* Posts by digiman

5 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2016

Student Loans Company burns £50 million in IT project superfail

digiman

Re: How the fec....?

Yes, GDS were involved and shockingly many of them are contractors on ridiculous high day rates; they watch but they don't 'do', they advise but are not accountable, they support those long established bureaucratic civil servants who are neither technology or customer savvy nor inclined, those very ones who run their 'services' as an extension of their self importance and wouldn't recognise a customer if/when they stepped on one.

Don't look too close as you might find yourself on trumped up charges and fired - especially if you are a private sector expert who joined the (un)Civil Service in the naive belief that they truly wanted the real world experience that you would bring to enable genuine government change.

Privatise them all but not to the big corporations who just cash in on incompetent procurement departments.

Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments

digiman
Happy

All I can say is . . .

/* NO COMMENT */

Mandarins plotted to water down EU data protection regs

digiman

Re: @ digiman Big government is watching you

I understand what you say and agree with elements of it but I have witnessed first hand how civil servants intentionally twist politician's intentions and are often the very people who put the mad-cap ideas that you refer to into the politicians heads in the first place. We will not improve government performance, accountability and openness while we ignore the civil self-servants !

digiman

Re: Big government is watching you

You are right to be concerned with the secret intentions of government but I would like to emphasise the absolute primacy of the Civil Service for being the real key problem which citizens need to deal with. These self serving faceless mandarins need major overhaul and reform and to be visibly accountable to the public not just politicians whom they hide behind.

Geniuses at HMRC sack too many staff! Nope, can't do it online. FAIL

digiman

Digital services is definitely all about empowering the consumer and reducing costs (ie less staff), but why do Government services struggle to become effective digital services? Well it is not because the technology or techies aren't up to the job. In reality, the leaders (senior grades) within the civil service do not have the commercial knowledge, experience or appetite to ever understand what a 'service' or a 'customer' actually is; therefore they run their services as 'departments', internally focussed and designed to create layers of bureaucracy and power, where the 'customer' is answerable to them and their 'authority'. Introducing digital services has only created a web enabled version of that culture and mind set - just look at HMRC farce web sites and the awful GDS whitespace UX rules. The real answer is to get rid of those senior civil servants with their cosy job-for-life mentality and replace them with real world commercial people with a competitive customer service ethic - whole-scale not piecemeal - only then will excellence naturally follow.