WRITTEN ON February 5th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, What do we want?
Civil servants were strip searched and passed through metal detectors on the way on to work his morning, and 3500 tons of iPods, memory sticks, mobile phones, Palm handhelds and camera memory cards were crushed and sent to landfill. That’s a fib, obviousy. It would be ludicrous. But so too is this story from ZDNet:
Government BlackBerry devices and PDAs have been grounded by the Whitehall-wide ban on the movement of unencrypted personal data. The devices have fallen foul of the department-wide ban imposed by cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell in the wake of the revelations about the Ministry of Defence data loss last month that resulted from a stolen laptop. The Cabinet Office confirmed that any government electronic device, even down to a mobile phone, would have to have any personal data encrypted before it could leave Whitehall premises.
How pointlessly frustrating must this be for officials who like to use contempory communictions tools to work effectively? Won’t it just drive them over the edge to become grasping Ernst-Accentouche-Deloitroids, devoting their ingenuity to hoovering cash out of the public purse?
Wibbi we applied across the board common-sense and professional policies based on deep respect for each and every individual, that the buggers of prisons, MPs, lawyers and everyone else would realise in a Damascene flash that they are the servants and not the masters and that we movd towards public services that were professionally and formally designed, with the participation from the outset of those whom they are intended to help, to be fit for purpose.
2 Responses to “Blackberries squashed by the great clunking fist of nitwittery”
This is how stories start.
I work in a Big Government Department with lots of people. Many of them have Blackberries. Not a single one of them has ever been on a blackberry training course.
Every single one of them is happily taking their blackberry around with them, because every blackberry is now and ever has been encrypted – that was a requirement before blackberries were allowed to use the government email system in the first place.
Many of them also have laptops. All of those are fully encrypted too – but it any case, it would be so exceptional for them to carry structured customer data that I can’t quite imagine what the circumstances would be.
We need to separate out the urban myths if our conversations are going to be sensible. Or at the very least, operate with finer granularity – the Guvm’nt is not a singular entity, anecdotes don’t make data, one swallow does not make a summer.
The positive consequence of that is that it’s not all bad. It follows that it is not impossible even for governments to get this right – which takes us to the much more intersting questions about where and why it works, where and why it doesn’t and how we most effectively infect the latter with the former.
A highly talented Whitehall secondee to the world of corporate finance returned recently to run an important new policy team. When he requested a Blackberry (along with a new email address, phone number, access to the department’s child care vouchers etc) he was told he would need to go on “The Blackberry Training Course”.
“Err, it’s ok,” says my friend, “I’ve been using a Blackberry every day for the last 2.5 years”.
“No”, comes the reply. “If you don’t go on the course, you can’t have the Blackberry. Government Rules.”