Open Sores

February 18, 2012

Whilst I have been an advocate of Open Source for many years (this is WordPress, isn’t it?), it has always been a case of banging one’s head against a brick wall in many cases. My Colleague David Henderson recently pointed me to GovFresh as a source of material to use when attempting to convert the so far unconverted, and the material on their whether about Joomla, Drupal or WordPress is really useful.

Whilst Liam Maxwell and the UK government make the right noises and visit some of the right places, beta.gov.uk itself is more of a mongrel, coded in Ruby with a load of Openish add ons – see Colophon for the GOV.UK beta. For good examples of the public sector use of Open Source in the UK one needs to examine Bristol City, Oxfordshire and the increasing number of others employing the likes of Drupal or Joomla.

In its own way this move away from commercial or hand-tooled CMS may cause a few problems in the private sector web businesses that have been slow to recognise that open source is the current trend, but that’s business isn’t it. The next trick will be getting those developing sites using open source to share the development pain and hosting.

My own council has never hosted its own website, I made sure of that. The next trick will be transferring the rest of the web applications that now feed into it into the ‘cloud’. After that it will be getting those application providers to develop their systems in Open Source and put them into the ‘cloud’ as well. Too many applications are reliant upon incredibly expensive Oracle, SQL or other licensing schemes that need to be switching to ‘software as a service’.

Anyway, GovFresh has lots of material to encourage the use of Open Source amongst even the most hardened advocates of paying through the nose, rather than paying by the seat.

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The ‘Green’ Emancipator

February 14, 2012

VIDEO STORY: Green technology on the front line

Mick Phythian, head of ICT at Rydale District Council, member of the Local CIO Council and Socitm lead on green technology issues, welcomes the Government’s sub-strategy for Green ICT – and is inviting local government to feed back examples of green best practice in the sector for his work with Socitm.

To read the rest of this news article click here: http://www.ukauthority.com/?tabid=64&id=3528

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Keep it stupid, simple

January 17, 2012

Whilst they may not be able to do much about it, at least some of the politicians in the UK have realised what a complex system we have around the claiming of various benefits. The conclusions from the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee published on the 12 January 2012, recognize the pickle we have got ourselves into:

  • No single body is responsible for coordinating means testing across government
  • At present there is no clear picture of how the entire benefit system affects claimants’ incentives to work
  • Departments do not understand the impact of administering more means-tested benefits locally
  • The benefit system is difficult to understand and places a high burden on claimants
  • administrative costs of means-tested benefits vary so significantly
  • Real-time information systems will be difficult to implement

So, if we have got an unmanageable set of legislation that makes life difficult and expensive for all levels of public service, who is going to sort it out? This self-induced complexity has been frequently discussed here, especially around the ‘New Conditionality’ covered by Paul Henman in Governing electronically - we make processes and systems complex because we believe that ICT will sort it all out for us – it may, but at an enormous cost, especially if the systems are outsourced or poorly designed. Let’s keep it simple or pay the stupid price!

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Keep taking the tablets

January 8, 2012

Since the festive season has passed and distributed a lot of new toys around, there has been further talk around the use of iPads and such devices as tools of government. They were also well in evidence at the GDS launch in December 2011.

A recent report from the Software Usability Research Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Wichita State University, USA, examines the usability of them and presents some interesting conclusions. The report is entitled “iPad Usage Patterns On-the-Go and at Work”, which is important because, as the report goes on to conclude, that the main use is “as a leisurely device to browse the Web and check email”. The major drawback being stated as the device’s inability to multitask. Having invested some time myself into testing an Asus Transformer, the Android alternative, in the work environment, I can only confirm these conclusions.

As a document viewer, or with the purchased application as a PDF form-filler, it has the same use as a laptop or netbook but with better battery life, but in attempting to connect the device through the many security barriers around local authority IT systems isn’t as easy, if at all possible. A supplier of a particular local government application has developed an application to interface with its server-based system but is then likely to be charging several thousand pounds for its use, which will then affeact the business case for using tablets.

Whilst I can see some limited uses for such devices currently, they’ll obviously become mainstream eventually, and with the correct security and service applications developed may venture outside the realms of being a flashy alternative to paper. So watch the arena but unless you have the dosh to spare, and who has these days, just try and reduce your printing in preparation.

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Broadband and the economy

December 27, 2011

Many politicians take as a given the fact that broadband is a necessity for economic development. Craig Settles in a piece in Government Technology considers the role of this is the round in the US and presents what he believes are surprising findings – ’8 Surprising Findings About the Broadband Economy (Opinion)’. The report is a review of the $ 7 billion dollar investment in the USA and what impact that has had to date.

One piece of advice is to evaluate the delivery medium with the community that will be using it, be it forms of cable or wireless, since there can be varying preferences. Another conclusion was the need to keep on fighting even if initial funding sources fail – some did and succeeded. A further piece of advice was that a fair proportion of rural respondents don’t expect ever to get sufficient capacity to affect economic development.  I hope there’s more confidence in the UK than the 13% reported from the US.

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