Painfully insecure GDS spaffs £21,000 on online narcissism tool
The Government Digital Service is spending £21,000 per year on a brand monitoring tool designed to track what is being said about it online. Brandwatch monitors conversations happening online "in order to provide brands with information and the means to track specific segments to analyse their online presence". The Brighton …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 4th August 2015 08:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Big deal
£21k is nothing in the world of government spending, where billions are routinely wasted on the whims of gormless politicians, and whilst Her Maj's opposition froths at the mouth at "austerity" in which the government fritter £80 billion each year more than they raise in taxes.
Given that getting good quality user feedback is far more difficult than tracking what people actually say about you, this is probably a sensible more, although with the cynical caveats that nobody probably does discuss GDS on social media (the Reg Commentariat excepted), and that there's no point getting feedback on your service unless you do something effective about it.
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Tuesday 4th August 2015 09:07 GMT Captain DaFt
Oh well, humanity had a good run
"The Government Digital Service is spending £21,000 per year on a brand monitoring tool designed to track what is being said about it online."
So, they took some AI software and are subjecting it to all the abuse directed at them? What could possibly go wrong?
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Tuesday 4th August 2015 10:47 GMT jrd
A government should seek feedback on its' performance. This may not be the best way to do it but it's also not the worst and £21k isn't much by the standards of government waste.
Of course, as others have already said, the difficult part is getting the government to actually *listen* to what people are saying - especially if it is not what they wish to hear (same problem with senior management in the private sector, in my experience).
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Tuesday 4th August 2015 10:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
(same problem with senior management in the private sector, in my experience).
That's my experience too.
Senior management were very disappointed by the results of last year's staff survey, as a cosequence they held meetings to identify two or three things that staff felt were a major frustration and within their remit to address.
So far so good.
A year later they have failed to deliver on any of the issues in 'their remit' and we have just had another survey pushed out.
But we have a successful cycling team so everything is fine.
Happy days.
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Wednesday 5th August 2015 23:52 GMT Vic
Senior management were very disappointed by the results of last year's staff survey
Some years ago, I worked for an organisation that had a goal of delivering at least 40 hours per year of training to each employee. And for some years, it all worked well - we all got at least 40 hours of training, and occasionally a bit more.
Then, management decided to start cost-cutting, and all sorts of things were no longer allowed.
At the next staff survey, senior management were "disappointed" that staff were claiming an average of 2 hours of training per year, and resolved to find out why we were "under-reporting" the training we got...
Vic.
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Tuesday 4th August 2015 12:13 GMT caffeine addict
Depending on how they're using it, I can genuinely see a purpose to this. Not if they're tracking how often someone says "$GOVDEPT are $EXPLETIVE" but if they're tracking trends in things like "$GOVSITE is down again" or "on hold for 3h to $GOVDEPT" then it has the potential to spot problems early on.
Not that I'd put any money on them doing this, of course...
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Saturday 29th August 2015 11:07 GMT charlie-charlie-tango-alpha
Re: Can anyone answer this?
"Suggest you either tweet the questions or send the letters via your MP."
I'd go for the letter to your MP as the most effective route if you want a Minister to actually see your complaint - whether that Minister actually does anything as a result is of course a moot point.
Letters from the public to HMG Ministers are treated in one of two ways. If the letter is direct to the Minister (or his office or an official in the Department) then the Minister never actually gets to see it. It is handled only by officials (this is known as "treat official"). If, however, the same letter is sent to an MP and is then forwarded by that MP to a responsible Minister for reply, then the Minister will get it in his red box along with a draft reply (from the same official who would have replied directly as before). The Minister then signs the reply to the MP and encloses the constituent's original letter with the reply. Said constituent then gets back the official line trotted out by the Department with a nice letter from both his or her MP as well.
In my experience however, this is a largely futile exerccise unless you happen to like collecting letters from Ministers and MPs.
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Thursday 3rd September 2015 02:51 GMT Chris 155
Is this really a story?
Most large organizations do something like this. When your random complaint on twitter gets actually addressed by the company, 99 times out of 100 that's because of something like this. 21k is less than they'd pay in labor costs to do it without the software so it's also pretty cheap.
This is the 21st century here. Social Media and what people are saying about your company on Social Media is important. For 21k you can monitor a bunch of different sources and produce a digest that can be easily managed.