Posts by David Gale 129 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2008
Can Supt Povey confirm that the Thames Valley Safety Camera Partnership has had no maintenance schedule for the power supply units within GATSO cabinets and that, as a consequence, their GATSO facilities cannot be deemed to be within Home Office specification? Can he also confrim what arrangements have been made with UK courts to inform wongly convicted drivers and to return fines levied on evidence known to be flawed?
Doubtless, this will be the same visionless piece of junk that WHS has always been. There is a MASSIVE opportunity here, if only Micirosoft would understand the architecture needed to secure home computing and rid the world of junk mail, to give but two examples. TADAG.com has an architecture that would give Microsoft a clear, global lead but the company were so focussed on lifting the IPR on the first bit they saw, they never got their hands on the real prize...
David Gale
CEO
SITFO.org
Come on, guys! At least get the story straight! Companies using contractors would themselves be liable for the back-tax, if IR35 was applied. IR35 doesn't just hit the contractor.
Contractors pay corporation tax, as well as cost of company administration, assets that have to be written down over five years (in IT???), and holidays that are self-funded. Yeah, real cosy...NOT!
No sign of any change with a change of government then? Same old, same old. When are you guys in government going to get it? Open source in itself does not deliver a sustainable architure for a Strategic IT Framework that enables cross-agency, cloud-based sharing and transformation.
Ah but wait! Before the election, you DID get it. Either the big suppliers have pressurised government back to the previous status quo or government is just totally incompetent...
My open letter to Francis Maude: http://is.gd/Sh4PqZ
David Gale
CEO
SITFO.org
It's easy to fall into line and view the Cloud as providing a brave new world. However, let's be clear about what the Cloud isn't: It isn't a substitute for a business-aligned IT strategy, it isn't necessarily cheaper, and it most certainly isn't a panacea for all ills.
Small and medium sized organisations may find themselves locked into a systems architecture (and even systems themselves) that cannot respond flexibly enough to their business reuirements. Strategy isn''t about capacity and tin, it's about aligning IT with the business. From that perspective the Cloud can maginfy the pitfalls. http://is.gd/opTHDx
David Gale
CEO
SITFO.org
Multitasking? Erm didn't Windows Mobile pre WP7 do that anyway? I've been 'playing music in the background' since about 2003 on everything from an XDAIIi on Pocket PC to my current Sony Xperia running WM6.1. I can also suspend apps and return to them as required.
Perhaps that's why the HPC HD2 is holding its second-user value so well. 1Ghz processor, WM6.5 AND a memory slot! With the XDA developer community already providing as much customisation of the OS as you could possibly want, a few of us realises that, paradoxically, Microsoft invented the open source Mobile OS a long time ago. I'll grant you it's no consumer phone but then WP7 is no business phone either. I WANT a Pocket PC. WP7 just demonstrates that Microsoft couldn't make WM pay!
There would have been no requirement for decoy email addresses had Microsoft played a straight hand in their acquisition of TADAG.com IPR. Instead they filched only a portion of the full TADAG architecture before hiving it off to a third party to be reinvented as OpenID. The remainder is still under wraps.
Step 1: Deliver a COHERENT public sector IT STRATEGY (not policy masquerading as strategy)
Step 2: Understand that IT and service transformation STARTS with building an IT architecture AFTER you understand the business
Step 3: Ban tactical, point solutions unless required for a temporary quick fix
Step 4: Build a public sector high-speed comms network
Step 5: Build public sector, private cloud-based strategic IT frameworks (SITFO.org) as regional nodes to enable shared services and service transformation
Step 6: Define shared, multi agency processes but pilot them first - NO BIG BANGS!
Step 7: Rememebr that this is Britain - the Land of Vested Interest. Sell your house, pack your bags and take your skills somewhere where they'll be appreciated...
I wonder if these stats will include information on whether a speed camera has beeen maintained as required for it to be recognised as a prescribed device? Whilst GATSO camera units are routinely removed from their cabinets for servicing and calibration, a calibration methodology that would never be allowed in any other industry, there has been a monumental cover-up, that has included the connivance of CPS and the courts, to avoid the disclosure that many GATSO's power supply units have NEVER been tested adequately to verify their output voltage. A GATSO without such certifiation does NOT meet with the statutory obligations required of a speed metering device. The Home Office know it, the CPS know it and the courts know it:
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=10&t=442382&mid=0&i=0&nmt=Power Supply Units to GATSO cameras - update&mid=0
Lest any of these party affiliated pundits get carried away, the same senior civil servants have ended up in the same positions following regime change. The pre-election window dressing was punted off into the long grass the week the Conservatives took power. The deal goes like this:
"If you want contributions to your election funds from mainstream government IT suppliers, we'll let you trim back on contract costs so long as you don't fundamentally tinker with the way that public sector IT is delivered. If you went strategic, as you promised in the run up to the election, that would cost us £Billions. So, play safe. We'll support your 'cuts' as long as there's no underlying threat to the revenue model that exists around perpetually disjointed, tactical public sector IT."
Mr Maude, the Conservative Party put up their Shadow spokesperson for Science over a year ago with a message that they shared the strategic vision held by key players, for so long ignored by the last administration. We were told that the strategic vision would also herald an end to the cosy contracts that had previously demonstrated a complete absence of governance over IT strategy. We were encouraged.
Within days of the election the window-dressing had been moved to one side and within weeks the same people were reappointed to key positions within the civil service. It was 'business as normal'. I see no evidence at all of strategic governance over IT and so, what we will end up with is smaller, perhaps more cost-effective contracts that perpetuate the expensive, rats' nest of 'point solutions'. We need a clear IT strategy, NOT policy masquerading as strategy. Once that is in place, we need governance to protect the strategy from the deflective ploys of performance-managed career targets of managers and the short-term sales focus of unscrupulous suppliers,
I remain unconvinced: http://sitfo.wordpress.com/
David Gale
CEO
SITFO.org
It's well-known, in some areas, that vice squad cops are open to taking a bung from girls or their pimps, just as some drugs squad officers are dealing. It's been going on for years. Yet, protected form the real truth from a politically-focused media, we hide behind our comforting self-denial of having the 'best police in the world'. I worked as a police officer thirty years ago and I can tell you that whilst 70% of the officers I worked with were decent, honest people focused on delivering a public service, the other 30% would have been behid bars if they hadn't been in uniform.
Whilst there will always be squabbles between private and public sectors, there are more pressing truths that make the discussion irrelevant. Firstly, the toxicity of debt in the world banking system has not gone away. What we have is merely a blip of calm on the back of tax-payer bail-outs. Secondly, my own informal research (that has never let me down - I forecast the collapse in 2006) is showing that we are now into deflation, with a consequent stagnation of the economy only a matter of months away. If the BoE tries to increase interest rates you can expect that stagnation will lead to a deeper recession than the one we've just had. Sorry to be all doom and gloom but the last recession is not like 1929 because we are very close to the situation repeating itself, again and again until the toxicity is shaken out. The difference this time is that, in terms of UK bank's debt, we are all now the shareholders.
Notable that the DoJ will busy themselves in something like this whilst Microsoft openly admits to having deficiencies in the way it manages its own Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). Ah, but then that allows a US company to obtain foreign IPR as part of an aggressive arm of US foreign policy. One rule for one... www.tadag.com
Readers of my SITFO.org blog will know, that for some years now, I have been trying to draw attention to the rather cosy relationships between IT suppliers and civil servants. I have given detailed accounts of senior civil servants knowingly working against the public interest on the back of nailing some short-term, lobby-fuelled tactical target. You would have thought, wouldn't you, that after Stephen Byers's revelations about being able 'to get to the civil servants', there might have been some media focus on exactly which civil servants were 'get-attable'. Not so, Sir Humphrey rolls on unmolested. Meanwhile, my discussions with Conservative-supporting, cloud-based suppliers in 2009, demonstrated them to be equally disinterested in the public good.
Outsourcing suppliers are all much the same but they do serve a purpose in the public sector, the main part of which is to mitigate personal risk to low-skilled business managers. I too have experienced the change-control ploy but not just from Capita. At a time when the private sector is bringing everything back in-house, the public sector continues to tolerate outsourcing and refuses to empower senior, strategic architects and CIOs with the skills to define coherent in-house strategies. Why? Because this would represent REAL change and threaten the established civil service empires. You can count the number of local authorities with a real IT Director / CIO on their chief officer board on the fingers of one hand, yet these are some of the most complex, IT dependent organisations in existence. Similarly, Whitehall is bereft of any empowered strategic IT input.
The jury is still out on whether the coalition government understands the need to define a coherent UK IT strategy (rather than the previous list of policies that have masqueraded as strategy) but before doing that, there is a more pressing need for real governance to be put in place for public sector IT. To do this, there needs to be investment in skilled senior IT strategists.
We can all live in hope...
"Authentication" & "identity management" are meaningless without understanding the context of citizens' engagements and where they are required. The Canadians seem to have got a grip of this lesson for public sector use, so why is Microsoft still missing the point?
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