Posts by Craig Cockburn

UK.gov cuts deal with Microsoft to avoid £15m post-Brexit price hike

Inked?

In a digital forum?

Hold on I'll get my quill

Or did you mean to write "agreed"

UK govt digi-chief confirms he is standing down after ... 9 months

Missed opportunity

GDS had the opportunity to do more, better and cheaper. See blog post from earlier this year.

GDS Reboot

Get ready for mandatory porn site age checks, Brits. You read that right

Censorship trial

Having to check every site before it goes live? Unworkable.

However, we could trial it on MPs sites and policital sites and remove all sites with lies on them to see if this is scalable.

Are you up for it, Conservative party?

Assessing the UK’s Government Digital Service

some thoughts on how to improve GDS

10 tips for future-proofing gov.uk against mistakes it made before

http://blog.siliconglen.com/2016/03/government-digital-service-reboot.html

UK.gov kicks long awaited digi strategy into long grass, blames EU referendum

A few thoughts

10 tips for future-proofing gov.uk against mistakes it made before

http://blog.siliconglen.com/2016/03/government-digital-service-reboot.html

GDS monopoly leaves UK.gov at risk of IT cock-ups, warns report

Celebrate success, learn and adapt for the future.

GDS build an excellent, user centric website which is rarely down, sets a model for other government sites worldwide, has revolutionised citizen engagement and which is highly regarded in terms of putting the citizen first and of rollout out agile ways of working. As far as I know GDS has saved the government a fortune which is more than can be said for how things used to be done. If GDS makes a mistake, it learns from it quickly - that's modern management thinking and the sort of thinking which has made Amazon, Facebook and Google into similar leaders in their fields.

GDS had a huge task on their hands, they have had successes and they have had failures. But they have had more successes than failures with less money than the way things used to be done. There is always a better way, there are always ways to learn and to improve. However chucking the baby out with the bathwater is hardly a positive approach.

Why shouldn't the government build everything in house? They run the country, they protect our national security, they pay benefits to millions of people every day, they protect the nation. They are our democracy and they are accountable to the people. Why then should we require a 3rd party subcontractor to run a website? What's the challenge that a 3rd party can do that a national government can't?

Tesco tills go titsup

ex Tesco.com

Funnily I applied last week for a position of project manager at Tesco.com. They turned me down, evidently my experience project managing tesco.com grocery previously didn't seem to count.

Maybe they should have given me the job instead, looks like their existing practices have a few faults. I have a strong background in system testing.

Tesco? Hello?

http://www.linkedin.com/in/siliconglen

Info chief slaps Met on CCTV in pubs

Big Brother

I live in the UK and work in Ireland. The number of CCTVs in one street in the UK is probably more than all of Dublin put together. It's like a UK time warp in Dublin - the only CCTV you see is the occasional camera for monitoring busy roads. No traffic light camera and few if any cameras for watching individuals. Even the UK government is happy to admit that the UK has more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/topic_specific_guides/cctv.aspx and it is only when you go to other countries that you realise just how vast the gulf is. Incidentally, the Irish government isn't talking about ID cards, another UK government Big Brother obsession.

easyJet warns Expedia: 'Hands off our flights'

Simple solution

I just use Skyscanner.net, they give the actual prices from the airlines sites and then take you to the airline site to make the booking. That way there's no middleman and you get to accurately compare all the flights.

Mobile phones soon to be allowed on aircraft

Pile of pants

This is just so much rubbish. If phones were in fact dangerous to planes they would take them off people. If having phones roam to multiple masts was a problem then the thousands of people leaving their phone on would cause a problem for people living under the flight path. Yet for about 25% of people who leave their phone on (or put it on silent rather than actually turn it off) this has never caused a problem to a plane, despite thousands of phones a day being left switched on whilst on a plane. In any case, even if the phone is off then the signal from the mast is still penetrating the cabin during take off and landing. Why is this not a problem?