WRITTEN ON March 22nd, 2010 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Across the Board
Big day in government IT as the PM makes a swathe of announcements on Building Britain’s Digital Future (see eg Benjamin’s round up here, or the Twitterstream #bbdf). I was NFI, and therefore unable to participate in this stage of the courteous & mutualy respectful dialogue #CMRD.
Initial impressions:
Much of the rhetoric seems to make sense. But the e-gov rhetoric made sense 10 years ago. You have to really mean it, and then it’s all down to delivery. Clearly TBL/MLF are doing good things and its good to see both their roles upgraded.
But
– there’s insufficient sign yet government understands and accepts that the problems with personal data need a real control shift to the individual based on VRM-type solution, personal data stores with verification services invoked by the individual
– there’s still massive disconnect between real world needs and the platform that procured government IT offers. We need something agile and beautifully designed.
It was good to see the obvious questions raised about the Digital Economy Bill. We cant design the best sort of online society on rules drawn up by and for the record industry.
It’s all getting better though. And it has so much further to go!
2 Responses to “Initial thoughts on the PM’s #bbdf”
Guy – this is just a Tim Kelsey thing. We all now where he’s comgin from.
You’re tarring a wide group with the same brush here. I quite accept that the data.gov group arent radiating sensitivity about reidentifiable data. But what’s this attack on “ideagov types”? You can see very clearly the difference stance on public data and personal data. We’ve always been very clear and strong on the need for entirely different and stronger protection of personal data.
Tim K and I agree to differ on this.
And you have seen this madness, haven’t you:
http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=12486
Precis: idealgov types have convinced us that making government information public is good; so whenever it is the public interest (i.e. officially expedient) we are going to make personal information into government information, which is the same thing. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?