12 Comments
Jun 3Liked by James O'Malley

The UK government’s digital services are mainly fantastic, so well done to Liz and everyone who made that happen!

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Jun 3Liked by James O'Malley

Very interesting, Liz! I have been astonished by how functional government websites are right now. When I needed to review my NI contributions history and some other bits recently a chill went down my spine thinking about how I would need to navigate an impenetrable website which would inevitable require yet another login and password, but none of that was true. The government gateway works really well. Good work trumpeting the success! Also, totally agree that doing government is like trying to change the parts of an aircraft that is already in flight.

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The government gateway was built in 2001 and indeed still works. Don't mention UK Verify though...

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Jun 3Liked by James O'Malley

Thanks, this was really interesting

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Jun 3Liked by James O'Malley

A joy to read- clear, concise and witty, with minimal footnotes!

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Jun 5Liked by James O'Malley

Loved this - sadly recognised a lot of the behaviours having worked alongside government on various digital projects. I fully support your point Liz that the UK is way ahead of many other countries and companies. I’d like to see greater exposure of this article as it helps demystify some of the challenges Gov departments face. The fact it has been written and published is a good thing, exposing how important it is for people like you and the amazing GDS visionaries and teams in Government to continue their life’s mission to digitise as much as possible ensuring it all works together and us punters can understand and use the services.

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Using free text fields to store key information which needs to be processed was also a feature in some systems in a telecoms company I once worked for, I suspect it is something which happens in any company over about 10 years old. But the worrying thing was how many of the expensive software developers had no idea, as you say it is important to get information out of the busy people using the current systems.

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I think it happens in any interface which allows free text entry...

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As I recall, when Tony Blair wanted to introduce ID cards, a lot of the objections were to the *database*, not the plastic card; to the sudden ability of anyone with access to link e.g. your driver's licence to your council tax to your adoption papers etc. and therefore (a) the likelihood that people would start doing dystopian data-mining or (b) that identity theft would be much more serious as a result. (Think of the USA where every single database has someone's social security number as a foreign key.) I'm curious to what has been done to address those concerns.

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Former No2ID activist here (in fact, I'm currently wearing a No2ID T-shirt): yes, this was exactly our main objection. I too am curious about whether there's been any progress on this: it would be nice to have more joined-up government services, but I still really don't trust the Home Office.

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I remember talking to the Sales Ledger staff as to why they did a particular process because I could find nowhere where that data was ever used again

Turns out it was necessary in the original paper based system (so they would know in which vault the paperwork was stored) the process had been put into the original Wang RPG II environment and replicated through several generations of the system. Forcing the users to enter the data before they could proceed

But once entered never touched again

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author

Amazing. 😂

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