officer (CDO) but also our Chief Data Officer (CDO), in pursuit of which his latest post is strewn with numbers, "120 senior digital and technology professionals ... 90 senior interims who have worked on digital transformation ... 172 service managers ... 125 Digital and Technology fast streamers".

No doubt these numbers are meant to speak for themselves. But what are they saying? "Try to get fired daily"?

Paradise Disrupted

“Every industry and business constantly needs to adapt its internal processes and governance to accommodate digital disruption. We are no different in government.”

- Mike Bracken, GDS Blog 14 March 2013

In blogs, interviews and articles during Mike Bracken’s time at the helm of GDS, the theme of disruption has been at the heart of the GDS approach to government ...

As Mike Bracken said in Civil Service World in February this year “be innovative, experimental, and disruptive” ...
Why did Steven Cox include those quotations in his 6 July 2015 blog post, A welcome disruption? And who is he?