uk government

The ethics of contact tracing

Peter Cripps architecture, comment , , ,

After a much publicised “U-turn” the UK government has decided to change the architecture of its coronavirus contact tracing system and to embrace the one based on the interfaces being provided by Apple and Google. The inevitable cries of a government that does not know what it is doing, we told you it wouldn’t work and this means we have wasted valuable time in building a system that would help protect UK citizens have ensued. At times like these it’s often difficult to get to the facts and understand where the problems actually lie. Let’s try and unearth some facts and understand the options for the design of a contact tracing app.

Any good approach to designing a system such as contact tracing should, you would hope, start with the requirements. I have no government inside knowledge and it’s not immediately apparent from online searches what the UK governments exact and actual requirements were. However as this article highlights you would expect that a contact tracing system would need to “involve apps, reporting channels, proximity-based communication technology and monitoring through personal items such as ID badges, phones and computers.” You might also expect it to involve cooperation with local health service departments. Whether or not there is also a requirement to collate data in some centralised repository so that epidemiologists, without knowing the nature of the contact, can build a model of contacts to see if they are serious spreaders or those who have tested positive yet are asymptomatic, at least for the UK, is not clear. Whilst it would seem perfectly reasonable to want the system to do that, this is a different use case to the one of contact tracing. One might assume that because the UK government was proposing a centralised database for tracking data this latter use case was also to be handled by the system.

Whilst different countries are going to have different requirements for contact tracing one would hope that for any democratically run country a minimum set of requirements (i.e. privacy, anonymity, transparency and verifiability, no central repository and minimal data collection) would be implemented.

The approach to contact tracing developed by Google and Apple (the two largest providers of mobile phone operating systems) was published in April of this year with the detail of the design being made available in four technical papers. Included as part of this document set were some frequently asked questions where the details of how the system would work were explained using the eponymous Alice and Bob notation. Here is a summary.

  1. Alice and Bob don’t know each other but happen to have a lengthy conversation sitting a few feet apart on a park bench. They both have a contact tracing app installed on their phones which exchange random Bluetooth identifiers with each other. These identifiers change frequently.
  2. Alice continues her day unaware that Bob had recently contracted Covid-19.
  3. Bob feels ill and gets tested for Covid-19. His test results are positive and he enters his result into his phone. With Bob’s consent his phone uploads the last 14 days of keys stored on his phone to a server.
  4. Alice’s phone periodically downloads the Bluetooth beacon keys of everyone who has tested positive for Covid-19 in her immediate vicinity. A match is found with Bob’s randomly generated Bluetooth identifier.
  5. Alice sees a notification on her phone warning her she has recently come into contact with someone who has tested positive with Covid-19. What Alice needs to do next is decided by her public health authority and will be provided in their version of the contact tracing app.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this use case:

  1. Alice and Bob both have to make an explicit choice to turn on the contact tracing app.
  2. Neither Alice or Bob’s names are ever revealed, either between themselves or to the app provider or health authority.
  3. No location data is collected. The system only knows that two identifiers have previously been within range of each other.
  4. Google and Apple say that the Bluetooth identifiers change every 10-20 minutes, to help prevent tracking and that they will disable the exposure notification system on a regional basis when it is no longer needed.
  5. Health authorities of any other third parties do not receive any data from the app.

Another point to note is that initially this solution has been released via application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow customised contact tracing apps from public health authorities to work across Android and iOS devices. Maintaining user privacy seems to have been a key non-functional requirement of the design. The apps are made available from the public health authorities via the respective Apple and Google app stores. A second phase has also been announced whereby the capability will be embedded at the operating system level meaning no app has to be installed but users still have to opt into using the capability. If a user is notified she has been in contact with someone with Covid-19 and has not already downloaded an official public health authority app they will be prompted to do so and advised on next steps. Only public health authorities will have access to this technology and their apps must meet specific criteria around privacy, security, and data control as mandated by Apple and Google.

So why would Google and Apple choose to implement its contact tracing app in this way which would seem to be putting privacy ahead of efficacy? More importantly why should Google and Apple get to dictate how countries should do contact tracing?

Clearly one major driver from both companies is that of security and privacy. Post-Snowden we know just how easy it has been for government security agencies (i.e. the US National Security Agency and UK’s Government Communications Headquarters) to get access to supposedly private data. Trust in central government is at an all time low and it is hardly surprising that the corporate world is stepping in to announce that they were the good guys all along and you can trust us with your data.

Another legitimate reason is also that during the coronavirus pandemic we have all had our ability to travel even locally, never mind nationally or globally, severely restricted. Implementing an approach that is supported at the operating system level means that it should be easier to make the app compatible with other countries’ counterparts, which are based on the same system therefore making it safer for people to begin travelling internationally again.

The real problem, at least as far as the UK has been concerned, is that the government has been woefully slow in implementing a rigorous and scaleable contact tracing system. It seems as though they may have been looking at an app-based approach to be the silver bullet that would solve all of their problems – no matter how poorly identified these are. Realistically that was never going to happen, even if the system had worked perfectly. The UK is not China and could never impose an app based contact tracing system on its populace, could it? Lessons from Singapore, where contact tracing has been in place for some time, are that the apps do not perform as required and other more intrusive measures are needed to make them effective.

There will now be the usual blame game between government, the press, and industry, no doubt resulting in the inevitable government enquiry into what went wrong. This will report back after several months, if not years, of deliberation. Blame will be officially apportioned, maybe a few junior minister heads will roll, if they have not already moved on, but meanwhile the trust that people have in their leaders will be chipped away a little more.

More seriously however, will we have ended up, by default, putting more trust into the powerful corporations of Silicon Valley some of whom not only have greater valuations than many countries GDP but are also allegedly practising anti-competitive behaviour?

Update: 21st June 2020

Updated to include link to Apple’s anti-trust case.

Cummings needs data scientists, economists and physicists (oh, and weirdos)

Peter Cripps comment , , ,

Dominic Cummings
Dominic Cummings – Image Copyright Business Insider Australia

To answer my (rhetorical) question in this post I think it’s been pretty much confirmed since the election that Dominic Cummings is, in equal measures, the most influential, disruptive, powerful and dangerous man in British politics right now. He has certainly set the cat amongst the pigeons in this blog post where he has effectively by-passed the civil service recruitment process by advertising for people to join his ever growing team of SPAD’s (special advisors). Cummings is looking for data scientists, project managers, policy experts and assorted weirdos to join his team. (Interestingly today we hear that the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller has applied for the job believing he qualifies because of the super-talented weirdo aspect of the job spec.)

Cummings is famed for his wide reaching reading tastes and the job spec also cites a number of scientific papers potential applicants “will be considering”. The papers mentioned are broadly in the areas of complex systems and the use of maths and statistics in forecasting which give an inkling into the kind of problems Cummings sees as those that need to be ‘fixed’ in the civil service as well as the government at large (including the assertion that “Brexit requires many large changes in policy and in the structure of decision-making”).

Like many of his posts, this particular one tends to ramble and also be contradictory. In one paragraph he’s saying that you “do not need a PhD” but then in the very next one saying you  “must have exceptional academic qualifications from one of the world’s best universities with a PhD or MSc in maths or physics.”

Cummings also returns to one of his favourite topics which is that of the failure of projects – mega projects in particular – and presumably those that governments tend to initiate and not complete on time or to budget (or at all). He’s an admirer of some of the huge project successes of yesteryear such as The Manhattan Project (1940s), ICBMs (1950s) and Apollo (1960s) but reckons that since then the Pentagon has “systematically de-programmed itself from more effective approaches to less effective approaches from the mid-1960s, in the name of ‘efficiency’.” Certainly the UK government is no stranger to some spectacular project failures itself both in the past and present (HS2 and Crossrail being two more contemporary examples of not so much failures but certainly massive cost overruns).

However as John Naughton points out here  “these inspirational projects have some interesting things in common: no ‘politics’, no bureaucratic processes and no legal niceties. Which is exactly how Cummings likes things to be.” Let’s face it both Crossrail and HS2 would be a doddle of only you could do away with all those pesky planning proposals and environmental impact assessments you have to do and just move people out of the way quickly – sort of how they do things in China maybe?

Cummings believes that now is the time to bring together the right set of people with a sufficient amount of cognitive diversity and work in Downing Street with him and other SPADs to start to address some of the wicked problems of government. One ‘lucky’ person will be his personal assistant, a role which he says will “involve a mix of very interesting work and lots of uninteresting trivia that makes my life easier which you won’t enjoy.” He goes on to say that in this role you “will not have weekday date nights, you will sacrifice many weekends — frankly it will hard having a boy/girlfriend at all. It will be exhausting but interesting and if you cut it you will be involved in things at the age of ~21 that most people never see.” That’s quite some sales pitch for a job!

What this so called job posting is really about though is another of Cummings abiding obsessions (which he often discusses in his blog) that the government in general, and civil service in particular (which he groups together as “SW1”), is basically not fit for purpose because it is scientifically and technologically illiterate as well as being staffed largely with Oxbridge humanities graduates. The posting is also a thinly veiled attempt at pushing the now somewhat outdated ‘move fast and break things” mantra of Silicon Valley. An approach that does not always play out well in government (Universal Credit anyone). I well remember my time working at the DWP (yes, as a consultant) where one of the civil servants with whom I was working said that the only problem with disruption in government IT was that it was likely to lead to riots on the streets if benefit payments were not paid on time. Sadly, Universal Credit has shown us that it’s not so much street riots that are caused but a demonstrable increase in demand for food banks. On average, 12 months after roll-out, food banks see a 52% increase in demand, compared to 13% in areas with Universal Credit for 3 months or less.

Cummings of course would say that the problem is not so much that disruption per se causes problems but rather the ineffective, stupid and incapable civil servants who plan and deploy such projects are at fault, hence the need for hiring the right ‘assorted weirdos’ who will bring new insights that fusty old civil servants cannot see. Whilst he may well be right that SW1 is lacking in deep technical experts as well as great project managers and ‘unusual’ economists he needs to realise that government transformation cannot succeed unless it is built on a sound strategy and good underlying architecture. Ideas are just thoughts floating in space until they can be transformed into actions that result in change which takes into account that the ‘products’ that governments deal with are people not software and hardware widgets.

This problem is far better articulated by Hannah Fry when she says that although maths has, and will continue to have, the capability to transform the world those who apply equations to human behaviour fall into two groups: “those who think numbers and data ultimately hold the answer to everything, and those who have the humility to realise they don’t.”

Possibly the last words should be left to Barack Obama who cautioned Silicon Valley’s leaders thus:

“The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences — setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio — then I think those suggestions are terrific. That’s not, by the way, to say that there aren’t huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it’s not inherently wrecked; it’s just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.”

Now I think that’s a man who shows true humility, something our current leaders (and their SPADs) could do with a little more of I think.

 

Is Dominic Cummings the Most Influential* Person in British Politics?

Peter Cripps Uncategorized , , , , , ,
Dominic Cummings. Photograph from parliament.tv

If you want to understand the likely trajectory of the new Conservative government you could do worse than study the blog posts of Dominic Cummings. In case you missed this announcement amongst all the cabinet reshuffling that happened last week, Cummings is to be Boris Johnson’s new “special adviser”.

*For what it’s worth I could equally have used any of the adjectives ‘disruptive’, ‘powerful’ or ‘dangerous’ here I think.

Cummings has had three previous significant advisory roles either in UK government or in support of political campaigns:

  • Campaign director at Business for Sterling (the campaign against the UK joining the Euro) between 1999 and 2002;
  • Special adviser to Michael Gove at the Deprtment for Education between 2010 and 2014;
  • Campaign Director Vote Leave between 2015 and 2016.

Much has already been written about Cummings, some of it more speculative and wishful thinking than factual I suspect, that you can find elsewhere (David Cameron was alleged to have called Cummings a “career psychopath“). What is far more interesting to me is what Cummings writes in his sometimes rambling blog posts, and what I focus on here.

In his capacity advising Gove at the DfE Cummings wrote a 240-page essay, Some thoughts on education and political priorities which was about transforming Britain into a “meritocratic technopolis”. Significantly during Gove’s tenure as education minister we saw far more emphasis on maths and grammar being taught from primary age (8-11) and teaching of ‘proper’ computer science in secondary schools (i.e. programming rather than how to use Microsoft Office products). Clearly his thoughts were being acted upon.

Given that his advise has been implemented before it does not seem unreasonable that a study of Cummings blog posts may give us some insight into what ideas we may see enacted by the current government. Here are a few of Cummings most significant thoughts from my reading of his blog. I have only included thoughts on his more recent posts, mainly those from his time in exile between the end of the Vote Leave campaign and now. Many of these build on previous posts anyway but more significantly are most relevant to what we are about to see happen in Johnsons new government. The name of the post is highlighted in italics and also contains a hyperlink to the actual post.

High performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, Michael Nielsen, Bret Victor, & ‘Seeing Rooms’

Cummings is very critical of the UK civil service, as well as government ministers, that he maintains do not make decisions based on facts and hard data but more often on intuition, feelings and inevitably their own biases and prejudices. In this post he suggests that ‘systems’ should be implemented to help run government. These would be things like:

  • Cognitive toolkits and AI that would support rational decision-making and help to decide what is possible as well as what is not (and why).
  • Prediction tournaments that could easily and cheaply be extended to consider ‘clusters’ of issues around themes like Brexit to improve policy and project management.
  • Red Teams and pre-mortems to help combat groupthink and “normal cognitive biases” . He advocates that Red Teams should work ‘above’ the Cabinet Office to ensure diversity of opinions, fight groupthink and other standard biases that make sure lessons are learned and government blunders avoided or at least minimised.
  • Seeing rooms that would replace the antiquated meeting spaces found in much of government (e.g. the Cabinet room) and use state of the art screens, IT and conference facilities to ensure better and more accurate decision making.

Two people mentioned often in this post by Cummings are Bret Victor and Michael Nielsen. Victor is a an interface designer, computer scientist, and electrical engineer who writes and talks on the future of technology. Nielsen is also a writer and computer scientist with an interest in neural networks and deep learning. The way Cummings immerses himself in fields outside of his area of expertise (he studied Ancient & Modern History at Oxford) and makes connections between different disciplines is itself instructive. Often the best ideas come from having such a cross-disciplinary approach to life without confining oneself to your particular comfort zone.

‘Systems’ thinking — ideas from the Apollo space programme on effective management and a possible ‘systems politics’

This post, published as a paper in February 2017, looks at what Cummings refers to as ‘mission critical’ political institutions” i.e. government departments with huge budgets, complex programs of work like HS2 (or Brexit) and those dealing with emergency situations such as terrorist incidents and wars. It looks at how disasters can (or could) be avoided by deploying “high performance man-machine teams” where the individuals involved are selected on the basis of their training and education as well “incentives”. The paper considers the development of new ideas about managing complex projects that were used by George Mueller to put men on the moon in 1969.

This quote sums up Cummings concerns with our current political institutions:

The project of rewiring institutions and national priorities is a ‘systems’ problem requiring a systems solution. Could we develop a systems politics that applies the unrecognised simplicities of effective action? The tale of George Mueller will be useful for all those thinking about how to improve government performance dramatically, reliably, and quantifiably.

The paper gives a potted history of systems engineering ideas and practices bringing in everyone from the military strategist John Boyd to the mathematician John von Neumann and along the way. Cummings is also fond of comparing the success of NASA’s mission to put a man on the moon and bring him safely home to the failure of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO) to even launch a rocket. The difference being (according to Cummings) that NASA’s success was due to “a managerial effort, no less prodigious than the technological one”.

Cummings core lessons for politics which he believes “could be applied to re-engineering political institutions such as Downing Street” are many and varied. but here are a few, which even after less than a week of Boris Johnsons government I think we are seeing being enacted. How that is happening are my italics in the below.

  • Organisation-wide orientation. Everybody in a large organisation must understand as much about the goals and plans as possible. The UK is leaving the EU on 31st October 2019.
  • There must be an overall approach in which the most important elements fit together, including in policy, management, and communications. Johnson has completely gutted May’s cabinet and everyone new onboard has allegedly been told they must be on message, tow the party line and vote with the government in any upcoming parliamentary votes.
  • You need a complex mix of centralisation and decentralisation.While overall vision, goals, and strategy usually comes from the top, it is vital that extreme decentralisation dominates operationally so that decisions are fast and unbureaucratic. Interesting that Johnsons first act as prime minister is to visit the regions (not Brussels) promising them various amounts of money presumably to do just this.
  • People and ideas are more important than technology. Computers and other technologies can help but Colonel Boyd’s dictum holds: people, ideas, technology — in that order. It is too early to see if this approach will be implemented. Certainly government does not have a good track record when it comes to implementing IT systems so it will be interesting to see if the ‘solution’ to the Irish backstop does end up being IT driven.

‘Expertise’, prediction and noise, from the NHS killing people to Brexit

What this post is about is probably best summed up by Cummings own words near the beginning of the article:

In SW1 (i.e. Whitehall) now, those at the apex of power practically never think in a serious way about the reasons for the endemic dysfunctional decision-making that constitutes most of their daily experience or how to change it. What looks like omnishambles to the public and high performers in technology or business is seen by Insiders, always implicitly and often explicitly, as ‘normal performance’. ‘Crises’ such as the collapse of Carillion or our farcical multi-decade multi-billion ‘aircraft carrier’ project occasionally provoke a few days of headlines but it’s very rare anything important changes in the underlying structures and there is no real reflection on system failure.

Although this post covers some of the same ground as previous ones it shows how Cummings ideas on how to tackle the key problems of government are beginning to coalesce, probably best summed up in the following:

One of the most powerful simplicities in all conflict (almost always unrecognised) is: ‘winning without fighting is the highest form of war’. If we approach the problem of government performance at the right level of generality then we have a chance to solve specific problems ‘without fighting’ — or, rather, without fighting nearly so much and the fighting will be more fruitful.

If you see the major problem of government as solving the wicked problem of Brexit it will be interesting to see how, and if, Cummings manages to tackle this particular issue. After all it has already led to two prime ministers resigning or being pushed out and even Boris Johnsons’ tenure is not guaranteed if he fails to deliver Brexit or calls an election that gains a greatly increased majority that allows him to push his ideas through.

The Digital Activist’s View

Few would argue that a government that based its decisions on data, more scientific methods and industry best practices around project and systems management would not be a good thing. However, using data to understand people and their needs is very different to using data to try and influence what people think, how they vote and the way they go about their daily lives. Something that Vote Leave (and by implication Cummings) have been accused of by proliferating fake new stories during the leave campaign. In short who is going to sit above the teams that position themselves above our decision makers?

One of Cummings pet hates is the whole Whitehall/civil service infrastructure. He sees it as being archaic and not fit for purpose and an organisation whose leaders come from a particular educational background and set of institutions that religiously follow the rules as well as outdated work practices no matter what. To quote Cummings from this paper:

The reason why Gove’s team got much more done than ANY insider thought was possible – including Cameron and the Perm Sec – was because we bent or broke the rules and focused very hard on a) replacing rubbish officials and bringing in people from outside and b) project management.

The danger here is that by bringing in some of the changes Cummings is advocating just risks replacing one set of biases/backgrounds with another. After all the industries that are spawning both the tools and techniques he is advocating (i.e. predominantly US West Coast tech companies) are hardly known for their gender/ethnic diversity or socially inclusive policies. They too tend to follow particular practices, some of which may work when running a startup business but less so when running a country. I remember being told myself when discussing ‘disruption’ with a civil servant in one of the UK’s large departments of state that the problem with disruption in government is that it can lead to rioting in the streets if it goes wrong.

There is also a concern that by focusing on the large, headline grabbing government departments (e.g. Cabinet Office, DWP, MoD etc) you miss some of the good work being done by lesser departments and agencies within them. I’m thinking of Ordnance Survey and HM Land Registry in particular (both currently part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and which I have direct experience of working with). The Ordnance Survey (which is classified as a ‘public corporation) has successfully mapped the UK for over 100 years and runs a thriving commercial business for its maps and mapping services. Similarly HM Land Registry has kept several trillion pounds worth of the nations land and property assets safe in digital storage for around 50 years and is looking at innovative ways of extending its services using technologies such as blockchain.

Sometimes when one’s entire working life is spent in the bubble that is Westminster it is easy to miss the innovative thinking that is going on outside. Often this is most successful when that thinking is being done by practitioners. For a good example of this see the work being done by the consultant neurologist Dr. Mark Wardle including this paper on using algorithms in healthcare.

If UK government really is as devoid of skills as Cummings is implying there is the danger they will try to ‘import’ skills by employing ever larger armies of consultants. This approach is fraught with danger as there is no guarantee the consultants will be as well read and immersed in the issues as Cummings hopes. The consultants will of course tell a good story but in my experience (i.e. as a consultant, not in government) unless they are well managed their performance is unlikely to be better than the people they are trying to replace. Cummings acknowledges this potential issue when he asks how we “distinguish between fields dominated by real expertise and those dominated by confident ‘experts’ who make bad predictions?“

Finally, do we really want Whitehall to become a department of USA Inc by climbing into bed with a country which, under the presidency of Trump, seems to be leaning ever more rightward? As part of any post-Brexit trade deal it is likely the US will be seeking a greater say in running not just our civil service but health service, schools and universities. All at a time when its tech companies seem to be playing an ever more intrusive part in our daily lives.

So what is the answer to the question that is the title of this post? As someone who trained as a scientist and has worked in software architecture and development all of my life I recognise how some of the practices Cummings advocates could, if implemented properly, lead to change for the better in UK government at this critical time in the nations history. However we need to realise that ultimately by following the ideas of one, or a small group of people, we run the risk of replacing one dogma with another. Dogma always has to be something we are prepared to rip up no matter where or who it comes from. Sometimes we have to depend on what the military strategist John Boyd (one of Cummings influences) calls “intuitive competence” in order to deal with the novelty that permeates human life.

I also think that a government run by technocrats will not necessarily lead to a better world. Something I think even Cummings hints at when he says:

A very interesting comment that I have heard from some of the most important scientists involved in the creation of advanced technologies is that ‘artists see things first’ — that is, artists glimpse possibilities before most technologists and long before most businessmen and politicians.

At the time of writing Boris Johnsons’ government is barely one week old. All we are seeing for now are the headline grabbing statements and sound bites. Behind the scenes though we can be sure that Cummings and his team of advisers are doing much string pulling and arm bending of ministers and civil servants alike. We shall soon see not just what the outcomes of this are, but how long Boris Johnson survives.

Getting Started with Blockchain

Peter Cripps education , , , , , , , ,

In an earlier post I discussed the UK government report on distributed ledger technology (AKA ‘blockchain‘) and how the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Mark Walport, was doing the rounds advocating the use of blockchain for a variety of (government) services.

Blockchain is a shared, trusted, public ledger that everyone can inspect, but which no single user controls. The participants in a blockchain system collectively keep the ledger up to date: it can be amended only according to strict rules and by general agreement. For a quick introduction to blockchain this article in the Economist is a pretty good place to start.

Blockchains are going to be useful wherever there is a need for a trustworthy record, something which is pretty vital for transactions of all sorts whether it be in banking, for legal documents or for registries of things like land or high value art works etc. Startups such as Stampery are looking to use blockchain technology to provide low cost certification services. Blockchain is not just for pure startups however. Twenty-five banks are part of the blockchain company, called R3 CEV, which aims to develop common standards around this technology. R3 CEV’s Head of Technology is Richard Gendal Brown an ex-colleague from IBM.

IBM recently announced that, together with Intel, J.P. Morgan and several large banks, it was joining forces to create the Open Ledger Project with the Linux Foundation, with the goal of re-imagining supply chains, contracts and other ways information about ownership and value are exchanged in a digital economy.

As part of this IBM is creating some great tools, using its Bluemix platform, to get developers up and running on the use of blockchain technology. If you have a Bluemix account you can quickly deploy some applications and study the source code on GitHub to see how to start making use of blockchain APIs.

This service is intended for developers who consider themselves early adopters and want to get involved with IBM’s approach to business networks that maintain, secure and share a replicated ledger using blockchain technology. It shows how you can:

  • Deploy and invoke simple transactions to test out IBM’s approach to blockchain technology.
  • Learn and test out IBM’s novel contributions to the blockchain open source community, including the concept of confidential transactions, containerized code execution etc.

It provides some simple demo applications you can quickly deploy into Bluemix to play around with this technology.

Marbles
Marbles Running in IBM Bluemix

This service is not production ready. It is pre-alpha and intended for testing and experimentation only. There are additional security measures that still must be implemented before the service can be used to store any confidential data. That said it’s still a great way to learn about the use and potential for this technology.

 

Government as a Platform

Peter Cripps architecture, comment , , ,

The UK government, under the auspices of Francis Maude and his Cabinet Office colleagues, have instigated a fundamental rethink of how government does IT following the arrival of the coalition in May 2010. You can find a brief summary here of what has happened since then (and why).

One of the approaches that the Cabinet Office favours is the idea of services built on a shared core, otherwise known as Government as a Platform (GaaP). In the governments own words:

A platform provides essential technology infrastructure, including core applications that demonstrate the potential of the platform. Other organisations and developers can use the platform to innovate and build upon. The core platform provider enforces “rules of the road” (such as the open technical standards and processes to be used) to ensure consistency, and that applications based on the platform will work well together.

The UK government sees the adoption of platform based services as a way of breaking down the silos that have existed in governments, pretty GaaPmuch since the dawn of computing, as well as loosening the stranglehold it thinks the large IT vendors have on its IT departments. This is a picture from the Government Digital Service (GDS), part of the Cabinet Office, that shows how providing a platform layer, above the existing legacy (and siloed) applications, can help move towards GaaP.

In a paper on GaaP, Tim O’Reilly sets out a number of lessons learnt from previous (successful) platforms which are worth summarising here:

  1. Platforms must be built on open standards. Open standards foster innovation as they let anyone play more easily on the platform. “When the barriers to entry to a market are low, entrepreneurs are free to invent the future. When barriers are high, innovation moves elsewhere.”
  2. Don’t abuse your power as the provider of the platform. Platform providers must not abuse their privileged position or market power otherwise the platform will decline (usually because the platform provider has begun to compete with its developer ecosystem).
  3. Build a simple system and let it evolve. As John Gall wrote: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over beginning with a working simple system.”
  4. Design for participation. Participatory systems are often remarkably simple—they have to be, or they just don’t work. But when a system is designed from the ground up to consist of components developed by independent developers (in a government context, read countries, federal agencies, states, cities, private sector entities), magic happens.
  5. Learn from your hackers. Developers may use APIs in unexpected ways. This is a good thing. If you see signs of uses that you didn’t consider, respond quickly, adapting the APIs to those new uses rather than trying to block them.
  6. Harness implicit participation. On platforms like Facebook and Twitter people give away their information for free (or more precisely to use those platforms for free). They are implicitly involved therefore in the development (and funding) of those platforms. Mining and linking datasets is where the real value of platforms can be obtained. Governments should provide open government data to enable innovative private sector participants to improve their products and services.
  7. Lower the barriers to experimentation. Platforms must be designed from the outset not as a fixed set of specifications, but as being open-ended  to allow for extensibility and revision by the marketplace. Platform thinking is an antidote to the complete specifications that currently dominate the government approach not only to IT but to programs of all kinds.
  8. Lead by example. A great platform provider does things that are ahead of the curve and that take time for the market to catch up to. It’s essential to prime the pump by showing what can be done.

In IBM, and elsewhere, we have been talking for a while about so called disruptive business platforms (DBP). A DBP has four actors associated with it:

  • Provider – Develops and provides the core platform. Providers need to ensure the platform exposes interfaces (that Complementors can use) and also ensure standards are defined that allow the platform to grow in a controlled way.
  • Complementor – Supplement the platform with new features, services and products that increase the value of the platform to End Users (and draw more of them in to use the platform).
  • End User – As well as performing the obvious ‘using the platform’ role End Users will also drive demand that  Complementors help fulfill. Also there are likely to be more Users if there are more Complementors providing new features. A well architected platform also allows End Users to interact with each other.
  • Supplier – Usually enters into a contract with the core platform provider to provide a known product or service or technology. Probably not innovating in the same way as the complementor would.

Walled Garden at Chartwell - Winston Churchill's Home
Walled Garden at Chartwell – Winston Churchill’s Home

We can see platform architectures as being the the ideal balance between the two political extremes of those who want to see a fully stripped back government that privatises all of its services and those who want central government to provide and manage all of these services. Platforms, if managed properly, provide the ideal ‘walled garden’ approach which is often attributed to the Apple iTunes and App Store way of doing business. Apple did not build all of the apps out their on the App Store. Instead they provided the platform on which others could provide the apps and create a diverse and thriving “app economy”.

It’s early days to see if this could work in a government context. What’s key is applying some of the above principles suggested by Tim O’Reilly to enforce the rules that others must comply with. There also of course needs to be the right business models in place that encourage people to invest in the platform in the first place and that allow new start ups to grow and thrive.

The Wicked Problems of Government

Peter Cripps comment , , , , , , ,

The dichotomy of our age is surely that as our machines become more and more intelligent the problems that we need them to solve are becoming ever more difficult and intractable. They are indeed truly wicked problems, no more so than in our offices of power where the addition of political and social ‘agendas’ would seem to make some of the problems we face even more difficult to address.

Poll Tax
A Demonstration Against the Infamous ‘Poll Tax’

In their book The Blunders of Our Governments the authors Anthony King and Ivor Crewe recall some of the most costly mistakes made by British governments over the last three decades. These include policy blunders such as the so called poll tax introduced by the Thatcher government in 1990 which led to rioting on the streets of many UK cities (above). Like the poll tax many, in fact most, of the blunders recounted are not IT related however the authors do devote a whole chapter (chapter 13 rather appropriately) to the more egregious examples of successive governments IT blunders. These include:

  • The Crown Prosecution Service, 1989 – A computerised system for tracking prosecutions. Meant to be up and running by 1993-94, abandoned in 1997 following a critical report from the National Audit Office (NAO).
  • The Department of Social Security, 1994 – A system to issue pensions and child benefits using swipe cards rather than the traditional books which were subject to fraud and also inefficient. The government cancelled the project in 1999 after repeated delays and disputes between the various stakeholders and following another critical report by the NAO.
  • The Home Office (Immigration and Nationality Directorate), 1996 – An integrated casework system to deal with asylum, refugee and citizenship applications. The system was meant to be live by October of 1998 but was cancelled in 1999 at a cost to the UK taxpayer of at least £77 million. The backlog of cases for asylum and citizenship which the system had meant to address had got worse not better.

Whilst the authors don’t offer any cast iron solutions to how to solve these problems they do highlight a number of factors these blunders had in common. Many of these were highlighted in a joint Royal Academy of Engineering and British Computer Society report published 10 years ago this month called The Challenges of Complex IT Projects.The major reasons found for why complex IT projects fail included:

  • Lack of agreed measures of success.
  • Lack of clear senior management ownership.
  • Lack of effective stakeholder management.
  • Lack of project/risk management skills.
  • Evaluation of proposals driven by price rather than business benefits.
  • Projects not broken into manageable steps.

In an attempt to address at least some of the issues around the procurement and operation of government IT systems (which is not restricted to the UK of course), in particular those citizen facing services over the internet, the coalition government that came to power in May 2010 commissioned a strategic review of its online delivery of public services by the UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox. Her report published in November 2010 recommended:

  • Provision of a common look and feel for all government departments’ transactional online services to citizens and business.
  • The opening up of government services and content, using application programme interfaces (APIs), to third parties.
  • Putting a new central team in Cabinet Office that is in absolute control of the overall user experience across all digital channels and that commissions all government online information from other departments.
  • Appointing a new CEO for digital in the Cabinet Office with absolute authority over the user experience across all government online services and the power to direct all government online spending.

Another government report, published in July of 2011, by the Public Administration Select Committee entitled Government and IT – “a recipe for rip-offs” – time for a new approach proposed 33 recommendations on how government could improve it’s woeful record for delivering IT. These included:

  • Developing a strategy to either replace legacy systems with newer, less costly systems, or open up the intellectual property rights to competitors.
  • Contracts to be broken up to allow for more effective competition and to increase opportunities for SMEs.
  • The Government must stop departments specifying IT solutions and ensure they specify what outcomes they wish to achieve.
  • Having a small group within government with the skills to both procure and manage a contract in partnership
    with its suppliers.
  • Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) should stay in post to oversee the delivery of the benefits for which they are accountable and which the project was intended to deliver.

At least partly as a result of these reports and their recommendations the Government Digital Service (GDS) was established in April 2011 under the leadership of Mike Bracken (previously Director of Digital Development at The Guardian newspaper). GDS works in three core areas:

  • Transforming 25 high volume key exemplars from across government into digital services.
  • Building and maintaining the consolidated GOV.UK website –  which brings government services together in one place.
  • Changing the way government procures IT services.

To the large corporates that have traditionally provided IT software, hardware and services to government GDS has had a big impact on how they do business. Not only does most business now have to be transacted through the governments own CloudStore but GDS also encourages a strong bias in favour of:

  • Software built on open source technology.
  • Systems that conform to open standards.
  • Using the cloud where it makes sense to do so.
  • Agile based development.
  • Working with small to medium enterprises (SME’s) rather than the large corporates seen as “an oligarchy that is ripping off the government“.

There can be no doubt that the sorry litany of public sector IT project failures, rightly or wrongly, have caused the pendulum to swing strongly in the direction that favours the above approach when procuring IT. However some argue that the pendulum has now swung a little too far. Indeed the UK Labour party has launched its own digital strategy review led by shadow Cabinet Office minister Chi Onwurah. She talks about a need to be more context-driven, rather than transaction focused saying that while the GDS focus has been on redesigning 25 “exemplar” transactions, Labour feels this is missing the complexity of delivering public services to the individual. Labour is also critical of the GDSs apparent hostility to large IT suppliers saying it is an “exaggeration” that big IT suppliers are “the bogeymen of IT”. While Labour supports competition and creating opportunities for SMEs, she said that large suppliers “shouldn’t be locked out, but neither should they be locked in”.

The establishment of the GDS has certainly provided a wake up call for the large IT providers however, and here I agree with the views expressed by Ms Onwurah, context is crucial and it’s far too easy to take an overly simplistic approach to trying to solve government IT issues. A good example of this is that of open source software. Open source software is certainly not free and often not dramatically cheaper than proprietary software (which is often built using some elements of open source anyway) once support costs are taken into account. The more serious problem with open source is where the support from it comes from. As the recent Heartbleed security issue with OpenSSL has shown there are dangers in entrusting mission critical enterprise software to people who are not accountable (and even unknown).

One aspect to ‘solving’ wicked problems is to bring more of a multi-disciplinary approach to the table. I have blogged before about the importance of a versatilist approach in solving such problems. Like it or not, the world cannot be viewed in high contrast black and white terms. One of the attributes of a wicked problem is that there is often no right or wrong answer and addressing one aspect of the problem can often introduce other issues. Understanding context and making smart architecture decisions is one aspect to this. Another aspect is whether the so called SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) technologies can bring a radically new approach to the way government makes use of IT? This is something for discussion in future blog posts.

Oh Dear, Here We Go Again!

Peter Cripps architecture ,

So, here we go again. The BBC today report that “IT giants are ‘ripping off’ Whitehall, say MPs”. As I presumably work for one of those “IT giants” I will attempt to comment on this in as impartial a way as is possible.

  • As long as we have ‘IT projects’ rather than ‘business improvement’ or ‘business change’ projects in government, or anywhere else come to that, we (and it is ‘we’ as tax payers) will continue to get ‘ripped off’. Buying IT because it is ‘sexy‘  is always going to end in tears. IT is a tool that may or may not fix a business problem. Unless you understand the true nature of that business problem throwing IT at it is doomed to failure. This is what software architects need to focus on. I’m coming to the conclusion that the best architects are actually technophobes rather than technophiles.
  • It’s not Whitehall that is being ‘ripped off’ here. It’s you and me as tax payers (assuming you live in the UK and pay taxes to the UK government of course). Whether you work in IT or anywhere else this effects you.
  • It’s not only understanding the requirements that is important, it’s also challenging those requirements as well as the business case that led to them in the first place. I suspect that many, many projects have been dreamt up as someones fantasy, nice to have system rather than having any real business value.
  • Governments should be no different from anyone else when it comes to buying IT. If I’m in the market for a new laptop I usually spend a little time reading up on what other buyers think and generally make sure I’m not about to buy something that’s not fit for purpose. One of the criticisms leveled at government in this report is the “lack of IT skills in government and over-reliance on contracting out”. In other words there are not enough experienced architects who work in government that can challenge some of the assumptions and proposed solutions that come from vendors.
  • Both vendors and government departments need to learn how to make agile work on large projects. We have enough experience now to know that multi-year, multi-person, multi-million pound projects that aim to deliver ‘big-bang’ fashion just do not work. Bringing a more agile approach to the table, delivering a little but more often so users can verify and feedback on what they are getting for their money is surely the way to go. This approach depends on more trust between client and supplier as well as better and more continuous engagement throughout the project’s life.