Tuesday 15 May 2018

RIP IDA – "Reality bites"

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.

"If Verify is the answer, what was the question?"

The Law Commission: "Verify does not currently ensure that the person entering the information
is in fact the person he or she is purporting to be;
rather it focuses on verifying that the person exists" (para.6.67/p.119)

Finally.

At their annual jamboree, Sprint 18, on Thursday 10 May 2018 the Government Digital Service (GDS) finally signed the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) death certificate.

"Reality bites", said Nic Harrison, GDS's director of service design and assurance, "we are, frankly, just not going to get hundreds of new services being digitised in the next year to bring on Verify".

By 6 May 2018 there were just 17 on-line public services using GOV.UK Verify (RIP) whereas over 100 had once long ago been expected.

And just 2,237,857 GOV.UK Verify (RIP) accounts have been created since 13 October 2014. At that rate it will take until 28 July 2054 to create 25 million accounts, whereas GDS's target is 2020. Not feasible. 34 years late.

100? No, 17.

2020? No, 2054.

Meanwhile, the Government Gateway is already used to access 123 on-line public services, it already has over 50 million active accounts and it is already used over 400 million times a year.

GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has only been used 3.9 million times since 13 October 2014. The Government Gateway takes just 3½ days on average to achieve the same usage as GOV.UK Verify (RIP) in 1,300 days. Roughly, one Government Gateway day is a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) year.

There's a lot of reality to bite. And it has now well and truly bitten. GDS's job was to provide access to on-line public services. The problem had already been solved by the Government Gateway. Why spend six years trying to solve it again with GOV.UK Verify (RIP)?

There never was a good answer to that question.

And now GDS agree. GOV.UK Verify? RIP.

There is a rearguard action.

GDS now want GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to be taken up by the private sector.

But private sector interest so far is nil. There are no private sector on-line services using GOV.UK Verify (RIP). None.

We all of us use private sector services on-line. It's another problem that's already been solved. We don't need GOV.UK Verify (RIP). GDS's non-performing little cartel of "identity providers" offers us nothing.

And the reality is that that's what the rearguard action will come to. Nothing.

----------

Updated 3&4.6.18

At Sprint 18, 10 May 2018, while Kevin Cunnington delivered sweet nothings from the stage, in the wings Nic Harrison briefed journalists on the mortal effect of reality on GOV.UK Verify (RIP), please see above. Mr Cunnington is the director general of GDS, the Government Digital Service, and it is odd that he delegated this briefing rôle.

GDS wants to take 'hands off control' on digital identity, says Gov.uk Verify boss. That was Computer Weekly magazine. In the words of the UKAuthority.com website, GDS looks to private sector to boost Verify take-up. Or, as Government Computing put it, Brexit brake on Verify spurs GDS to woo private sector on digital identity.

What would "GDS taking its hands off control" mean? How could the private sector "boost" take-up? In what way would the private sector be "wooed"? And how can a brake be a spur?

Not long to wait for the answers, the Think.Digital conference on Understanding the ethos and ethics of identity in public services was coming up on 18 May 2018 and this time we were going to hear from the boss himself: "Speakers already confirmed include the GDS Director General Kevin Cunnington, who will be talking about the next phase of Gov Verify" ...

... except that it's all turning into a French farce, you never know who's going to come out of which door. In the event Mr Cunnington scratched so that once again, when the door opened, with DMossEsq in the audience, it was Nic "reality bites" Harrison who came out on stage.

GOV.UK Verify (RIP) will eliminate fraud, he said, and it will reduce operating costs. Also, GDS is transforming government from end to end step by step and privacy is the cornerstone of everything GDS does. And the Government Gateway will be closed by March 2019 implying, although Mr Harrison didn't make this obvious point, that HMG (Her Majesty's Government) won't be able to collect any tax thereafter. Reality has a bit more biting to do yet.

On the other hand, Mr Harrison did acknowledge for the first time that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is not unique. Other identity assurance schemes around the world have taken six years to achieve 50% adoption so really we ought to look at GOV.UK Verify (RIP) as a very young system and your patience is called for. This is a first for GDS. Reality has at least nibbled. The pretence of exceptionalism has been dropped.

The completion rate (now "verification success rate") for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is complicated. It is hard to explain. It stands at 40% or so, i.e. the failure rate is something like 60% but that's not really what it means, Mr Harrison said. You can have too much reality – this may be the prelude to removing the completion rate from GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s dashboard on the GDS performance platform.

There was some perfunctory vapour about including level-of-assurance-1 self-certified, unverified identities in the statistics for GOV.UK Verify (RIP) – you can see why GDS lost the responsibility for government "data" – and everyone should use one and only one electronic identity and government standards and federated systems and the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) brand and stepping stones to an ecosystem and it all depends on the private sector ...

... but there was no explanation how this will work. The questions raised by Sprint 18 remain unanswered and GOV.UK Verify (RIP) remains dead.

Mr Harrison finished by saying that he looked forward to hearing what the next speaker, Don Thibeau, had to say. Then he sat down. Mr Thibeau got up to speak. Mr Harrison promptly left the building. It's the way he tells 'em.


Updated 4.6.18

Don Thibeau is the head of OIX, the Open Identity Exchange, GDS's business partner on GOV.UK Verify (RIP) and, according to him, speaking at the Think.Digital conference on Identity for government, OIX should lead the public-private partnership (PPP) between GDS and the private sector.

That's a bit confusing when you consider that no organisation has done more than OIX to explain the problems with GOV.UK Verify (RIP) and its inability to attract a single user in the private sector, please see here, here and here for example. And of course Mr Thibeau offered no explanation how this PPP would work.

In a whirlwind tour of the identity assurance world Mr Thibeau told us that:
  • The US have cancelled their GOV.UK Verify (RIP) lookalike system, connect.gov (a fact which DMossEsq readers have been apprised of for nearly two years now).
  • The nasty authoritarian Chinese are using identity assurance systems to keep the population under constant surveillance. They maintain social credit accounts for everyone and woe betide you if your balance/score goes into the red (Think tank wants GDS to take on creation of single Digital Government Account).
  • The nasty authoritarian Russians want access to the personal records of all passengers overflying the mother country (that hasn't been news for at least nine years now, everyone wants that data, please see question 7).
  • There is a queue of African states outside the doors of the World Bank all trying to raise loans to deploy identity assurance schemes to promote economic growth (any sign of that working?).
  • Open banking and PSD2 could be big (if they ever get started, we've been expecting them in the UK since 13 January 2018 and there's no sign yet).
  • Blockchain.
None of that explains how a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) PPP would work, we are no further forward, the ethos of identity in public services is decidedly other-worldly, reality has yet to bite and the ethics can get nasty – "aggressive data capitalism", Mr Thibeau called it, referring to governments just as much as Facebook and Google.

Make of it what you will, Mr Thibeau agreed to take questions at the end of his talk on one condition: "keep the microphone away from David Moss".


Updated 6.6.18

Two presentations at the Think.Digital conference on identity in public services were given by practitioners actually trying to get identity assurance schemes to work:
  • Adam Lewis is the Programme director, Citizen Identity & Personal Health Records at NHS Digital. The NHS (National Health Service) for some purposes ("Comparison" purposes) needs level of assurance 3 digital identities and GOV.UK Verify (RIP) only offers level of assurance 2. So for those purposes GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is no use to the NHS.

  • Stuart Young is the managing director of Etive Technologies, a company which has worked on identity assurance with Birmingham City Council, the Greater London Authority, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Hackney Council and GDS themselves, the Government Digital Service. Mr Young said that in his experience of identity assurance for local authorities:
    • GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has "failed most people".
    • Local authorities are better at identity proofing and validation verification (IPV) than banks.
That's what reality biting looks like, according to DMossEsq's contemporaneous notes of the conference.

GDS can ignore reality and advocate a public-private partnership all they like but the fact remains, according to Messrs Lewis and Young and others, that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is useless to the NHS and to local authorities.

Level of assurance? Low
OIX have told us in the past that, with millions of people, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has trouble reaching even level of assurance 2 (p.11). The problem is GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s reliance on credit records. Millions of people don't have a comprehensive and up to date credit record and as a result the credit rating agencies can't help with IPV. These people exist. But they can't be added to GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s population registers. From that point of view, they may as well not exist.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), by the way, consider that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) doesn't really offer level of assurance 2 – NIST reckon it only amounts to level of assurance 1, self-certification. Self-certification has its uses but there's no need to pay "identity providers" to populate GOV.UK Verify (RIP) with unverified identities ...

... and the Law Commission, of course, please see above, consider that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) fails to prove that the person on the end of the line is who they claim to be. After a while you have to ask yourself whether entirely on-line registration is feasible, reality may suggest that GDS are simply attempting the impossible.

Penetration? Limited
GDS used to publish statistics on GOV.UK Verify (RIP)'s account creation success rate. The rate hovered around the 70% mark, i.e. about 30% of the population could not be reached by GOV.UK Verify (RIP). GDS stipulated that GOV.UK Verify (RIP) would not go live until the account creation success rate had reached 90%. It never did, they stopped publishing the statistics and GOV.UK Verify (RIP) went live anyway.

In public administration you can't just ignore millions of people. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) just won't do. Not if it's meant to be the only identity assurance system which is what Nic Harrison wants, please see above, and so do other ideologues.

The public sector needs "universal" coverage, the NHS has to be able to offer services to anyone, DWP (the Department for Work and Pensions) has to be able to pay Universal Credit to anyone and Tower Hamlets has to be able to contribute to the social care costs of anyone. The ideologues need to listen to the practitioners.

The private sector can pick and choose. They don't need "universal" coverage, they can be content with a sub-set of the population. But they do need more than level of assurance 2 for their digital identities. In the finance sector they need more like 4 and even higher.

Partner? Sleeping
When reality really bites, when they confront the real world, GDS will finally have to acknowledge that, to repeat, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) just won't do. GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has nothing to bring to any supposed partnership with the private sector.

Legal persons? None
Both the public sector and the private sector need companies and trusts and partnerships to have electronic identities in addition to natural persons (you and me). GOV.UK Verify (RIP) can't provide them. It can only register natural persons, not legal persons. If they relied on GOV.UK Verify (RIP) HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs) couldn't collect corporation tax, PAYE, NI or VAT from companies because GOV.UK Verify (RIP) doesn't know what a company is. No good.

Combustion? Spontaneous
GOV.UK Verify (RIP) has been dying since it went into its public beta phase in October 2014. It's not the young system Nic Harrison pretends, please see above. One problem that has come to light over the years is that your GOV.UK Verify (RIP) identity can spontaneously disappear, you can unpredictably cease to exist – now you are you, now you're not. No good to the NHS. No good to local authorities. No good to the private sector. No good.


Updated 12.11.18

We have recorded above some of the points made at Think.Digital's 18 May 2018 conference on identity in public services.

Now Think.Digital are holding a second conference, this time on 'Understanding the Policy, Practice and Delivery of Public Sector Identity', 29 November 2018.

No DMossEsq speaking this time. No Kevin Cunnington, of course. And no Nic Harrison – reality has bitten and he's left the Government Digital Service (GDS).

Anthony Wilson will be there. He is a colleague at NHS Digital of Adam Lewis, who spoke at the 18 May event when he explained how GOV.UK Verify RIP can't meet the National Health Service's level of assurance requirements. Mr Wilson will no doubt expand on 29 November on NHS Digital's plans to develop its own identity assurance scheme.

And of course Lawrence Hopper will be there on 29 November.

Who?

Lawrence. You know Lawrence. The Head of Policy and Strategy for GOV.UK Verify RIP at GDS.

What does he know about national identity assurance?

Almost entirely anonymous, Google is silent on the question but that doesn't matter because, famously, GDS are handing GOV.UK Verify RIP over to the private sector, please see for example Dowden details Verify’s private sector future and signals end of direct Whitehall funding for identity programme.

Also, GDS haven't been in charge of national identity policy since June 2018, please see for example GDS loses digital identity policy to DCMS. Luckily Andrew Elliot will be there to resolve this mystery. He's the deputy director for digital identity at DCMS, the Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport.

David Alexander will be there, he's Chief Executive of Mydex, the company still flying the flag for personal data stores. Why did Mydex never sign up as "identity providers" to GOV.UK Verify RIP? Perhaps Mr Alexander will tell the audience on 29 November.

How do you protect your personal information? According to Mydex, by collecting it all together in a personal data store in the cloud. That puts you in control, by some new definition of the word "control", the opposite of what is normally understood by it. Never mind the daily diet of cyber breaches which we feed on. And never mind that personal data stores can't support attribute exchange.

The BBC have the same problem. When you hand over all your personal information to a stranger in the cloud the BBC, too, call that "being in control". Attendees could take that up with Colin Brown, lead identity and access management architect at the BBC, another organisation that sees no need to use GOV.UK Verify RIP.

HMRC are having to modernise the Government Gateway to continue to support on-line transactions, as it has for 18 years now, as GOV.UK Verify RIP can't verify the identity of companies. The new version of the Gateway is thought to be going live in March 2019. Will it? Attendees could ask Alison Walsh, the business readiness lead for external government departments, Government Gateway program at Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Let's hope the answer is yes, otherwise reality really will bite, we won't be able to pay any tax and there won't be any public services left in the UK, not even GDS.

RIP IDA – "Reality bites"

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.

"If Verify is the answer, what was the question?"

The Law Commission: "Verify does not currently ensure that the person entering the information
is in fact the person he or she is purporting to be;
rather it focuses on verifying that the person exists" (para.6.67/p.119)

Finally.

At their annual jamboree, Sprint 18, on Thursday 10 May 2018 the Government Digital Service (GDS) finally signed the GOV.UK Verify (RIP) death certificate.

"Reality bites", said Nic Harrison, GDS's director of service design and assurance, "we are, frankly, just not going to get hundreds of new services being digitised in the next year to bring on Verify".

Wednesday 9 May 2018

RIP IDA – OIX to the rescue 3

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.

The Law Commission: "Verify does not currently ensure that the person entering the information
is in fact the person he or she is purporting to be;
rather it focuses on verifying that the person exists" (para.6.67/p.119)

14 June 2012, we discovered that the Government Digital Service (GDS) had joined the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) in order to help with their moribund identity assurance programme now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)".

19 April 2018, OIX published Digital Identity in the UK: The cost of doing nothing, a report by Innovate Identity, a consultancy which predictably enough attempts to convince the reader that the benefits of a national digital identity scheme are so great that it doesn't matter what it costs to develop.

Does that report help GDS?

Put it this way:
  • On p.1 they say: "The UK is amongst an ever-smaller group of developed nations without a national digital identity infrastructure. The UK has few identity standards, and the market remains fragmented" – not altogether helpful six years or so after GDS started work on GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
  • P.3 opens with: "The relatively under-developed digital identity ecosystem in the UK has been the topic of a long and increasingly frustrated discussion".
  • P.7 is headed "Inertia in the UK".
  • P.8 lists a small sub-set of GDS's missed targets and blames GDS for the low levels of public adoption of GOV.UK Verify (RIP), its limited utility and its failure to be adopted anywhere in the private sector.
  • By p.10 you're still less than half way through the report and you read: "The provision of only four attributes by GOV.UK Verify [RIP] ... can alone only satisfy a small part of the data needs that many uses would require".
The report has many failings. For example it ...
On the other hand, p.21 is good. You are enjoined to read p.21. It's no help to GDS. But it's important:


RIP IDA – OIX to the rescue 3

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.

The Law Commission: "Verify does not currently ensure that the person entering the information
is in fact the person he or she is purporting to be;
rather it focuses on verifying that the person exists" (para.6.67/p.119)

14 June 2012, we discovered that the Government Digital Service (GDS) had joined the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) in order to help with their moribund identity assurance programme now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)".

19 April 2018, OIX published Digital Identity in the UK: The cost of doing nothing, a report by Innovate Identity, a consultancy which predictably enough attempts to convince the reader that the benefits of a national digital identity scheme are so great that it doesn't matter what it costs to develop.

Does that report help GDS?

Monday 7 May 2018

RIP IDA – Windrush & ID cards

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.

"If Verify is the answer, what was the question?"

The Law Commission: "Verify does not currently ensure that the person entering the information
is in fact the person he or she is purporting to be;
rather it focuses on verifying that the person exists" (para.6.67/p.119)

4 May 2018 Windrush scandal: no passport for thousands who moved to Britain. That article and hundreds more like it describe the outrageous Windrush generation problem we have in the UK. Home Office officials are threatening some of these British citizens from overseas with deportation. Some of them have lost their jobs. Some their rented homes. Others have been denied the free state healthcare which they are entitled to.

Many commentators have had the same reaction. If only we had ID cards, these disgraceful injustices could have been avoided. Please see for example:
Politicians and their officials spent eight years in the UK from 2002 to 2010 trying to introduce government-issued ID cards and failing. Nothing daunted, the delusion that ID cards would solve all sorts of problems persists, even though it is perfectly obvious that people who have trouble proving their British citizenship would have the same trouble proving their right to an ID card.

Noticeably, although lots of people's minds turned automatically to ID cards, absolutely no-one's first thought was "this is a job for GOV.UK Verify (RIP), what we all need is a GOV.UK Verify (RIP) account". Whatever the problem, GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is the solution that occurs to no-one.

RIP IDA – Windrush & ID cards

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.

"If Verify is the answer, what was the question?"

The Law Commission: "Verify does not currently ensure that the person entering the information
is in fact the person he or she is purporting to be;
rather it focuses on verifying that the person exists" (para.6.67/p.119)

4 May 2018 Windrush scandal: no passport for thousands who moved to Britain. That article and hundreds more like it describe the outrageous Windrush generation problem we have in the UK. Home Office officials are threatening some of these British citizens from overseas with deportation. Some of them have lost their jobs. Some their rented homes. Others have been denied the free state healthcare which they are entitled to.

Sunday 29 April 2018

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

At last Messrs Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken and Tom Loosemore have delivered a book about digital transformation. Yours for £14.99, it's published tomorrow: "This book ... explains how a growing band of reformers in businesses and governments around the world have helped their organisations pivot to this new way of working, and what lessons others can learn from their experience".

The authors are described as "partners in Public Digital Ltd", which isn't a partnership, it's a company, and they're directors, not partners.

"Mike Bracken", it says in the blurb, "was appointed ... the Chief Data Officer in 2014". Actually his appointment was announced in a 24 March 2015 press release, Local authorities setting standards as Open Data Champions.

These little errors may make you wonder about the accuracy of other claims in the blurb, e.g. "the UK’s Government Digital Service ... snipped £4 billion off the government’s technology bill". You would do well to check with the National Audit Office before assuming that that figure is authoritative, there have been problems in the past.

Only last month Mr Bracken was bewailing the failure of digital transformation in the UK government.

That is just the latest in a series of bitter epitaphs. Mr Greenway, for example, has been at it since August 2016: "GDS is following the course charted by other successful [?] centralised reformers in government. Icarus-like soaring for a few years. The occasional flutter of feathers. Then a headlong dive into the timeless, inky depths of the bureaucratic abyss".

And in October 2015 Mr Loosemore advised the world that, far from GDS transforming government, it had merely put lipstick on pigs, a reminder of GDS's failure to deliver their on-line system for payments to farmers.

So who is this "growing band of reformers in businesses and governments around the world [who] have helped their organisations pivot to this new way of working"?

We know who it isn't ...

... we'll have to wait for our copies of the new book to arrive to find out who it is.

----------

Updated 1.5.18

"This title will be released on May 4, 2018". That's what Amazon say. Three long days to wait.

There are some tremendous endorsements of the book. For example Jen Pahlka, Executive Director of Code for America, says "their approach broke open decades of dysfunction and made the public believe in government". She's clearly not talking about the UK, where our dysfunction remains intact.

Lucky Emer Coleman has actually read the book and she's blogged about it:
Books that talk about tech or tech change tend to be (IMHO) a tad well 'technical' but this offering from the Public Digital team is droll and funny in parts like the observation that for good working spaces in digital you don’t need pool tables or martinis or mini fridges. Things on walls, decent computers and stickers will get you most of the way. Or in other words 'The digital revolution can be found in Rymans'.
Droll? Funny? That'll have you in stitches ...

... as long as you know that Rymans is a chain of stationers.

Ms Coleman goes on:
And there are lots more of these useful [?] observations like the fact [?] that 'good digital work is a million silent nods of approval, not one loud round of applause'.
Confucius?

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

At last Messrs Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken and Tom Loosemore have delivered a book about digital transformation. Yours for £14.99, it's published tomorrow: "This book ... explains how a growing band of reformers in businesses and governments around the world have helped their organisations pivot to this new way of working, and what lessons others can learn from their experience".

Wednesday 18 April 2018

GDS & the banshees 4 – in defence of silos


The system is not set up to do stuff.
It’s set up, frankly,
to have an intellectual pissing match
around how its things should be.


Easter 2018 will be remembered briefly for the epic querulous caterwauling of the banshees when data was taken away from GDS and given to DCMS.

The passionate tweet alongside was emitted in response to a 29 March 2018 announcement on the machinery of government by the Prime Minister: "This written statement confirms that the data policy and governance functions of the Government Digital Service (GDS) will transfer from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The transfer includes responsibility for data sharing (including coordination of Part 5 of the Digital Economy Act 2017), data ethics, open data and data governance".

No surprises there:
  • The Department for Culture Media and Sport changed its name to "The Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport" back in July 2017.
  • 18 months before that, in December 2015, DCMS issued a consultation document on the UK's digital economy making it clear that it was in their remit and not GDS's.
Nine months before that, in March 2015, there was a real surprise when GDS acquired responsibility for data in some unspecified way but they didn't do anything with this responsibility and their attempt in May 2016 to produce an ethical framework for data science confirmed that they had nothing to offer.

Nevertheless, in solidarity with Mr Bracken, Stephen Foreshew-Cain dutifully feigned indignation at the loss of power to DCMS, please see the tweet alongside.

You should know that Mr Foreshew-Cain took over as Executive Director of GDS in September 2015, replacing Mr Bracken. Also, that he only lasted 10 months, after which he was replaced by Kevin Cunnington, ...

... who has remained silent on the DCMS issue, no public wailing from him, no gnashing of teeth and not a single garment has been rended (rent?).

No such restraint from Mr Bracken. He was back on banshee duty on 4 April 2018 in the New Statesman magazine: "To elicit government-wide institutional reforms in a digital age, one needs three levers – digital, data and technology – to be in one place aligned to the financial levers of government ...To take data policy out of the centre and move it without mandate or clear explanation to a weak departments with no track record of delivery or cross-Whitehall power ... doesn’t make sense ... Last weekend, the UK seems to have made government a little bit slower, more siloed, harder to reform and more complex. Without a clear statement of motivation, you have to ask: what is the user need?".

It all sounds quite plausible at first but you have to ask how does Mr Bracken know that digital, data and technology have to be in one place, that's a rule he's just made up, suppose he's wrong. They were in one place in GDS and nothing was happening. After no time at all the argument starts to degenerate into what he himself refers to as "an intellectual pissing match". GDS has a poor track record of delivery and suffers from much-diminished cross-Whitehall power. And its claims to be driven only by user needs do not stand up.

Sometimes these banshees spoil it by wailing just a bit too much. Take a look at "last weekend, the UK seems to have made government a little bit slower, more siloed, harder to reform and more complex". Whitehall departments as currently established are "silos", in his language, and Mr Bracken doesn't like silos.

Nor does Mr Foreshew-Cain as we discovered two years ago, please see the tweet alongside.

The suggestion is that a collection of reactionary old permanent secretaries sit around Whitehall defending the entrenched entitlement of their departments against all-comers, standing in the way of internet era progress offered to them by the enlightened likes of Messrs Bracken and Foreshew-Cain.

Well that won't wash, will it – "one needs three levers – digital, data and technology – to be in one place" is exactly what you'd expect a selfish and benighted silo-defender to say, followed by the threat that change would make "government a little bit slower, ... harder to reform and more complex".

The comparison isn't exact. The long gone Messrs Bracken and Foreshew-Cain never were permanent secretaries and and they don't have the decades of public service behind them that normally go with the job. But the petulant cry from the sidelines that disruption is all very well for other departments but keep your hands off GDS sounds pretty authentically reactionary. Some silos are more equal than others?


Silos in Acatlán, Hidalgo, Mexico.

----------

Updated 12.6.18

Major government initiatives are announced on television, on the radio and in the national newspapers and periodicals. There are people who remember when they were even announced on the floor of the House of Commons.

Minor matters like medical reports on the latest ailments of the Government Digital Service (GDS) used to merit a press release. There was a time when GDS would write endless self-congratulatory blog posts and carpet bomb Twitter with their awesome news.

Long gone now. The GDS blog posts have all but stopped. Their Twitter timeline is like one of those ghost towns in cowboy films – tumbleweed, a hyena or two, and the odd crazed old gap-toothed prospector.

Last March saw the nadir of this PR curve, with news being whispered to a few selected journalists in the margins of a conference, please see above.

Except that now the nadir has sunk even lower, with the briefing involving apparently just one single journalist, Bryan Glick, the editor of Computer Weekly magazine. GDS loses digital identity policy to DCMS, he told us yesterday, 11 June 2018: "The Government Digital Service (GDS) has lost responsibility for digital identity policy, with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) taking over".

An 1861 painting of Mary Celeste
(named Amazon at the time),
by an unknown artist
Apparently "GDS will still be developing Gov.uk Verify [RIP], its in-house digital identity assurance system, but wider policy now rests with Matt Hancock, secretary of state at DCMS. The move took place last month, without any public announcement, but was revealed by Hancock during a press briefing last week".

Mr Glick is the only journalist known to have reported this move. Was he the only journalist at the press briefing? That's what it looks like.

All the hot air has escaped. The party's over ...

... and all that's left of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) is a wrinkly old dusty bit of a deflated balloon while GDS comes to resemble nothing more than the Mary Celeste.

GDS & the banshees 4 – in defence of silos


The system is not set up to do stuff.
It’s set up, frankly,
to have an intellectual pissing match
around how its things should be.


Easter 2018 will be remembered briefly for the epic querulous caterwauling of the banshees when data was taken away from GDS and given to DCMS.

The passionate tweet alongside was emitted in response to a 29 March 2018 announcement on the machinery of government by the Prime Minister: "This written statement confirms that the data policy and governance functions of the Government Digital Service (GDS) will transfer from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The transfer includes responsibility for data sharing (including coordination of Part 5 of the Digital Economy Act 2017), data ethics, open data and data governance".

No surprises there:
  • The Department for Culture Media and Sport changed its name to "The Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport" back in July 2017.
  • 18 months before that, in December 2015, DCMS issued a consultation document on the UK's digital economy making it clear that it was in their remit and not GDS's.