Meet the guy trying to drag HM Treasury's data strategy into the 21st century

The UK government is to spend £1.2 trillion in the current financial year overseen mainly by HM Treasury, the department also responsible for keeping the economy on track and overseeing financial markets. To do its job, the Treasury aims to create a "production model" of a new data platform by the end of the 2024-2025 financial …

[Doctor Syntax]

"Those groups tend to work quite independently; analysts tend not to share common ways of performing that data analysis."

I'd have thought that would be a good way to avoid group think, even if the end product is PowerPoint slides.

[Ken G]

Group think is bad for making policy but financial metrics is one area I would hope there are shared approaches.

[Anonymous Coward]

None of it really matters, the government will ignore anything they don't like and ask the same question elsewhere until they get an answer that supports whatever current madness has gripped them.

I'd love to take a dig at the Tories here but quite honestly Labour are just as bad.

They'd be netter off saving the money and using a spreadsheet with some random numbers in it.

[Roland6]

Whilst having potentially 300 different approaches and toolsets to the same data analysis problem is an overkill, unifying around one can hinder the discovery of modelling mistakes and invalid assumptions. Hence why having multiple people working to the same objective but using the same data, different tools and different methods, should give greater trust in the results and where inconsistencies arise further investigation is the norm…

Seem to remember this is effectively a standard way of developing critical systems software in some sectors, plus we shouldn’t forget the background to the Intel AMD duoopoloy, where the military wanted two sources - even if one was the favoured supplier.

[Anonymous Coward]

google on Synapse data warehouse:

Azure Synapse Analytics is an enterprise analytics service that accelerates time to insight across data warehouses and big data systems .. modern architecture patterns .. serverless on-demand or provisioned resources .. Microsoft Fabric ...

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Re: google on Synapse data warehouse:

So basically "blah blah big data blah blah delivering synergies blah blah new ways of working blah blah leveraging efficiencies blah blah unlimited rice pudding" etc etc?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: google on Synapse data warehouse:

Their business card simply says "we're not SAS"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: google on Synapse data warehouse:

are they at least SaaS?

[Fazal Majid]

Using a Microsoft stack

Means they are probably unable to attract the best Data Scientists from Big Tech companies who are used to working with open-source analytics stacks like Jupyter notebooks as front-ends. At some level, basic BI capabilities are a commodity (and having Tableau probably means more people can actually access data without needing a data specialist to assist), but cutting-edge predictive analytics and machine learning are not available first on commercial products.

[Roland6]

Re: Using a Microsoft stack

>” Big Tech companies”

This is a sweeping category, which governments like to use, given how.much IT is now used in business, so it include both code tech companies and online banking/retail etc.

But as this is government, I doubt they will be paying enough to attract the more commercially minded analysts, before you start to look at the tools and toys…

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Using a Microsoft stack

You *can* use Jupyter Notebooks on Azure. Not sure why that would be a blocked to attracting the best data scientists. The salary on the other hand probably is.

[Anonymous Coward]

ChatGPT.....

Someone has to suggest replacing the entire department with an AI that may be smarter:-)

[xyz]

Re: ChatGPT.....

They might have tried something like that back around 2018 but I couldn't possibly comment.

IMHO, with the current speed of product development, I'd be very, very wary of cuddling up to a single product suite and trying to big bang a solution.