Puffbox – Page 17 – Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

23 Nov 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, directgov, francismaude, marthalanefox

Lane Fox report published; does Cabinet Office share her revolutionary zeal?
Martha Lane Fox’s review of Directgov has been published this morning – as an 11 page, 5.7MB graphic-based PDF file, making it impossible to search or select text. (Thanks to various colleagues on Twitter for confirming it wasn’t just me.) Its key recommendations, pretty much as anticipated:
The document is entitled ‘Revolution not evolution’ – but that’s certainly not the tone of the Cabinet Office press release, which describes the proposals in the most anodyne form imaginable. Where Martha talks about recruiting a ‘CEO for Digital’, and giving him/her ‘absolute’ power, the press release talks about an ‘Executive Director’ – note the immediate switch to Civil Service speak – whose job will be to ‘drive change and bring together existing teams working in this area’. And the press release’s line about ‘asking Directgov and Business Link to create a plan of what would be involved to converge the sites into a single domain’ seems two or three steps removed from actually demanding that it happens pronto.

The most provocative proposal in the document is surely the plan to consolidate everything into Directgov:

A new central commissioning team should take responsibility for the overall user experience on the government web estate, and should commission content from departmental experts. This content should then be published to a single Government website with a consistently excellent user experience.

Ultimately, departments should stop publishing to their own websites, and instead produce only content commissioned by this central commissioning team. There is no need for a major migration of content from existing departmental websites, they should simply be archived or mothballed when essential content has been commissioned and included in the new site.

But Francis Maude’s letter in response – quite rightly – takes a very cautious view of the work involved, and its implications… and almost seems to be kicking it into the long grass.

I agree in principle with your proposal that over time Government should move to a single domain based on agile web shared web services. However, as your report makes clear, this will be challenging for Government and I will need to consult colleagues before we make a final decision about how to proceed. To take these and other cross government issues forward, I intend to set up a new Ministerial Working Group on Digital reporting to the Cabinet Economic Affairs Committee.

Notable by its absence from the review is NHS Choices. Martha’s ‘shared service’ vision shows Directgov, Business Link, ‘departmental teams’, a Central Newsroom (CO/No10) and ‘digital engagement teams’ all feeding the Directgov brand/domain – but there’s no reference to the third of the three supersites. I spotted the other day that NHS Choices is being openly reticent about getting involved in the G-Digital project: the one-page overview on the G-Digital site notes that ‘NHS Choices are represented on the G-Digital Project Board and are considering how they can best utilise the project.’

And whilst the Maude response talks about ‘simplifying the governance of Directgov’, there’s no specific reference to the fate of its management board.

That’s my report on the publication itself; I’ll reflect on the proposals later. In the meantime, here’s what Steph Gray thinks… and he’s bang on.
22 Nov 2010

e-government

directgov, marthalanefox

Lane Fox plans for government web revealed

A document published on a non-departmental gov.uk site appears to have lifted the lid on Martha Lane Fox’s plans for UK government web publishing. The document, published as an unrestricted PDF, is a review of the website of the organisation in question. But given the ongoing Lane Fox review, its author provides a helpfully concise summary of what may lie ahead.

[Lane Fox] is recommending that Directgov should expand in scope to become the government front end for all transactions, with the ability to mandate departments to meet standards they set; she is also recommending the establishment of a central team in the Cabinet Office in charge of commissioning all online government information, led by a CEO for digital to direct all online government spending. There has been no formal response from the Government to her proposals, but it reflects an overall trend for centralisation and standardisation of government online information and services.

A copy of Lane Fox’s letter to Francis Maude, dated 16 October, was attached to the document in question; but, sadly, has not been included in the online copy. It does at least indicate that the plans have already been widely circulated around the Civil Service.

For the record, the PDF in question appears (at the time of writing) in the first few pages of Google search results for ‘martha lane fox directgov review’.
21 Nov 2010

e-government

directgov

Directgov board 'dissolved' prior to CEO's exit
In the world of the government webby, it really doesn’t come a lot juicier than this. Jayne Nickalls’s resignation as chief executive of Directgov was confirmed via Twitter on Saturday:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/jnickalls/status/5971161754107904″]

This was followed by a report in the Sunday Express (which I’d have missed, were it not for a helpful tipoff):

THE boss of a major Government website has quit amid concerns about a “politicised power-grab” by David Cameron’s spin doctors. Jayne Nickalls, the chief executive of Directgov … left last week. The organisation’s board has also been dissolved before an announcement about the website’s future due on Tuesday.

I’d heard rumours about the board’s dissolution: so I contacted Rory Sutherland, a man who knows a thing or two about public relations, who was appointed as a non-exec director in 2008.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/simond/status/5961035764736000″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/rorysutherland/status/6347334073978880″]

Beautifully worded.

Directgov itself has virtually no information about its own board. So I’ll have to quote a COI press release from 2008, which says the board existed for the following purposes:
- Contributing to and approving an annual business plan to meet the requirements of the annual remit letter;
- Agreeing strategies for the delivery of the business plan, priorities for delivery and the allocation of resources;
- Setting the standards and values of the organisation;
- Agreeing annual KPIs for Directgov and regularly monitoring performance against them; and
- Ensuring achievement of Directgov’s targets associated with the cross-Departmental Service Transformation Delivery Agreement.
Now… you could certainly put two and two together here, with the proposal that all government (ie policy / political) material should be merged with Directgov’s rather clinical information, and the protective layer of the board being removed, to conclude that Jayne had walked out as a direct consequence.

I stress, I don’t know if this is or isn’t the case: but you’d certainly understand if she felt this would jeopardise, and potentially compromise the ‘public services’ brand she’d worked hard to develop over the last five years. And stripping away the board, quite abruptly from what I’m hearing, can only have heightened any concerns she might have had.

Have a good week, gang.

PS I’ll also note in passing the piece in the Observer today: ‘Britons will be forced to apply online for government services such as student loans, driving licences, passports and benefits under cost-cutting plans to be unveiled this week… Cabinet Office officials say the full savings will only be felt if everything is moved online. Leaving even a small percentage of print registrations would be “prohibitively expensive”.’ Although there isn’t even a namecheck for Directgov itself, it’s an illustration of just how central it is to the government’s overall cost-cutting drive.
19 Nov 2010

e-government

directgov

Directgov CEO Jayne Nickalls quits (now confirmed)

No formal confirmation as yet, but we have reports from two very well-placed sources that Directgov CEO Jayne Nickalls has ‘resigned’ from her £95,000-a-year position.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/markflanagan2/status/5657033491611649″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/JimmyTLeach/status/5672929454981120″]

It’s just over a month since Martha Lane Fox submitted her review of Directgov, and her proposals for its future. And only two days ago, there was the clearest confirmation yet of the whispers I was picking up, when Civil Service Live posted a report that Directgov is to be government’s sole website.

More to follow – but since it’s well after 5pm on a Friday afternoon, I wouldn’t exactly hold your breath.
18 Nov 2010

e-government

downingstreet

Mark Flanagan leaves No10

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/markflanagan2/status/5177151099768832″]

News of another high-profile (if you’re into this sort of thing) Whitehall departure: this time it’s Mark Flanagan, who joined Downing Street in 2008 as head of digital, but subsequently became head of strategic comms. Mark’s Labour connections were no secret, so perhaps the biggest surprise is that he lasted so long.

He’s moving to Portland Communications, joining numerous former Westminster villagers including Tim Allan and George Pascoe-Watson, with a mandate to ‘put digital at the heart of the business… integrating online profile, social, search and mobile into every level of our client interaction.’

Mark deserves a lot of credit for the quiet good work done by the Downing Street web team over the last couple of years. It was he who first invited me in to talk about using WordPress, and it was his initiative to leap into Twitter: in both cases, giving an effective green light to the rest of government (much as Jimmy Leach had done previously with YouTube etc), and sparking so much of the innovation which has characterised the last couple of years.
17 Nov 2010

e-government, technology

twitter, wordpress

To tweet or not to tweet?

A bit of a first today: meeting with a new client, I found myself – for the first time – insisting that they get a Twitter account. I think they were rather taken aback by the suggestion: so was I, to be honest.

But I think it’s important to recognise that Twitter has reached a certain scale now, where it can’t be ignored. And even if your account isn’t likely to attract huge numbers of followers, you need to be aware of the wider potential community, and the potential audience for a retweet: this particular organisation is in the international development space, also populated by DFID (9,000 followers) and NGOs such as Oxfam (80,00 followers). Make it easy for them to spread your message: give it to them in a format which allows them to pass it on with a single click.

As we’re using WordPress (inevitably), it can be a zero-effort addition to your online offering: there are plenty of plugins which will send automated tweets, based on a pre-defined template, to your Twitter account. Alex King’s Twitter Tools tends to be the most popular, but I tend to avoid it – it’s been a suspect (although never formally charged) in a couple of site failures. Instead, at the moment, I’m recommending WordTwit – which isn’t perfect, but does seem to do the job reliably.

And maybe it’s just me, but where I used to react quite negatively to automated ‘hey! look at my blog!’ tweets, I actually quite welcome them now. A blip in the flow of my daily Twitter stream isn’t enough to derail my train of thought, and it might be something I want to read (otherwise why did I follow the account in the first place?).

Three years ago, I wrote a post suggesting that Facebook would become the RSS consumption tool for the masses. I think the fine detail of my prediction may have been wrong, but the substance was right. The social network has become the notification channel for the masses.

Setting up the Twitter account costs nothing. Sending the automated tweets costs nothing. If it helps even one person, on one occasion, you’re in notional profit. And there’s unquestionable potential to go much, much wider.
16 Nov 2010

e-government, politics

Situations vacated
I’m aware that other news stories have rather dominated the agenda this morning; so you may have missed the news that:
- government CIO John Suffolk has resigned, although so far he has neglected to mention it on either his blog or Twitter account, neither of which has been updated since 30 July (when he declared it was ‘good to be back online after the election break’). Quite a turnaround since August, when he told Computer Weekly he had no such intention. I had assumed this would happen a lot sooner, to be honest. Kable has a rather bland statement from him.
- David Cameron’s ‘vanity staffers’, Andrew Parsons and Nicky Woodhouse are switching payrolls, from the civil service to Conservative central office (according to the Standard). It’s unfortunate timing for Tom Watson, whose letter to Gus O’Donnell had just received confirmation that the positions were not advertised because they were ‘short term appointments of up to two years to meet short term needs’. Crown copyright was to have applied to any photos taken by Mr Parsons; what happens now, I wonder? Can/should government use party-funded publicity material? You’d have to say ‘no’, surely.
12 Nov 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, directgov, rationalisation, rishisaha

Cabinet Office web 'takeover'

Leaving aside the inevitable tabloid hyperbole, the Mirror is reporting this morning that:

Scores of civil servants could be axed under plans to hand David Cameron’s “vanity staff” control of all Government websites. The PM wants to create a single unit to take charge of web operations handled by 117 staff in separate departments. Whitehall’s dozens of official websites could be merged into one in a cost-cutting measure which would also allow Mr Cameron’s aides to “brand” the coalition’s presence on the internet. Former Tory party staffer Rishi Saha, who oversees No10’s internet site, is expected to be in charge.

That would certainly be in keeping with the signals I’ve been seeing over the past few weeks.
9 Nov 2010

e-government

directgov, marthalanefox

What are you suggesting, Sir Bonar?

There have been some intriguing tweets from the well-connected, albeit fictional, UK data sharing czar, Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom in the last day or so.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/sirbonar/status/1689062737977344″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/sirbonar/status/1712500290617345″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/sirbonar/status/1713718299721728″]

There it is again: the notion of greater rationalisation around Directgov. Hmm..?

In other news: Guido Fawkes is getting his teeth into the number of former Conservative Party (and indeed, Lib Dem) staff now finding themselves with Civil Service jobs. One stand-out name on the list is Rishi Saha, whose appointment was (finally) covered by the Mail a few days ago. Newsnight’s Michael Crick quotes his job title as ‘deputy director of communications in the Cabinet Office (and effectively head of digital communications, in charge of the websites run by the Cabinet Office and Number 10)’ – but he isn’t named in the Cabinet Office’s recent orgchart.
8 Nov 2010

e-government

amazon, downingstreet, transparency

Downing St's new transparency site

When is a new website not a new website? When it’s a subdomain, of course. Presumably that’s the justification for Downing Street launching a new transparency website, acting as a centralised depository for departments’ Business Plans (don’t call them ‘structural reform plans’, no matter what the URL says), org charts and meetings / hospitality data. In the last hour or so, it has taken its place in the Number10 site‘s primary navigation, replacing ‘Communicate’.

There’s a rather complex arrangement behind the scenes, by the look of it, with the more basic pages showing signs of being hand-coded in PHP, and the jQuery-rich Business Plans area being content-managed by a different application. It’s all running on Amazon hosting, so I’m guessing it might be bespoke PHP with Business Plan data sitting underneath in Amazon’s SimpleDB? But I’d be delighted if someone could enlighten me further. It certainly isn’t WordPress.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/mizansyed/status/1620114021556224″]

One disappointing aspect, though, is the use of Disqus for commenting. I continue to have serious reservations about government using a function which absolutely requires javascript – not just to submit a comment, but to read them too; and hosts its data at an overseas third party. As Neil Williams noted previously, it’s dead easy to lash it into any web page: but personally, I’d only ever want to use it as a last resort. I’m not sure Downing Street should be setting this kind of example.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/pubstrat/status/1622105846194176″]