14 Mar 2008

Desist! And give me my data back!

Just in from Patricia in Sir Bonar’s office:

I did promise I’d do a Blog Cast today but I’m afraid I’m dictating this to Patricia in something of a rage.

That IT manager fellow - the one we’re going to blame when everything goes wrong, and sack - arranged a small symposium. It was just DitPol, Affteck (3) and young Nick from my private office. Gus dropped by, and Walter. Brian said he’d try but I dont think he’s going to head his head around this stuff, poor chap.

Anyway, after we’d heard from Gus and Alexis they put up this...I can only say: student, with no apparent qualifications, CV, job or understanding of authority. Apparently he’d written a system which stole all our data about government consultations and made them obvious and easy to respond to. We weren’t able actually to see it because out Internet connection wasn’t working. I know there are lot of consultations under way but I must say I found the whole thing most unimpressive. I mean, if we wanted to make consultations transparent and obvious it wouldn’t have been hard for us to do so ourselves in the first place.

He then made some derogatory and frankly disrespectful remarks about DirectGov. I believe someone sniggered. People are quite heedless of the morale of the 100-odd Civil Servants we have working on our flagship Web Site. He chirped that his friends had knocked up a better search service in 45 minutes in the pub. Then - if I caught this right - that his eleven-year-old sister Ruby had rewritten our £50m TransportDirect service so it ran on rails.

Whippersnapper! I told him to give us our data back immediately, and to desist.

My own Nick then first started wittering about mashing upwards. Whoever heard of such a thing? Then he claimed he could make all our pictures flicker, which sounds pointless, indeed undignified. None of this sounds to me like progress at all. Nick never even pretended to wear a tie in the office on Fridays, and now he’s even been spotted wearing Lycra. I think the time is fast approaching when we shall have to sack him as a Gershon efficiency measure. Patricia tells me he’s been secretly Blog-casting. Well, he never asked my permission, so we have our cast-iron pretext.

I must say, all this clever easy-to-use Web 2.0 and facial networking activity is all very well for propellerheads who want to lose their jobs. Mercifully such people, like the civil liberties fanatics, make up a tiny fraction of the population.

I have no doubt that the man on the (probably now bendy, heaven forfend) Clapham omnibus expects us to spend proper resources with our most trusted suppliers to deliver proper traditional IT-based word-processed services. They expect a table of contents and a jolly good index.

What on earth is the use of a Web Site which just does one thing? There are only so many hours in the day, and it’s not as if we can make our machines read these things for us. What is the purpose of having a government communications service if everything is made so obvious nobody needs to be told what to do? Above all, which would you rather trust: a Web Site properly procured under EU rules from the likes of British Aerospace and Deloitte, or something knocked by by a Polytechnic student after a late night out at the pub? There you have it.

Really, these symposia where one meets little smartarses in T-shirts make my blood boil. To think I cancelled four perfectly good whole-person review meetings to make space in the diary for it.

At times such as this it is an immense relief to leave the office and to dwell on the prospect of a long weekend in the garden. (dictated by Sir Bonar and transmitted without sight)

Posted by Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO on 14/03/08 at 8:56pm
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