No doubt it will soon migrate to www.gov.uk
From which point, it will have greatness thrust upon it
Shiny new UK.gov stats website a 'disaster' - MPs
The official website designed to give the British public access to government statistics has been branded a "disaster" by MPs. Andrew Dilnot, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, was brought in front of the Public Administration Committee yesterday to explain why it's so hard to actually pull up any information on ons.gov.uk …
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Thursday 13th December 2012 16:02 GMT Pete 2
A success by any other name
> no way of getting an answer to that question if you are a lay person
So, at least it's met one of it's core criteria.
Afterthought: it appears the article was written with the same intent as the website in its subject: nowhere is there any mention of the URL, just references to "the site". Maybe the second of the core criteria is to make no reference to the site's address, thus preventing people from accessing it, so it can be closed down in the future due to "lack of public interest"
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Thursday 13th December 2012 16:08 GMT Flawless101
Colour me shocked.
I'll never understand why government IT is the way it is. My experience of it just gave me the impression of amateurs with no proper understanding of the tech, sure there was diamonds in there... but it was mostly awful. Imagine a proper in-house IT company for software dev using industry standards, and support. Perhaps I've just experienced the worst of it, but it I now have a special appreciation of how bad IT can get.
A dream too far?
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Thursday 13th December 2012 20:47 GMT Destroy All Monsters
It's like a no-go theorem
Public administration, the handling of the government apparatus of coercion and compulsion, must necessarily be formalistic and bureaucratic. No reform can remove the bureaucratic features of the government’s bureaus. It is useless to blame them for their slowness and slackness. It is vain to lament over the fact that the assiduity, carefulness, and painstaking work of the average bureau clerk are, as a rule, below those of the average worker in private business. (There are, after all, many civil servants whose enthusiastic fervor amounts to unselfish sacrifice.) In the absence of an unquestionable yardstick of success and failure it is almost impossible for the vast majority of men to find that incentive to utmost exertion [that] the money calculus of profit-seeking business easily provides. It is of no use to criticize the bureaucrat’s pedantic observance of rigid rules and regulations. Such rules are indispensable if public administration is not to slip out of the hands of the top executives and degenerate into the supremacy of subordinate clerks. These rules are, moreover, the only means of making the law supreme in the conduct of public affairs and of protecting the citizen against despotic arbitrariness.
It is easy for an observer to indict the bureaucratic apparatus for extravagance. But the executive with whom the responsibility for perfect service rests sees the matter from another angle. He does not want to run too high a risk. He prefers to be on the safe side and to be doubly sure.
All such deficiencies are inherent in the performance of services which cannot be checked by money statements of profit and loss. Indeed we would never have recognized that they really are deficiencies if we were not in a position to compare the bureaucratic system with the operation of profit-seeking enterprise. This much-abused system of the “mean” striving for profit made people efficiency conscious and eager for the utmost rationalization. But we cannot help it. We must put up with the fact that one cannot apply to a police department or to the office of a tax collector the well-tried methods of profit-seeking business.
Ludwig von Mises: Bureaucracy (1944)
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Friday 14th December 2012 09:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Flawless101
Having worked with various gov IT people as a small third-party vendor/developer, I can tell you it's shocking. I can't tell you the number of times the systems we supply and manage for HMRC and UKBA have not failed, and yet when something goes wrong somewhere we generally say what the problem is within 10 minutes, followed by 5 hours of gov "management" running around attacking us and making us defend ourselves 100%, followed eventually by an admission that it was the thing we said it was (generally the network or the SAN).
Also having done some work for QinetiQ, that's equally baffling. PhDs trying to implement some form of SOA, arguing that web services are a service (sort of true), a Windows service is a service (not true), hahaha, I suppose even mail delivery should be considered a service! (Loony.) Your opinion of SOA notwithstanding, I hope this gives you some idea of how far removed from the real world some of these people are.
In one way or another, they are generally a joke, with a job for life.
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Thursday 13th December 2012 16:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The only sensible thing to do
Incomptent supplier: "I'll tell you what, lets start again, but this time, we'll do it properly, here's the spec and bill"
Clueless Mandarin "Wow, it must be good if it'll cost that much! I can't question it too much, I don't want to appear clueless in front of this supplier..."
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Thursday 13th December 2012 17:55 GMT Steve Foster
Re: The Site...
data.gov.uk is for publishing raw* data in machine-usable form (CSV, XML, that sort of thing) that others can consume. While the ONS site is a bunch of reports (logically, the ONS site should be built on results from data.gov.uk, but probably isn't).
* after sanitising & other "airbrushing" techniques have been applied, of course
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Thursday 13th December 2012 17:57 GMT H2Nick
Thanks for the URL.
Just tried "total government spending"
Nothing for the total on the first page.
saw "UK Central Government Procurement Spend"
tried "UK Central Government spend"
Hopeless.
Simple enough to find on this site : http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/total - though that fails quickly enough with 'server not found' if you click on "revenue"...
Maybe all the various Gov sites feed data into this new one. Maybe I'm just dreaming in colour...
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Thursday 13th December 2012 20:25 GMT All names Taken
Point of order?
Guvernment = body of people elected to form representatives in the House of Commons dealing with all matters related to the Commons and commoners. It has ability to set taxes for what it seeks to do and empower udders tp do its bidding.
Civil serventia = the bit that takes all the money, spends it upon itself, shuns publicity and is supposed to make policy manifest. Trouble is it doesn't do that (make policy manifest I mean) and what it does do it shouldn't (they have their own agenda upon which politicians sometimes unwittingly impose themselves?). Know wot I mean 'arry?
I mean, you don't expect MPs to do any website coding now do you?
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Monday 17th December 2012 14:27 GMT Arrrggghh-otron
Re: Downloads?
Your point makes sense, but I had one or other of the open source databases in mind when I said that.
Keep the tables reasonably simply and exporting it to any other format should be easy. However getting a CSV into a DB is also fairly easy. But it would be nice to be able to run queries on the data direct from the site...
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Friday 14th December 2012 20:52 GMT Paul S Williams
gov.uk or ons.gov.uk???
My understanding is that gov.uk has been a groundbreaking reworking of directgov, using agile development methods. Its been held as a flagship agile project, hoping to make the methodology and related culture more acceptable to government software contracting. If this site is mistakenly suggesting the problems are on gov.uk rather than, as I believe it ons.gov.uk (a separately managed site) then maybe this should be made more clear...
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
