16 May 2008

Give us yer best

We’re refreshing our examples of excellence in ThePublicOffice. What are your favourite examples of supremely customer-orientated services (from private, public or NGO worlds)? We’d like at least 2 new examples to illustrate each of the following:

* How user-created feedback can improve services
* How navigating services can be made more simple
* How users can best help themselves to help each other
* How services can be combined in order to increase reach/take up
* How better information can improve customer experience

Please point us in the direction of some good ones ... and if we choose your recommendation we’ll send you some PublicOffice paraphernalia to spice up your desk and notice board. These examples will be used to inspire public servants to think WIBBI..... Get recommending!

Posted by Ruth Kennedy on 16/05/08 at 11:45am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: user-oriented
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Sensible health-records option #3 emerges as CfH stretches to infinity and beyond

The UK’s expensive and dysfunctional clunking great fist of a centralised health records system is going to take four years longer than expected, says the NAO. According to Kable’s mothership The Guardian

A £12.7bn upgrade of IT systems throughout the NHS in England will not be completed for at least another six years, four years behind schedule, parliament’s spending watchdog disclosed today. Revealing that the scale of the delay to the system was worse than previously thought, the National Audit Office said plans for a national electronic record of the medical files of 50 million patients might not come to fruition until 2014-15.

Grrrr....yawn.

Meanwhile the real world moves briskly in a far more attractive direction. An IBM-Hipaat alliance is the latest - after Google-Cleveland Clinic and Microsoft Healthvault - to offer user-controlled online health records. They send me a press release:

The IBM-HIPAAT collaboration extends patient-driven privacy to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Personal Health Records (PHRs) and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). Combined IBM and HIPAAT technologies allow patients to easily specify who is granted access to their personal health information (PHI), what information can be accessed and when. They enable caregivers to implement and enforce patient consent directives, providing “break the glass” access to PHI and EHR data in emergency-care situations, where appropriate.

This commercially-available patient-directed solution is a privacy-based approach to securely controlling PHI access across diverse healthcare applications and settings. When installed in HIE environments as the “consent engine,” Privacy eSuite empowers patients and designated providers to create and record privacy directives. The software then evaluates a provider’s authorization to access a patient’s PHI based on such directives. With the combined offerings, a patient can restrict a particular clinician from accessing PHI, even if that clinician – based on medical role – would typically be granted such access. All access requests are recorded and an audit trail is created.

Nothing on pricing but I bet it wont be costing UK taxpayers anything in tne £6bn-30bn price range bandied about for Connecting for Health.

Wibbi we canned our daft centrally-controlled electronic health records system and the D’oH! just asked Google, Microsoft and IBM-Hipaat to confirm to a standard the NHS was prepared to work to. Then we could choose which sort of electronic patient record we used, and our data wouldn’t be subjected to bossy fishing expeditions from national terrorist-prevention services trying to work out whether we eat the right amount of fruit and veg, or the wrong sort of shellfish. Why will it take so many years and so many billions of pounds before we come to our senses?

I suppose the four year delay gives people more time to opt out of centralised health records. I hope our opt-out is final; it would be a drag to have to renew it every year like a pointless TV licence or car tax disk.

Posted by William Heath on 16/05/08 at 9:36pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Wibbipedia/MindtheGap · Design: user-oriented · Foundation of Trust · Data nitwittery · Save Time and Money · "Transformational Government" · Government Procurement
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CRM turned upside down and inside out

We can’t say who said it or where, but the other night we had a meaty dinner conversation (apologies to veggies). Customer Relationship Management (CRM) hasn’t fulfilled its promise, and new ways of doing things are emerging. To what extent may this hold important lessons for government and public services?

Unfold and continue reading...

The big centralised databases of CRM have their limitations. There’s massive reduplication as every organisation seeking a relationship tries to maintain largely overlapping database records about the same person. Data is harvested with varying levels of consent and deception. Often as the data subject understands this process better it appears increasingly intrusive. Unease creeps in; even distinguished public servants treat CRM as a process which should be subverted eg with false middle initials or misleading information about buying power in the hope of making it work more in line with individual wishes.

At best CRM systems record a slice of history. Amazon’s state of the art CRM might know what you bought from Amazon, but not from Barnes & Noble, nor whether the books reflect your own interests or were a gift, nor how your interests have changed. CRM is not where buyers store their future intentions, and buyers don’t tell CRM systems when their needs change. CRM is expensive and the results can be disappointing. As one public servant with a huge customer base put it: “People don’t sit still long enough for us to devise a service mechanism to address them.”

Public services such as welfare, health, education and child protection are increasingly based on centralised databases. These must be universal, as the clients include everyone – there’s no picking and choosing of ‘customers’ in these parts of the public sector. They are often based on statutory requirements (for example to know quite a lot about a client to whom welfare payments are made). Over the last few years, the declared policy intention has been that such public services should also become increasingly personalised and customer-centric: the one-size-fits-all approach is no longer appropriate. Thus both the security-by-control and the personalised customer services agendas have depended on more data being gathered, aggregated and shared, setbacks such as recent data losses notwithstanding.

The news coming over the hill is that CRM is about to be turned on its head by a user-driven model of relationship data. In this “vendor- relationship management” (VRM) model the individual maintains the one comprehensive and up to date version of the ‘truth’, selectively sharing what they choose to with their preferred suppliers and partners. It avoids duplication, keeps the facts up to date, and can make marketing demand driven and therefore far more relevant and effective.

This is of course not how the world of marketing yet works, but contemporary web developments make it possible and a very strong case can be made that it is a huge and imminent trend. Straws in the wind would include search web sites and personalised health records such MS Healthvault and the Google/Cleveland clinic collaboration.

This change would be a fundamental inversion of how relationships are managed. But that’s not to say that it is universally applicable, that it is entirely “right” for public services or should be “sold” to government either in the political or commercial sense. But it does seem intuitively incontrovertible that the locus of personal data management should lie in many circumstances with the individual, and the availability of new tools to manage that data will be an important development for public services as well as the world of commercial marketing.

This raises deep questions about citizen and community empowerment, identity management, ownership of personal data and how we will successfully deliver personalised services.

A buyer-centric, citizen-centric or VRM approach to public services cannot be a universal answer for many reasons. There will remain a digital divide perhaps for generations. It’s essential that services are seen to be fair and equitable, challenging those who try to play the system, and that the benefits of new ways of doing things should not broaden yet further the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Such an approach is clearly inapplicable in certain areas: we’re hardly going to invite people to manage their own criminal records or history of traffic offences. But it is entirely relevant for any customer-like service relationship where the user chooses. There is a role for independently authenticated fields (eg a valid driving licence or NI number) when an essentially user-managed service is deployed, for example when hiring a car.

We caution against accepting a digital token or data field (such as a CRB check) as a substitute for common sense, whether it comes from a user-managed or a centrally managed system: no certificate of suitability removes the need for basic best practice procedures when working with children. Similarly we recognise that there are very real risks of aggregating data, whether it’s the comprehensive picture one individual needs to manage every aspect of their lives (based on perhaps 3500-4500 fields) or the aggregation of “slices” of data about millions of people’s health, child welfare or benefits.

If we look at the example of health records, some of this is professional confidential data. The data subject - patient - has to accept they should not be able to edit or alter their mental health history. But they may well wish to add subjective data, or share parts of their record with non-NHS care providers. This might give the patient a greater sense of ownership and responsibility over managing their own condition. Asthma sufferers might be willing to share their personal data with government (and other services) in return for helpful information about the weather, the geography of pollution and other knowledge which support self-management of the condition. The DoH might be open to interaction with personal health records such as the Google or Microsoft developments. Clearly there’s a risk of pursuing a centralised NHS approach to care records to the exclusion of what appears to be happening in the market. We could waste a huge amount of taxpayers’ money producing the wrong thing.

We’re grateful to the long-term care lobby for the insight that the risk of differential uptake (ie people moving forward at different speeds) should not stand in the way of progress. These are deep questions, and we saw that they challenged some of our deeply held assumptions about the journey to transform public services. That’s a good sign. And there is specific progress: the Government Gateway is piloting user- centric ID for local authority employees, and working on this with ContactPoint in children’s services.

How significant the potential for VRM in public services is perhaps comes down to how active or passive we see citizens as being. Are public services such as health, education or law & order only something we do to people? Or are these desirable community outcomes in which people and communities should and can play an active role?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if government really wants to see personalised public services, choice and contestability, and increasing numbers of citizens actively engaged in creating and managing their own outcomes, it will need to be open to a more empowered user model. An openness to a user-controlled approach to information (even just in a few defined areas to start with) would also go some way towards restoring trust in government’s handling of personal data (or perhaps removing the requirement for such trust). The potential is great: let’s continue to explore how truly user- driven outcomes are likely to be based on user-driven data.

Wrap up...

Posted by Ruth Kennedy on 16/05/08 at 12:36pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: user-oriented · Foundation of Trust · Identity · Power of Information
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15 May 2008

Wider professional skills for the government generalist

Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom writes:

Wednesday morning colleagues of course have a strong expectation that I will be chosen to replace Gus when the good man goes (off to run Tony’s Faith Foundation, no doubt).

But even as an exceptionally gifted amateur, one can never rest on one’s laurels. It has to be said that colleagues find fulfilment of the Outer Skin of the Professional Skills for Government Onion - ‘broader experience’ - a challenge (although my non-executive Chairmanship of the Surrey Gardens Trust has stood me in good stead thus far). So I have agreed with Gus that I am the obvious person to be the Broader Experience Champion amongst us.

Of course, the National School’s use of words such as ‘vital’, ‘core requirement’ and ‘mandatory’ need to be understood in context, but when CSMB signed up to the PSG implementation plan in June 2005, they did put out some outline guidance which suggested it might be necessary for us to do more than pay mere lip service to this idea. CSMB were concerned that some departments would be put under pressure to offer real opportunities for staff to gain operational delivery experience. I don’t think this needs to ruffle feathers or cause any unnecessary activity. We need to be flexible about what counts, and be seen to provide all with suitable opportunities to become upskilled.

As the paper I helped draft (PSG 146:ii) made clear, there is no real substitute for hands-on experience. Given that there is no new money to support broader experience attainment and departments are urged to identify cost-neutral ways to encourage staff to gain broader experience, it is pleasing to note the selfless enthusiasm shown by the trade association, Intellect, to match colleagues to opportunities for deep immersion within the private sector. I’m sure Gill’s Outward Deployment Directorate can swiftly effect such a managed move for anyone who needs one: putting one close to ‘delivery’ without of course expecting too much. (And do send my secretary an electronic mail if the position of Secretary on the SGT is of interest. Our next meeting will take in a private visit of Sissinghurst, to which I am much looking forward).

Rather neatly, it occurs to me that that would also provide something to put in the “professional expertise” box, which is always a bit of a tricky one. Karen and Vicky always look insufferably smug when that comes up, just because they have professions to be head of, while the rest of us have to rely on the broader cultural palette of the generalist. But a few weeks with Intellect would be plenty to justify putting IT down - and once we had a few bright chaps who had done that, we could stop recruiting Heads of Computing from outside, who are intolerably expensive, often excessively Scottish, and for some very strange reason want to be called Chief Information Officers, although none of them appears to me to have any proper qualifications as librarian.

A propos it struck me as I was deadheading the very last of the daffodils over the weekend how valuable it would be to add two hours’ of compulsory gardening each week to the national curriculum. Today’s youth would benefit greatly from some peaceful, valuable work in the great outdoors. Let them cast off their hoodies for an hour or two, put on an old suit and enjoy some fresh air and exercise as they happily learn the finer points of Linnaean taxonomy.

In this way they too could broaden their own experience in the same way that more fortunate amongst us do already.

Posted by Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO on 15/05/08 at 7:08pm
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14 May 2008

Tax Simplification, Not Just Automation

What an easy answer to the 10p tax problem: Reduce taxation by simply adjusting our “personal allowances”: Minimum bureaucracy, minimum complexity, minimum administration cost.

Now, which politician will be brave enough to abolish the silly and grossly unfair TV ownership licence? (Currently 139.50 Pounds per household but equivalent to over 174 Pounds of gross annual income and especially harsh on low-income households.) The whole ghastly TV Licensing bureaucracy, online service and enforcement arm could then be abolished, making further significant savings.

Next, although the car ownership tax has so recently been increased and made even more complicated; which brave politician will abolish it - and the DVLA? The task of administering the safety & road-worthiness of vehicles could be handed to the insurance industry. Again, this would remove a large, expensive, unnecessary bureaucracy together with its unnecessary “enforcement” activities.

Wibbi: All politicians and all governments looked for ways to simplify matters, rather than ways to automate obsolete bureaucracies.

Posted by Richard S on 14/05/08 at 10:34am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Save Time and Money
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13 May 2008

HMRC PAYE / NI Online 2008 - OK

My fourth year of using this HMRC PAYE / NI online service: Another government form successfully submitted ... I hope! All went fairly smoothly; the individual web-pages were reasonably clear; even near the end of the rather tight deadline, the service seemed quite fast; an acknowledgement email arrived promptly. Overall - for people who have broadband - this HMRC online service is much better than the old paper forms.

Update: Don’t miss HMRC’s video podcast which tries to explain this service: It’s easy to mock the upbeat tone and phrases such as “… a simple five step process ...” but it’s a good attempt and reasonably clear to people who have used the paper forms.

Note: Ordinary PAYE employees are shielded from the horrendous complexity of the UK’s Tax and NI system. This video gives a tiny insight.

Wibbis:
1. Instead of using “print” from the web-browser, I’d like the option to download PDFs of the completed forms.
2. Although you’re typing figures taken from PAYE & NI forms, it would still be useful if all boxes had descriptive labels (or even descriptive help) rather than labels such as “1e.”
3. Is it really essential for all UK companies to files this information in the short space between the end of the tax year and the 19th May?

Posted by Richard S on 13/05/08 at 6:01pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Save Time and Money
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Ideal realised

It would be unbearably ironic if the Ideal Government website missed the fact that, since 2 May 2008, the UK has enjoyed the ideal government, viz. no government, and will continue to do so until the next general election at least.

Posted by David Moss on 13/05/08 at 10:23am
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12 May 2008

Tesco’s to “Issue ID Cards”?

According to this teasing article, we’ll be able to “buy” our ID cards along with our Lottery tickets.

Separately, there are interesting differences between the (private sector) incentives attached to the latest “Club Card” loyalty scheme and the (public sector) penalties attached to government schemes:

In a country which perhaps has more Tesco stores than Post Offices: Tesco’s offers to “do its best” to return my keys if my bar-coded Club Card tag is attached to the keyring - ie. an incentive to carry the tag and to keep Tesco’s database update with the correct address.

Would the national or local government do the same if I lose my wallet containing my spooky new ITSO smart-card bus-pass (aka “Citizen Card")?

Wibbis:

1. Scrap the UK government & EU ID projects: We don’t need them; we can’t afford them. (We’ll even allow the government to give the “credit-crunch” as an excuse!)
2. More (any?) joined-up thinking about how ordinary people could benefit from any new e-government schemes.

Posted by Richard S on 12/05/08 at 11:48am
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04 May 2008

Listening and the great clunking ham-fist

After the local election results the Beeb picked up a “we need to listen"meme running through all the Labour reactions (I can’t list them all, but it was endless). Good news I guess for Opinion Leader, Mori, and the other favoured pollsters. My own concern is whether what they practice really is the sort of deep, respectful listening I’ve observed in the Society of Friends, or whether it’s a sort of disrespectul, suferficial, Amstrad-like listening for the buying signals. ("Watts per channel RMS? I’ll give them watts per channel RMS...etc")

Here is, I fear, our answer, from the great clunking fist himself. What has he done wrong, asks Beeb R4 this Sunday morning?

I’ve spent too little time thinking how we can get our arguments across to the people

Noooooooooooooo no no! Too much time thinking about that. Not enough time cultivating respectful listening in the right way.

Posted by William Heath on 04/05/08 at 9:14am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Foundation of Trust
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02 May 2008

Local government Cardspace trial

Here’s what the Cardspace trial referred to earlier looks like:

This is the personal CardSpace of a Microsoft employee, who has been closely involved in the trial. It features an Eduserv Athens card and a few example cards for other services that could be potentially useful to consumers.

Posted by Kersti Klami on 02/05/08 at 11:52am
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01 May 2008

OGC: standing up for its right and sticking up for Britain

OGC is very clear on this:

Permission to use the OGC logo in any context and in any media must first be obtained in writing from OGC, please contact the OGC Service Desk.

So I hpe they’ve issued written permission to bloggers in Spain

No ven nada raro.Y si le volteamos unos 90 grados. Estas mentes sucias del gobierno siempre liándola. ¿Poco tacto o falta de creatividad? El nuevo diseño del logotipo de la Oficina de Comercio Gubernamental del Reino Unido (OGC - siglas en inglés-), cuyo diseño fue presentado el año pasado, ha sido criticado por sus supuestas connotaciones sexuales que despierta al ser girado 90 grados.

in France

Le nouveau logo de l’OGC (Office and Government Commerce), conçu par l’agence FHD London pour la modique somme de 14 000£ (21 000€ : ça fait quand même 7 000€ par lettre, est l’objet d’un buzz sur Internet, et vous allez voir, ce n’est pas pour rien !

Italy

Leggo da Spotanatomy la notizia “curiosa” che l’Office of Government Commerce, l”ente inglese istituito per far chiarezza e aiutare a capire il sistema degli appalti pubblici, ha dovuto cambiare di corsa questo logo (foto in alto) costato ben 14.000 sterline.

in Greece

Το Βρεατνικό OGC (Offie of government Commerce) αποφάσισε να δημιουργησει ένα νέο Logo. Επένδυσε λοιπόν 14,000 λίρες και εμπνεύστηκε, δε ξέρω απο που το παραπάνω σήμα. Πως σας φαίνεται; Ακριβό; Τώρα; Ο εκπρόσωπος του OGV πάντως δήλωσε “It is true that it caused a few titters among some

and in various other places to which my language skills do not extend

这个LOGO是英国商务部(Office of Government Commerce)花14000英镑请人设计的.网站暂时还没换上这个新的,但已经用于鼠标垫及笔上.天才无处不在,发现原来是酱紫滴(点开看哦.这个设计师真是油菜油菜滴.囧TL. 如果还不明白啥意思,百毒知不道万能!Via PS:谷歌翻译也SO强大嘛,”囧”都能翻译出来.果然,宅文化开始走向世界了

Britain appears to have forged a global lead in onanistic logos.

Posted by William Heath on 01/05/08 at 9:52pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Save Time and Money
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No need to tell us once: we know already!

Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom writes:

As a seasoned blog-caster - I think I might now without hubris now describe myself as such - I am now content to agree that these new technologies have something to offer us in Whitehall.

This new e-press cuttings service is a good example. It has now saved 3m sheets of paper since the Wednesday morning group took it up last month. Everything I wanted was just a flick or two away, allowing Patricia to print out all the things I need to read in the car tonight. Howell’s GICS Islands of Innovation Messaging team is starting to click. There was an excellent story about Poole Borough Council’s innovative application of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to ascertain whether or not a family lived within a popular school’s catchment area. That’s the sort of innovation we need to applaud and celebrate, and a powerful example of my 7th C - Customer Insight (see my earlier blog-cast).

Progress can be extremely rapid once the best minds are applied to the nation’s problems, can it not? In the very next clipping I read that the entire Metropolitan Police force is to be electronically tagged, with microchips in radio headsets so we can pinpoint them to within a yard or so across the Met’s 620sq mile patch.

Marvellous. And it’s just a start. Let’s apply it to tackle benefit fraud, welfare entitlement, freedom pass qualification, for example. These devices can be put in the foot or ear. If we routinely establish where citizens are at all times, we would have the data *already* whenever we needed to find out anything.

Imagine the efficiencies. We’d meet the Service Transformation Agreement target on avoidable contact in a jiffy. And - let’s not tell David - it would render the flagship Tell Us Once project - of which he seems inordinately proud - quite redundant.

People wouldn’t need to tell us once: we’d already know!

Of course whenever leading thinkers - such as myself in this instance - break new ground, everybody else pretends they saw it all along. Leigh was going on just the other day about some gadget his people have got that listens in on phone calls and can spot when people are being untruthful. Applied to hoi polloi - the unemployed for example - it allows us to turn their claims down before they have even made them. How’s that for response time?

Of course we must ensure there is no intrusion of this sort on the Whitehall network. That would be an intolerable breach of confidence and the privacy of hard-working public servants. It would undermine precisely the system of mutual trust on which we have depended since 1854 and Northcote-Trevelyan.

Posted by Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO on 01/05/08 at 8:37pm
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Look at these lovely tax details!

In cock-up Britain the tax authorities needlessly copy personal data to CDs then lose them. Clinton’s staffers stole the ‘W’s from White House keyboards when the apparently perfectly intelligent George Bush 2 took over at US&A. In Machiavellian Italy an outgoing administration deliberately posts everyone’s tax details, including salary, on the web (in this extraordinary story from the Beeb), apparently to poke Berlusconi in the eye.

Openness about tax is the norm in Scandinavia, but a complete shocker for Italians. Tax-dodging is somewhere between rife and socially acceptable in Italy. The outgoing administration must have been exasperated beyond reason at the thought of a crooked tax dodger getting back into power.

We knew the vast mounds of personal data held often unnecessarily by government were already at risk from nitwits and criminal insiders. We’d better add “piqued outgoing administrations” to the list of risks.

Wibbi government reduced its risk and liability by minimising its holdings of non-essential personal data, anonymising wherever possible, and encrypting the small proportion it is essential to keep? Not that it would have helped Italy here.

Wibbi the technical immortality attributed to Silvio Berlusconi were quickly proved to be a phantasm? Or is that unkind...he is entertaining, in a John Prescottey sort of way.

Wibbi we could take the best of Italy and and the best of Scandinavia and be enlightened and responsible with decent weather, good food and sublime artistic sensibility and sense of humour to boot? Well, we can but ask…

Posted by William Heath on 01/05/08 at 10:28am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Foundation of Trust · Data nitwittery
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Breakthrough discerned?

Bloomsbury, 1 May 2008

It may be 2009 or even 2010 before the Large Votron Collider (LVC) goes into production but science journalists today were invited to an exclusive preview of its operation.

THE EQUIPMENT comprises a huge ring known as the M25, hundreds of miles long, an almost perfect vacuum surrounding the government and insulating it from reality. A complicated system of lasers is used to insert just two votrons at a time into the LVC where, using magnets and other incentives, and subject to seasonal variations, weather conditions and roadworks, the votrons are accelerated to unimaginable speeds close to 70 m.p.h. (Kelly’s constant).

The project is the brainchild of one man, William Heath, who surmises that at the beginning of time “ideal” and “government” were actually next to each other. The question is, given the light years which separate them now, whether they remain in contact and, if so, how.

Heath bravely proposes the existence of a previously unobserved sub-atomic particle, the brainon, evidence for the existence of which could be discovered when votrons collide.

Sipping a cup of coffee made using some of the heat generated during the hustings phase of the LVC, when votrons are given their distinctive red and blue spins, a remarkably composed Heath observes that this could be the day we discover whether there is a brainon. If not, there’s a decent Italian round the corner and maybe we could go and get a bite to eat.

UPDATE, 2 May 2008

OVER A surprisingly good lunch, the conversation flowed fast and furious, not unlike the votrons in the LVC all around us. Professor Heath wisely kept his own counsel but the assembled science journalists made their rash predictions.

Classical quantum mechanics would suggest that, on collision of the votrons, large numbers of leftons should be converted to libdemons, roughly equivalent to a shift from red spin to orange. Votrons are seen as a sort of messenger particle, trying to communicate with the distant, governing neutrons at the centre. Given that leftons and libdemons have barely distinguishable energy levels, the most economic application of the time-for-a-change principle is for one to convert into the other, its nearest neighbour. Would the results bear out our predictions?

Early results are now in and the answer is no. The expected annihilation of the leftons has been observed, but instead of libdemons, they seem to have gone straight to neocons. What is happening? And is this huge energy shift – all the way to blue spin – evidence for the brainon or isn’t it?

Leftons and libdemons share a common affinity for collective action and central control. The votrons can’t have leapt in one bound to the laissez-faire (L-F) of the neocons, can they? What is their message?

Perhaps the answer will be clearer when results come in from the inner core later today. Until then, back to the Italian and a bumpy ride on the expense account.

UPDATE, 3 May 2008

FUNNY THINGS, quanta, the way they behave. It must be 40 years since Feynman pointed out that we know the mathematics of quantum mechanics and we know that it’s right but quanta remain incomprehensible. You can have knowledge without understanding.

There are times when the behaviour of a quantum can only be explained if you assume that it can remember what it has done previously. But how can a quantum have memory? No idea.

There are times when the behaviour of one quantum can only be explained if you assume that it knows what another quantum has done or even will do. How? No idea. But given the outcome, it’s the only explanation. Even if we don’t understand it.

And so, to the votrons. What is the message they were sending? Over several bottles of best Amarone, this is our best guess at an answer. And after personally consuming two bottles of that fine 15% alcohol wine, in the interests of science, if you don’t mind, the answer is going to have to be stated in the form of an analogy, as though the LVC were an election. Not a general election, but a series of local ones.

The outcome of Thursday’s “vote” is a brief period of experiment. The government has become completely disengaged from the voters. Between now and the general election, there will be no government. No new initiatives will be implemented. The civil service will sit on them. They will not imperil their relationship with the next administration, which takes power whenever the general election is finally held.

In the interim, people can get on with their lives without interference from the government. The government will be irrelevant to them.

And the people will be irrelevant to the government, which will be entirely preoccupied with its survival, its message, its leadership and its legacy.

So everyone’s happy.

The experiment will come to an end but, until then, a happy phase of rediscovering the joys of autonomy is to be had.

That is the outcome. So that is the votrons’ message. Somehow, incomprehensibly, they know that the LVC will go into production in two years time, max., and in the meantime these idealistic quanta intend to enjoy their unaccustomed blue spin freedom from the government. It is a period to savour. Like Amarone. Make the most of it.

(No more updates, by the way. May 4 be with you.)

Posted by David Moss on 01/05/08 at 9:06am
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30 Apr 2008

Noitatlusnoc

We are all conversant with the concept of the invitation to tender (ITT). The customer documents his requirements and issues the specification to prospective suppliers, inviting them to tender for the business. The interested suppliers, if any, submit proposals and, one way or another, the winners are decided.

This venerable institution has now been the subject of revolutionary change.

The Financial Times reported in August 2007 that the Identity & Passport Service (IPS) would start to award contracts for the ID cards scheme next spring, i.e. now. Instead, IPS have issued a consultation document, seeking the public’s views on “what kind of information about the Scheme may be needed by organisations that might want to take part in delivering the Scheme”.

We are all conversant with the concept of the public consultation. The government department in question describes its proposals in detail, the public submit their thoughts and, one way or another, the government department does what it was going to do in the first place.

This venerable institution also, has been the subject of revolutionary change – the IPS consultation document seeks views on “what kind of information about the Scheme the public may need”.

Not only are the public expected to write IPS’s ITTs for them but, under the new dispensation, the public also have to decide for them what IPS are trying to achieve.

Posted by David Moss on 30/04/08 at 11:47am
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Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

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16 May 2008

Give us yer best

Sensible health-records option #3 emerges as CfH stretches to infinity and beyond

CRM turned upside down and inside out

15 May 2008

Wider professional skills for the government generalist

14 May 2008

Tax Simplification, Not Just Automation

13 May 2008

HMRC PAYE / NI Online 2008 - OK

Ideal realised

12 May 2008

Tesco’s to “Issue ID Cards”?

04 May 2008

Listening and the great clunking ham-fist

02 May 2008

Local government Cardspace trial

01 May 2008

OGC: standing up for its right and sticking up for Britain

No need to tell us once: we know already!

Look at these lovely tax details!

Breakthrough discerned?

30 Apr 2008

Noitatlusnoc

Ideal Government

Categories

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