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Yes, it’s another Digital Economy Bill rant.

It’s passed the Lords, and is on the way to the Commons, where it *could* be rammed through with minimum scrutiny once the General Election is called.  That’s what the corporate interests that have drafted it want:

In this leaked, six-page email, Richard Mollet, the Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Institute (the UK’s record-industry lobbyists), sets out the BPI’s strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill, a sweeping, backwards reform to UK copyright law that will further sacrifice privacy and due process in the name of preserving copyright, without actually preserving copyright.

<snip>

On the other hand, he identifies Members of Parliament as being “resigned” to the fact that they will not be allowed to debate the bill or give it “detailed scrutiny” (heck of a job, MPs!). He cites an expert on legislation as saying that the bill will likely die if MPs insist on their right and responsibility to examine this legislation in detail before voting on it.

There’s still one last chance to prevent this, if MPs do what MPs are supposed to do and hold the legislation up to some kind of scrutiny.   Time to hit WriteToThem – especially if you have a LibDem MP – and tell that’s what they should be doing.

This is my contribution, aimed at Nick Clegg.  Feel free to use something similar yourself :

Dear Mr Clegg,

I was heartened to see that the resolution regarding the Digital Economy Bill was overwhelmingly passed at the Spring Conference.  But despite the fact that the Liberal Democrats have woken up to the implications, the Bill is still a deeply flawed piece of legislation that is utterly skewed to the interests of big corporations, and will do irreparable damage to the real digital economy in the UK:

• The Joint Committee on Human Rights has said that it is unable to rule on whether the Bill would be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights without more detailed scrutiny. [1]
• Speaking in the Lords, Lord Puttnam said “I am absolutely convinced that, within the next two or three years, there will be another bill before this house which will be created to deal with the deficiencies of the present bill.” [2]
• According to a leaked memo, the BPI are relying on a lack of Parliamentary review to ensure that clauses which were drafted word-for-word by them become law. [3]
• The statistics which form a central plank of the lobbyist arguments are demonstrably misleading. [4]

This Bill will do nothing for the digital economy, as it’s written entirely from the perspective of media conglomerates who are seeking to shore up outmoded business models that are rapidly being rendered obsolete by technology.  If their approach was taken back 100 years, the telegraph industry would be attempting to pass legislation that effectively outlawed the telephone.  It threatens the livelihoods of thousands of people like me who are making the most of new opportunities to make a healthy, legal and creative living through the internet.

That’s the view of everyone – and I really mean *everyone* – I know who works in the IT and internet industry, and there’s a growing groundswell of public opinion that shares this.

People’s faith in politics in the UK is an an all-time low, and it would be a travesty of the legislative process if a Bill this flawed was allowed to become law without scrutiny in a mad rush to clear the decks before the General Election.

I’m writing to ask that you and your fellow Liberal Democrats do not allow this Bill to pass without detailed scrutiny, and that Danny Alexander’s promise to do so [5] is kept.

Yours sincerely,

Tim Duckett

[1] http://www.out-law.com/page-10754
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/02/digital-economy-puttnam
[3] http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/12/leaked-uk-record-ind.html
[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/05/ben-goldacre-bad-science-music-downloads
[5] http://www.libdemvoice.org/danny-alexander-digital-economy-bill-18321.html

Vodafone have got a problem. On the one hand, they’re one of the world’s largest mobile networks, with however many billions of subscribers. On the other, they’re just another network as far as many of their customers are concerned.

One of their responses is Vodafone360:

Vodafone 360 is a new internet service for your mobile, PC and Mac. It brings your phone, email, chat and social network contacts together in one place. Communicate with your friends, see their status updates, share your photos and favourite places – from your phone, PC or Mac.

As part of the launch, Voda are running roadshows aimed at their nascent development community and brought the latest one to Sheffield yesterday in partnership with Screen Yorkshire. (No, I can’t work out the connection between Screen Yorkshire and mobile apps either, but it was good of SY to cough up for the coffee and biscuits.)

I went along to have a look, and I *might* have been a bit rude in the backchannel. It’s not that I think Vodafone are doing a *bad* job – it’s just that I think it’s impossible for them to do a good one.

Voda’s first problem is that Apple have pretty much eaten their lunch as far as mobile application mindshare is concerned. There’s a reason why you don’t hear Tesco shouting about their new app for the Samsung H1 – it’s because they’re busy building apps for the iPhone. That might change, it might not – but there’s a hell of a mountain to climb right now.

The other problem that Voda have got is that the core 360 offering is simply a mashup of access to largely existing services. It’s a single consolidated address book, a single view of various social networks, maps, basic photo sharing, a music store, a web portal and an app store.

The fundamental issue for the networks is that the richer the devices and online experiences become, the more commoditised the network services get. If all I’m interested in accessing while I’m mobile is Facebook and Twitter, then I really don’t care about the network so long as it’s fast and reliable.

I’m a classic case in point – I use an iPhone, and switched from O2 to Orange because of the flakiness of the O2 network. I have no loyalty to Orange whatsoever – all my content is on the device, which can be ported from network to network as I see fit. If and when Orange start to piss me off through cost or reliability, I’ll move – and there’s really not an awful lot they can do about short of lock me in with contracts.

What Voda are attempting to do is interpose themself between me and the services I want to interact with. What 360 doesn’t seem to be about is “hey, come and use this cool new social network brought to you by Vodafone”. The only network in town is Facebook – there’s really no point in even trying to complete with it – so all Voda can do is try to graft on a funky access layer.

This all looks and smells something like the “walled gardens” that the network operators built of old. Rather than allowing unfettered access to all that the web could offer, chosen bits were carefully selected and presented to customers in a bounded environment. And rather than allowing access to “open” services like Twitter and Facebook and email, interaction had to take place within the confines of the operator’s webmail service.

The obvious problem with this is that the web moves far, far faster than any network product manager can, and customers vote with their feet when they find that they can’t go where they want. Once the first network caved and allowed access to the whole of the web, the others had to fall into line. And any value that *might* have existed in the walled garden was instantly lost. Back to being a dumb pipe again.

Ultimately, I can’t see a way that Vodafone – or any other network – can stem this tide. They’re doomed to become ISPs in the sky. For all that the likes of Talk Talk and BT and Virgin would like to *think* that they’ve got customer loyalty for their ISP services, they really know deep down that internet connectivity is commoditised and it’s the other services, such as bundled phone lines, that create the loyalty.

[As a sidenote, I'm an exception to this - I'm a Zen customer because they're a) reasonably priced; b) technically knowledgeable and c) sensible about things like Phorm and deep packet inspection. But I'm a geek, and I'm one of an incredibly small market. And even I've got my limits - if Virgin ever get around to running fibre past my front door, I'd be sorely tempted.]

One possible way of reacting would be to do a reverse Apple – offer some compelling devices that are exclusive to Vodafone only. The difficulty there is that Voda don’t have a device business, so they’re dependent on the OEM market. OEM manufacturers are unlikely to be interested in serving a single network only because it’s not a big enough market – unless they’re Apple, in which case they have the networks’ collective cojones in a vice and can extract revenues for the privilege of supplying the hardware.

And in any case, building those compelling devices is really, really, really hard – as Nokia are finding as their market share dwindles.

Overall, I can’t fault Vodafone for *trying* to do something about this. It’s just that I’m not sure that there’s anything they *can* do – mobile bandwidth is destined to become a commodity like fixed bandwidth has regardless of how hard they try to stem the tide. And it’s going to take them and their brand with it.

Here are some numbers relating to Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, courtesy of the Home Office.

There have been 200,444 stop-and-searches in England, Wales and Scotland in 2009.

As a result of those searches, 965 arrests were made.   That’s 0.5% of the searches made – or, if you want it another way, 1 arrest per 208 searches.

Arrests don’t necessarily lead to charges, though.  I can’t find any figures to show how many charges arose from those S.44-related arrests, but the Home Office figures do tell us that there were 24 charges relating to terrorism legislation overall.

So let’s be generous, and assume that every charge arose as a result of a S.44 stop.  In practice, this isn’t the case, so the numbers will only get worse – but what the hell, why should common sense intrude on this exercise?  It doesn’t feature anywhere else, after all.

24 terrorism-related charges is a mere 0.01% of searches.  Or 1 terrorism-related charge per 8,351 searches.

But wait – just because you’re charged, doesn’t mean you’ll be prosecuted.  The police lay charges, but the Crown Prosecution Service decide whether to prosecute them. Only 12 of those 24 people charged were actually tried, which is 0.006 of the original searches, or 1 prosecution per 16,703 S.44 searches.

And one of those prosecutions failed, so we’ve got 11 convictions – 0.006%, or 1 conviction per 18,222 searches.

OK, now let’s play with some really made-up numbers.

Let’s assume that your average S.44 search takes 10 minutes.  I’ve never been stopped, but from what I’ve seen there’s a lot of paperwork involved so 10 minutes seems reasonable.   That’s 2,004,440 minutes, or 33,407 hours.

And I’ve never seen a search carried out by less than 2 police officers and 1 searchee, so we’re talking 100,221 man-hours in total – or 11.44 person-years if you prefer it like that.

Which works out at almost exactly one person-year of searches per conviction.   Assuming the two were related in the first place, of course – which they’re not.

I can’t put it any better than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration speech:

First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Don’t have nightmares.

William Heath has put up a post called “What the smart government IT supplier needs to say in 12 weeks’ time“. I started a comment there which grew to the size of a post, so I figured I might as well put it up here as well.

He asks the question:

“Now: here’s the crux. Britain’s new post-election government may be pretty hostile to its IT suppliers. Whichever colour it is it faces the same problems, but let us assume for sake of argument it is Conservative.

Relations have not improved since the unseemly spat between Intellect and David Davies over ID System contracts. Big IT suppliers and their big bills are definitely seen as “part of the problem” in Tory HQ, as is the trade association, and an ineffectual (overpromoted/overpaid) CIO culture and the excessively big, out-of control IT projects they have cooked up.

What is a smart government IT supplier to do in this situation?”

I suspect that the big IT houses are going to be having more and more conversations with people like James Gardner, a former banker who is now Chief Technology Officer at the Department for Work and Pensions.

Earlier this month he posted about his experiences of spending a week in a Job Centre somewhere in the Rust Belt of Scotland.

Apologies for quoting from his post at length, but I think this is a significant illustration of a mind shift taking place:

“But here is another thing I’ve found in this Job Centre, and it is something I’m not surprised about.

Staff build their own stuff to get around the limitations of systems we provide. There are Excel based spreadsheets which are used for diary management (“oh, I can’t have this open too long, otherwise no-one else will be able to make appointments”). There is email based workflow, where each step is a new inbox that gets manually monitored. And there’s any number of self-made data capturing things that are used for statistics and business reporting.

And all of it is stitched together with another technology: paper. They create their own forms, and their own paper based systems in order to supplement their jobs.

Consequently, the work is processed in a highly efficient way. I’d make a guess that each JobCentre does things slightly differently, depending on how good their custom additions to each of our centrally provided processes are.

If there was ever proof needed that decentralisation of the core is a good thing, then I’ve been immersed in it for the week so far.

I wonder what would happen if we put the appropriate end-user computing tools in the hands of these people and said “design the perfect Job Centre system”. My guess would be something good.”

Having been involved in the peripheries of Big Projects in the past, I’ve often wondered if the reason that they fail is linked to their sheer size and the capacity of an ordinary human being to cope with the scale.

Beyond a certain size, it seems that the probability of success by any definition tends to zero, and no amount of tinkering with the political complexions or terminology or methodology-of-the-month will change that.

At some point in history, the processes that cause these problematic systems to be created in the first place either didn’t exist, or were paper-based. That suggests a couple of questions.

Perhaps if the processes didn’t exist before IT, they can’t exist after IT – because they’re too large and complex to be administered in the first place.

And maybe moving from paper to digital processes doesn’t actually increase efficiency once you account for the eleventy-billion pound cost of the digital process itself.

Sure, there’s a superficial improvement by virtue of being able to call up a record on the screen rather than retrieve it from a shelf somewhere – but the true cost of the operation is a lot greater than the immediately-apparent interaction would suggest.

I spent half an hour yesterday trying to update a gas bill online, and failing because the British Gas system didn’t like the combination of address and name on the account. Talking (eventually) to a call centre agent, it turns out that this is a routine problem for them.

Viewed simplistically, the online process is a Good Thing, because it’s more (apparently) efficient. But viewed holistically, it’s a disaster, because it’s creating additional work for both customer AND organisation. The issue is that the process won’t ever be seen holistically, because the organisation isn’t taking into account my contribution.

What all this suggests – it’s just my gut feel, I’ve no empirical evidence to back this up other than a hunch – is that the days of the monumentally collossal top-down design is over, simply because they’re too expensive and too complex to work.

That the future is more likely to consist of patchworks of systems – and a realisation that apparent inefficiencies aren’t actually curable without spending more time and money than was wasted in the first place.

Another day, another Daily Mail-esque panic about how social networking is causing the downfall of modern society as we know it. This time it’s pleaserobme.com, a site that scrapes location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla and publicises the fact that you’re – shock, horror – not at home.

It’s a clever idea, but it does of course rely on a certain amount of coding skill to be able to set it up in the first place.

So, in the spirit of opening the web to wider participation, I’m putting *my* method of figuring out which house is worth robbing into the public domain. No copyright, no patents, fully Creative Commonsed for your remixing pleasure of this simple four-step process.

Drive or walk around your intended target area during the hours of darkness, and make careful note of houses with cars parked outside.

Step Two.

Return the following day during office hours, and carefully note the location of those houses which no longer have cars parked outside.

Step Three.

Break into those houses which are sans-car – the owners are likely to be out.

Step Four.

Profit!

Clearly the ease with which I – and you, with a little training and practice – can detect which houses are potentially empty is a serious threat to the cohesion of modern society, so I fully expect that insurance companies will react accordingly. I’m looking forward to reading the press releases which mutter darkly about how people who have the temerity to park their cars outside their houses will see their insurance premiums rise to counter this threat.

And no doubt the Daily Mail will start a campaign to ban the use of non-garage parking – isn’t it better to be safe than sorry, after all?

Unfortunately this is just another demonstration of how “internet” somehow gets equated with “new” when it comes to potential risks. The additional risk posed to your belongings by posting your whereabouts on Gowalla is so small as to be impossible to calculate, however much the actuaries would love to try. If we stopped to contemplate every risk of this type, we’d cower in corners and never go anywhere – let alone multiplying them by the bogeyman factor of teh Interwebs.

It’s lazy journalism at best, and lazy thinking if you *do* take it too seriously.

Oh, and if you are planning on using my Gowalla checkins to work out when you can pop round to relieve me of my belongings, there’s a couple of things you should bear in mind. Firstly, just because I’m out it doesn’t necessarily follow that my house is empty. And secondly, be sure to introduce yourself to my large, snarly and (potentially) bitey dog while you’re round…

When the Apple iPad finally gets released in the UK, I’m going to buy two of them.

The first one is going to get used for iPaddy-type stuff, whatever that turns out to be. It’ll be for browsing, and playing games, and reading ebooks and whatever else comes its way. I’ll probably use that as the device that I have a go at writing apps for.

The second one is going to get velcroed to the fridge door.

Insofar as our family has a central, physical point, it’s the fridge. That’s where the letters from school about trips get magnetted to; it’s where the shopping list lives; it’s where the kids write rude messages to each other with the word magnets; and it’s where the family calendar (if we’d got around to replacing it this year) would be.

The problem is that I can’t get to the fridge when I’m out of the house, and I can’t sync it to a device that I can carry around with me. And writing down that we need more baked beans is only half-way to solving the lack-of-baked-beans problem – surely it would be more efficient if I could drop more beans into the shopping basket as soon as I’ve opened the last tin?

I’ve toyed with the idea of sticking a cheap netbook to my fridge – but that would be awkward to operate because whichever flavour of Linux it would run, it would still be keyboard-and-mouse driven. The iPad format changes that, because it’s designed for touchscreen operation from the ground up.

It’s an expensive option, for sure – although given that people seem to see the need for flat-screen TVs that fold underneath fitted cupboards, I’m not sure it’s an extravagant one.

[Incidentally, if you want an illustration of everything that's wrong with the marketing of consumer electronics and white goods, try punching the product name - LG GRD-267DTU - of this LG fridge into their website.  Utter, utter fail.]

Initially, I can see a whole series of uses based around the “standard” apps. It’ll be the access point for shared Google calendars; notes that would otherwise get scribbled onto post-its; and quick access to things like when the next bus from the stop up the road is due.

But beyond that, it’s easy to see apps becoming “localised” to the kitchen environment. Ocado already have an iPhone app, so having an iPad version should be a no-brainer. Hook the iPad up to a barcode reader – or use the front-facing camera that’s supposed to be along in the next iteration – and you could swipe the tin of beans as it comes out of the cupboard and have it added to the shopping list automatically. Could Ocado take things one step further, and book a delivery slot based on when my Google calendar says we’ll be around to receive the delivery?

This touches on one of the reasons why I think much of the disappointment around the iPad was misplaced. It’s the first iteration of something. The first iteration of the iPhone was basic in the extreme compared to where it is now – no 3rd-party apps, no GPS, no cut-and-paste and so on. But it was the catalyst for an ecosystem of applications which have completely changed the perception of the device. I doubt anyone would have considered how the augmented reality uses would have panned out back in 2007. What gives the iPad – and the other devices that must surely follow it – such potential, is the way in which it’s going to be able break out of what we consider to be the “natural” applications for computing devices.

Sitting around chatting with @erica_jane_mp at the Sheffield Geekup last week, we got talking about data visualisation – or rather what comes *after* visualisation.

Incoming rant: This was partly born out of one of my hobbyhorses – that we’ve done pretty much everything it’s possible to do with a screen and a keyboard by now.  Don’t get me wrong, jQuery and HTML5 and so on are really exciting and cool tools – but they’re stuck in a desktop paradigm that hasn’t changed significantly in the last 30 years.

The elements to liberate us from this are starting to come together – we’ve got computing devices small enough that an entire fully-functional Unix machine can be compressed to the size of an iPhone.   The battery will last for hours at a time.  The screen is touch-sensitive, and uses intuitive gestures rather than abstract concepts like menus.  And we’ve (almost) got ubiquitous connectivity with 3G and wireless.

So to just concentrate on every-more subtle refinements of the desktop metaphor seems – well, just like a wast of an opportunity, really.  Rant over.

Back to visualisation, or what comes after.

Years ago, I spent some time working for what was then British Nuclear Fuels, at the Sellafield plant.   One of the risks of working with fissile materials is that they can go critical if they’re allowed to concentrate in particular ways – and when that happens, vast amounts of radiation is released, and it’s generally a bad idea to be in the vicinity.

So all the buildings which handle fissile materials have criticality alarms, which will alert the occupants and allow them to Get The Hell Out Of There.  You’d expect sirens and klaxons and flashing lights – but the main criticality alarm is completely different.  It’s a background ‘tick’, which is constantly  broadcast over the PA system in the building at about 1 ‘click’ every 2 seconds.

If there’s an incident – or the alarm system goes down for any reason, the tick stops.

The counter-intuitive part of this is that you’d think that it would be either incredibly annoying because it’s constantly present; or that you’d end up tuning it out and ignoring it, so wouldn’t notice an alarm in the first place.  But in fact, the opposite is true.  When the tick is interrupted for PA announcements, there can be a pause of up to 2 seconds before the alarm starts after the announcement finishes.   And I can vividly remember people pausing and looking around, waiting for it to start again – because 2 seconds is a VERY long time to wait for something THAT important.  You become aware of the absence almost subconsciously, and very quickly.

All of which got me wondering about how you could apply this to visualisation.

I sometimes use a piece of software called ChatterBlocker – it plays a series of noise tracks to block out ambient noise, sounds like running water, waves, conversation murmours and so on.  It’s loud enough to cover distractions, but not so loud or intrusive that you can’t concentrate.

If the volume of individual tracks was hooked up to incoming data feeds, you’d have a sound source where the mix of sounds was an indication of the data trends.  If the sound of rain increased, it could mean that a market was falling; or a gradual rise in conversation could be triggered by unread emails or DMs building up.

The point is that you don’t have to be fully-aware of what’s going on – it’s completely peripheral.  No bouncing Dock icons or unread counts – leaving visual cues for the task in hand.

For that matter, I can’t see why other senses couldn’t work.  A blast of cold air down the back of the neck when an email from your lands, or a chair that tilted slowly forward over the course of the day until it tipped you out just before you needed to head off to catch that train.   And smell is incredibly evocative – a quick whiff of a significant other’s perfume/aftershave instead of a ring tone?

And then there’s haptic feedback – a task on your iPhone home screen that had to be pushed really hard to dismiss it, because it’s now become really urgent?  The list is endless.

Anyway, this is something that can sit on my someday list for now.   Maybe it should decay and start to whiff after a while as a reminder?

[Cross-posted from the Headshift blog]

The great and the good of social media (as well as the rest of us) descended on the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London yesterday for Reboot Britain, a 1-day conference run by NESTA looking at “how the promise of our new digital age can tackle the challenges we face as a country”

There have been a number of conferences and gatherings happened over the last few months that have had this theme, but this was the largest and most “official” so far. The participants were mixed – the usual social media suspects, non-profits, public sector and the hackers and the enthusiasts.   Speakers ranged from from the official spokespeople such as Martha Lane-Fox the Digital Inclusion “czar”, Shadow Cabinet members through to the doers such as School of Everything’s Paul Miller and the celebrity experts in the form of Howard Rheingold.

If there was a theme, it was that something’s gone fundamentally wrong with the way we operate many aspects of our society, and digital technology gives us an opportunity to fix some of these.   The opportunity was partially summed-up by Jonathan Kestenbaum of NESTA when he talked about there being no shortage of ingenuity in the UK, but that it’s now about moving this “from the marginal to the mainstream”.

The opening keynote was delivered by the Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt.  He’s the very model of a modern Tory (shadow) minister, straight from Conservative central casting – no notes, no podium and no tie.   He’s got a good line in expenses-related self-deprecation, which is probably all that stands between most politicians and their heads on spikes over Westminster Bridge these days, and played to the audience with references to the IT Crowd sitcom and “rebooting PCs” jokes.

His opener was that the current cynicism with politics is linked to the reach of technology – as organisations such as MySociety shine a bright light into some fairly murky corners, the information that comes into view shows the political processes for the corrupt and dysfunctional mess that they are.   Politics is now stuck in the old model of “getting on with it for now and get reelected every 4 years”.

The soundbite phrase he used was “collaborative individualism”, and there was a grab-bag of use cases – Wikipedia’s virtually instantaneous response to the 7/7 London bombings as an example of wikinomics in action. The flip side to collaborative individualism is nanny-state paternalism – I’m not sure I entirely agree with that distinction – to me, conservatism can be just as paternalistic – but it is at least distinct from the tendency of the current government to firehose public money at grandiose and badly defined mega-projects while staring starry-eyed at US corporate consultancies.

He also made a point that hadn’t really occurred to me before – whereas in the US, the opportunities offered by digital media were embraced by the centre left (or at least as left as the Obama administration gets), whereas in the UK it’s been taken up by the centre right.  He explained this as being down to the instinctive Tory like of decentralisation, and the way that the web can be seen as a fairly pure expression of evolution in action – good ideas get traction and services succeed, while poor ones don’t get the traffic and wither and die.  Again, that strikes me as a simplification, particularly when you consider public services where the concept of “competition” simply doesn’t apply – but it does at least give us examples of what works and what doesn’t that can be used as the basis for more successful online public services.

And there were a few semi-concrete ideas thrown out, such as making details of all expenditure of more than £25,000 freely available online – although that does raise the question of how many transactions will come in at exactly £24,999.99 once that goes live, of course…

What was most interesting, given where we are in the electoral cycle, was the complete lack of any Government representation at the conference – unless you count Tom Watson MP who was there in his capacity as a backbencher (or perhaps as the “Member for the Internet”?)  I supposed you could argue that this is down to the Government being busy – well, Governing – but it did strike me that here was a missed opportunity for a practical demonstration of the “listening” that is supposed to be happening.  Perhaps if the conference had cost 4 figures and delegates got bags emblazoned with large US corporate logos as freebies, we’d have seen a few more Government representatives?

Video of the speakers and the subsequent conversations are being curated at the Reboot Britain site, and there’s also a conference wiki where (hopefully) more follow-up will take place.

<crossposted from the Headshift blog>

I’m a regular rail traveller on the East Coast Main Line, so when news of “innovative customer management technology” being deployed by operator National Express arrived in my inbox, I had to take a look.

According to the press-release-masquerading-as-a-news-article in Computing magazine,

“Maintaining passenger loyalty while reducing operational costs has become an urgent priority…

…Consequently National Express is introducing an innovative text message analysis service. the new system captures passenger feedback by SMS, providing executives with a realtime view of company performance and service requirements.”

The idea is that you send a text message to a shortcode number moaning about the overflowing toilets, and something happens. Somewhere. Maybe.

Or then again, it might not.

Cue wavy lines, as we’re transported back to 1995.

It’s easy to be snarky – National Express East Coast are facing real problems after they massively overbid for the privilege of running the service, and passenger numbers have gone through the floor as a result of the recession.   So they definitely need to do something to improve their customer service, stem the losses, and avoid the humiliation of handing back what’s regarded as Britain’s premier rail route.

But this is such a classically “dumb management” idea it deserves to be called out – NXEC seem to have missed out on the last few years and the idea that THEY need to go where their customers are, and not the other way around.

One of the best things about NXEC’s service is their on-board wifi service – it’s got wrinkles, but being able to get online onboard is (still) a real value-add.   Which should have perhaps given NXEC a clue as to where they needed to be concentrating their efforts.

When things go wrong, their customers are online. They’re blogging about their journey from hell, or Twittering, or updating their Facebook statuses.   They’re having conversations – not with the company, but with their networks of friends and aquaintences. And they’re having those conversations outside of NXEC’s area of influence – not texting faceless automatic systems.

So it’s not about the technology, although that’s a dumb choice. It’s about the approach itself – NXEC seem to be stuck in a peculiarly 20th century mindset that hasn’t realised that their customers are everywhere that the company is not.

In the spirit of offering some criticism that’s at least trying to be constructive, here’s a few things that NXEC could be doing.   They could be monitoring Twitter for mentions about their service, and tweeting back with information and updates. They could be active on Facebook, offering apologies and explanations when they find tales of woe.   And they could offer something other than a faceless “email us” link on their website (and for that matter, they could offer a website that plays nicely with mobiles and loads quickly enough to be useful with 3G dongles.)

I’m going to hazard a guess that all of these would be cheaper – and far more effective in the long run – than the “investment” which has been thrown at SMS.   After all, a copy of the Cluetrain manifesto runs to £5 on Amazon, so it’s not like these ideas are hard to come by.

At the UK Government Bar Camp last weekend, there was a lot of discussion in many of the sessions about public sector procurement – particularly IT procurement.

Basically, it’s broken.

I was acutely aware of this before I turned up at the barcamp, because I’d spend a significant proportion of the previous week wrestling with a full-on OJEU-style procurement exercise.   After collating the last 3 years’-worth of financial results, the company directors’ inside leg measurements,  and writing 2-page CVs for everyone who may or may not be involved in the project should we be awarded the contract, we basically ended up have to provide a detailed specification of a system that hasn’t been designed yet.

It’s daft.  We think it’s daft, the potential client thinks it’s daft, but we’ve got to do it Because It’s The Rules.

But if we look at why the rules exist in the first place, we find that they’re basically there to make sure that the contract doesn’t go to the Chief Executive’s brother-in-law.   The rules are there to create a so-called level playing field, and ensure rigorous transparency around the procurement process.

The fact that the number of contracts that DO get awarded to the Chief Executive’s brother-in-law are vanishingly small seems to have been overlooked – so to prevent a marginal risk of corrupt practices, we’ve created a situation where the results of procurement exercises are massively skewed towards large organisations with the resources and the bureaucracy to jump through these hoops.   If the first threshold test is having been in business for three years, then there’s no way for an innovative start-up to get involved short of selling their souls out to the Big Consultancies.

This would be fine, if the large organisations then went on to do a good job.  But as we’ve seen time and time again, as the size of the project increases towards infinity, the probability of it going horribly wrong approaches unity.   The big consultancies have become bywords for repeating the same problems over and over again.  And what’s more, they’re selling the same old solutions – the ones which arguably have contributed to getting us into the current mess in the first place.

Is there a solution to the problem?   The discussions at GovBarCamp suggested that the problem’s clear, but were less conclusive about the solution.   Part of the issue is that the current system was created with the best of intentions, but has had unanticipated consequences.   There are signs of change, though.  We geeky types like nothing better than giggling at some of the portal-style ineptitude that has been the Direct.gov.uk site over the years, but then over the course of three days they’ve hacked together an “is my kids’ school closed” site which would probably have taken at least a year and six figures if it had gone through “traditional channels”.   But for every Schoolclosure.org.uk, there’s another incipient car crash of a project travelling towards us, whether it’s medical records or MTAS or the National Identity Register.

Perhaps the recession will be a catalyst for change – after bailing out the banks, there isn’t the money left to waste on huge projects.  What money does remain is going to need to go further than it ever did before.

[cross-posted from the Headshift blog]