17 Sep 2008

Personal data: who gets what

Sir Bonar writes:

Marvellous head-clearing session with the Wednesday morning group today. Gus brought us all together in a sort of management pod, facilitated by a rather prickly woman from AT Kearney. We listened politely to her anecdotes for a while, then got rid of her, and reconvened for the serious business.

Personal data is the oil of the new economy they say. So it’s high time we divvied it up.

Once we know who owns what, we can ask the IT managers to put standard descriptors and architectures on everything so we can all trade and share it all without let or hindrance to the proper business of government.

Hugh owns everyone’s health records, obviously. Ian and and Bill own everything we know about servicemen and women. David owns everything about children, but passes some of that to Ian (who takes much of the credit for this whole idea) once they’re students. Dave (who may not be one of us for long I fear) and Leigh squabbled a bit over who owned taxpayers and welfare recipients, who are more or less the same thing now. We agreed they could each have a copy, which would be regularly synchronised.

After all, the whole lot fits on a memory stick nowadays, and one can just pop that in the post.

David N. does very well. He has the criminal records, immigration and passport holders. And he gets the new ID register, but even with its rich audit trail there’s a feeling the real action is with SOCA and the Intercept Refresh programme. This record of every phone number, email address used and Web Site Address used gives us quite unprecentended and hugely valuable capability. It’s quite unlike anything that has been possible before. That’s where all the smart money is headed, indeed John and Nick’s eyes were watering at the sums involved.

A propos Intercept Refresh we’ve decided there might be a stink if we put it forward by straightforward means. We wouldn’t want it not getting through Parliament. So it seems simplest just to tell the incumbent supplier Serco to get on with it, with a private bidding process. We can always put the frighteners on the new administration and sort out legislative cover at a later date. For now we just position it of course as simply bringing our existing capabilities up to date. Much chortling about that, as you can imagine.

Robert’s a dark horse. All his traffic camera stuff is getting quite interesting - we saw some fascinating clips of what Gus’s driver gets up to when he’s off duty.

I end up with a co-ordinating role owning the whole “ring of Saturn” data sharing architecture. Specifically I managed to win explicit control over all the data in the proposed fusion centres to share as I please. So I get the same as everyone else put together. All the power, none of the responsibility. This was most satisfactory.

Poor old Brian doesn’t get anything.

You might be amused to hear we had a light-hearted “information age” moment when David told us that apparently poor old John McCain dropped the clanger of referring to the Google as “a Google”. I fear Brian didn’t get that either. That’s becoming rather the leitmotiv of our “Transformational” sessions.

 
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