Zentelligence

Night of the Long Knives

It seems that the Chancellor has also woken-up to the argument I made in CW360 last week, that while an aggressively “wired” public sector seems like a jolly good idea for some, for others, notably the National Audit Office and the Treasury, there’s growing alarm at the way the money is being spent.

Apparently, the Probation Service has, according to one revelation, been paying its support contractor £11,000 every time it called out an engineer over a weekend. With costs like these, it’s hardly surprising that Gordon Brown is disturbed and it does rather explains why the IT industry is so very keen on helping the Public Sector along its increasingly expensive path towards its 2005 goal of digital Nirvana.

Observed from abroad, the UK is generally seen as a pillar of virtue and an example to other nations and we have been busy advising other countries on their own development of electronic Government processes. However, not everyone believes that eGovernment like socialism, is necessarily a god thing for developing countries. I was passed one email, which came from an office very close to Big Ben, which argues:

“In my view, rushing into e-Gov as a priority for an impoverished nation or one that has weak democratic processes might well deliver more not less power into the hands of a corrupt administration. The Nazi administration in Germany was one of the most active early users of the crude pre-computers of its day”!

In fact, the author has a valid point and while we agonise over the introduction of identity cards, other countries have them already and will without doubt, use Smartcard technologies to exercise much greater control and interference in the lives of their populations than was ever possible in the past.

So while we worry over the millions that we waste every month on badly controlled Public Sector computing projects, perhaps we should also be a little thankful for the slip-shod inefficiencies of our own system. After all and as a friend from the security services once said to me: “You’ve got nothing to worry about from Government until it’s fully joined up” and that he said “might take for ever”.

Where Angels Fear to Tread

By the time you read this column, I’ll be behind bars, no doubt on remand in “the Scrubs”. Of course, it was bound to happen one day and I received the “Notice of Intended Prosecution” this morning.

Thanks to rapid advances in speed camera technology, this particular menace to society was caught – allegedly – making “Excess Speed” down the Old Kent Road – “a 30mph zone” – “at 16:07 on July 2nd”.

That day sticks in my memory, if only because the gridlock in South London was so bad that afternoon, that it forced me to turnaround in despair and fight my way home. In fact, I believe that if I actually managed to exceed 30 mph at any point on my route, I should be rewarded with a medal and certainly not a fixed penalty fine and points on my license.

“It’s quite simple really”, said one of my friends in high places with an ironic grin, “speed cameras are probably the only example of technology introduced by government which can actually demonstrate a return on investment. If we could automate the traffic wardens we’d be laughing”.

“It’s even better in Dubai”, I said. “Thanks to eGovernment reform, I’m told that if you are caught by a speed camera, the penalty is faxed or emailed to your address and is waiting for you when you arrive home”.

But it’s that irksome ‘Return on Investment’ idea that keeps nagging at my conscience. We are spending billions, not millions on upgrading, improving, evolving and managing the nation’s information real-estate and yet, over six months after collapsing under the demand, we can’t even get the 1901 census back-on line.

The public sector complains that it hasn’t enough money to push through it’s ICT programme and in the meantime, we could possibly build a hospital each month on what we waste on aborted pilot projects and lose on IT projects that wildly over-run, like NATS, the new national air traffic service.

Here’s a suggestion, not my own but it comes from the right direction. Central government should set-up the equivalent of a ‘Tiger Team’, to oversee the hugely expensive projects that industry, in its wildest dreams, would never risk trying.

The team might be twelve good men or women, with a long track record of experience of technology and project management at the macro-level, people perhaps with similar qualifications to my old friends Professor Jim Norton, who is now chairman of Deutsche Telekom and David Svendsen the ex-chairman of Microsoft UK. The job, once a project looks set to collapse, would be for this International Rescue-type team, to cut through the fog of civil-service excuses and public relations damage control and do what has to be done to save or sacrifice failing public sector mega-projects. Call it part rescue, part sanity check if you like.

What frightens me is the prospect of a public sector in denial and the spectre of failure. There’s a very obvious ‘friction’ between local and central government where ICT strategy is involved and all the Pathfinders in the world aren’t going to eliminate the ‘Them and Us’ perceptions overnight. IT managers in large corporations have sleepless nights thinking about million pound projects and yet Government calmly believes that it can succeed with £100 million initiatives. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread and when they go wrong what happens? A serious review of the responsibility, strategy and technology or the application of lots of expensive string and selotape behind a smokescreen of excuses?

I really believe that we need to urgently review our progress towards the goal of becoming an information society. Why are we doing what we are doing? Does the argument that the strategy is one of ‘spend avoidance’ rather than a search for return on investment, actually hold water?

No Sex Please – We’re British

It appears that a quarter of UK companies have sacked employees for misconduct involving peeking at online pornography over the Internet, according to a survey from Websens and that 72% of businesses have had to address the uncomfortable reality of Internet abuse or should I call that misuse?

So hands-up anyone who hasn’t ever browsed an “unsuitable” Web site? If this were France or Italy of course, readers would immediately fill the mailbag with their favourites but we’re British, which is why our politicians hide, rather than celebrate their mistresses.

Of course, one problem lies in avoiding sex on the Internet. My Hotmail inbox this morning had eleven emails, even with the spam filter turned-on. One was legitimate correspondence, three were loan offers, four were junk and four were ‘solicitations’ of one kind or another. Increasingly, the latter arrive as HTML, with embedded pictures, so regardless of whether I wish to view a ‘sample’ or not, I can still see it.

Less frequently, a link to what you think is one thing, happens to take you to an entirely different place, which then kicks of a ‘porn storm’ of sex-site windows, as referred to by Edwina’s mother, in the TV comedy, ‘Absolutely Fabulous’.

And then there are site such as Orsm. Awfully popular and its model aeroplane collection makes Playboy look tame but it carries, from time to time, some of the funniest video clips to download, like the Jay Leno “Wassup” Budweiser sketch, featuring Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban.

Naturally, one can’t have people wasting their time browsing photographs of Angelina Jolie’s more attractive features or passing these around the office for the admiration or the embarrassment of colleagues, male and female alike, which is why filtering software is increasingly popular. Even worse of course, is the prospect of an office server being used as repository and distribution point for paedophile collections, a nightmare scenario for any business, which has happened more than once.

Once again, it all comes down to a question of policy and probity. On several occasions over the last three years, I have had to pen and reinforce company policy on web browsing and inappropriate content and this is a difficult issue for each and every employer attached to the Internet. What is acceptable and what is not? Do you forbid flesh tones altogether – which is difficult to monitor and enforce - or do you specify that saving and distributing ‘pornographic images represents unacceptable behaviour?

If 72% of businesses have a problem then its time that employers ‘Came out of the closet’ and started to think clearly and logically about the problem and how best to protect their business interests and those of their staff at the same time. Being British, we are inclined to shrug off the ‘S’ word until it becomes an unavoidable problem in the workplace and I can tell you, that the latest statistics show quite clearly that pornographic Spam now represents the fastest growing nuisance on the Web.

In the interests of setting a good example, I can’t of course browse the more interesting websites from the comfort of my office network, however important my research. I plan instead to advertise for an Italian mistress!

Not Me .Gov

Unisys’ Brian Hadfield may be a little harsh when he says "The government needs to stop paying lip service to 'joined up government' and start doing it. Unlike many other countries, the UK has opted for the ‘Big Picture’ vision of eGovernment and a strategy that goes with it and has found, in attempting to implement it, that Government is big, very big indeed.

It’s true to say that the message from the trenches is at times, very much at odds with the message from the top. When I meet people at Local Authority level, the frequently reflect the Unisys research by telling me that they feel under-resourced and have day jobs too. They understand why we need to streamline public sector services but invariably, they feel they are being pushed too fast towards a goal they can’t possibly achieve in the time they have been given.

Through thinking big, Central Government risks losing sight of the wood for the trees. Expectations are high and there’s a risk in every country, that eGovernment is perceived as a plumbing exercise, connecting what I call the legacy stuff to all the Web stuff, through a vapid cloud of emerging standards.

No government can really claim that the great eGovernment experiment is a success. Take-up for services is still in the low, single digit percentages and critics claim that there are far too many pilot projects and examples of parallel services as the Public Sector attempts to use the technology to drag it from one state of existence to another. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be doing it but the IT cost of so many different projects is quite breathtaking, when you consider that the return on investment is still nowhere in sight.

Government describes this as “Cost Avoidance” as opposed to cost reduction but it takes an expensive chunk out of the public purse whichever way you look at it and it’s hard to find anyone who thinks they have enough money to deliver what they are expected to. The cost of e-government is soaring in Europe, and is estimated to increase by 28% to £3.9 billion this year Meanwhile, pilot projects come and go. Take dkTV, the digital television pilot involving, among others, Camden, Newham and the BBC. I was on the original board and last month, it finally ran out of money, just as it was starting to work. And then there’s the collapse of the £260 million Individual Learning Account project that ran £93m over budget before it was abandoned, two small drops in an ocean of technology spending.

It’s easy to criticize ambitious planning and eGovernment presents a very large and soft target for the critics. We know – I think - why we want eGovernment and we know - I think - that there is no other option available if we are to sensibly reduce the cost of supporting and streamlining a bloated Public Sector. The challenge is that while joined-up government looks very good on paper, it involves a volatile and unpredictable mixture of expectations, people and technology, all of which are in constant collision. Valuable resources are pulled into the eGovernment orbit and development costs continue to escalate with no real end in sight.

Perhaps, my wife, who once upon a time used to work at the No10 press office for Bernard Ingham, has the right view when she commented, that “Government is like a one-legged man on a bicycle. Once it’s committed to change, however foolish or ambitious, it has to keep pedaling until the next election gives it an excuse to fall off”. Hopefully and by then, the technology will have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams and as a nation, we’ll be so completely wired into UK Online, we won’t notice.

Like Railtrack but with Fibre

Businessman Paul King, believes that BT’s OpenWorld Broadband service is so bad that it’s cost him as much as £30,000 in lost and interrupted business and so strongly does he feel about the matter, that he’s apparently taken his protest to the BT offices, parading his grievance on a sandwich board.

The future is Broadband and that naturally means BT. Well of course it does but reconciling the reality of our domestic market with the platitudes, promises and the rhetoric contained in their latest publicity drive are another matter entirely.

“Get yourself an ASP, ASAP”, screamed the banner headline on page twelve of BT’s newspaper Broadband supplement. “Why not outsource this work to somebody what already has the necessary know-how”? Was the subtitle. I almost collapsed in a puddle of helpless laughter.

It was November of 2000 when I chaired one of the big ASP events at the Novotel in London and Sally Davis, the President of BT Ignite told the audience why BT was going to become the biggest and baddest ASP of them all. In fact, BT had research that showed quite clearly that SMEs would adopt the ASP proposition en masse, by about now. I was tempted to describe the company’s plans as being rather close to the “Small drinks party in a brewery” school of thinking but I was too polite and time and the looming ASP catastrophe, proved me right.

“ASPs have been around for several years but have not really taken off”, says BT’s ASP Director Furnston. Well, there’s an understatement if ever I read one. It’s rather like saying the Black Death was bad for small business. Today’s survivors of the decimated ASP market are mostly those who have learned some very hard business lessons, sprinkled with those who had enough cash to ride out the storm, such as Cable & Wireless, with their very expensive and abortive (A) Services deal with Compaq.

BT, a company that never took any part in the UK’s ASP Community, have like the other survivors, shied away from the acronym and are describing their service as “Subscription Computing”, a novel way of saying managed services. What frightens me, is that the Sunday Times supplement is very obviously aimed at readers who don’t know their ASP from their A*s and so, come Monday morning, the Managing Directors of companies all over the UK will be walking into their IT Directors offices, saying “This ASP thing, sounds like a good idea to me”.

Broadband Britain. It’s a wonderful idea and one day, we’ll all be connected to broadband and won’t think twice about subscription computing, which is, I believe, very much the shape of IT to come. But before that happens we need to learn from the mistakes of the ASP industry from the very beginning.

Once upon a time, some very large companies and telcos, encouraged by Citrix and Microsoft, came together and decided that the next evolution in information technology would be the ASP. Nobody really bothered to ask the customers, who were expected to do as they were told and nobody enquired too deeply about the ability of the infrastructure and the software to support the idea. It was all about money, moving the market from irregular upgrade revenue to a regular, constant and predictable source of subscription revenue.

And so, collectively, the industry, led by the now defunct ASP Consortium, announced “Let there be light”. And there wasn’t…….

Today, we live in a very different world. We are more educated and more focused on the return on investment and productivity arguments behind new ideas. The ASP experience also taught us to take collective predictions from the big players with a health warning. ASP is now something else and you can choose from over eight different ideas and acronyms but what is certain is that it’s starting to blend invisibly into the world of Web Services where it sits most comfortably. What concerns me, reading the Sunday Times, is that BT, trumpeting the Broadband message, still doesn’t grasp technology and it still leaves me with a vague nationalized industry feel to the message, like Railtrack but with fiber.

Can I find ten companies from among our readers that would confidently outsource their computing to BT? If so, please come forward and tell me why!

Drop the Dead Donkey

Are we deceiving ourselves over technology? Does what it promise actually work all the time rather than some of the time? By this I mean 99.999% rather than 95% of the time.

I’m in danger of becoming a secret Luddite. I’m starting to envy the few societies that remain firmly off-line; whose notion of advanced telecommunications is ownership of a hollowed-out coconut, a piece of string and two tin cans.

Last week, you may recall my taking a shot at BT for wasting my time and that of anyone else by not publishing their new dial-up Internet number on their website. The number is of course 0808 9933163 but BT executives clearly don’t read CW360 because as I write this the access number on their website is clearly 0808 993 3024, which is equally clearly wrong and they have been told. Perhaps they just don’t care and certainly, the mailbag is flooded by other readers sharing their own special ‘BT Moments’.

Then there’s Barclays Bank, my own and an on-line service I rely on. After forty-five minutes this morning attempting to access my bank account, which in turn continued to hang and drop out, I called Barclays Helpline. The very pleasant young lady on the phone told me that the system, which has “Four Legs”, has been” up and down” all week and is only working on two legs (Servers?) at the moment. This rather explains why the system keeps timing out but doesn’t explain why Barclays hasn’t bothered to put up a simple “We are experiencing difficulties with the service” message on the Home Page?

Incidentally Barclays, why do you always deny the problem first and then finally concede to Computer Weekly that there is one and I'm the only person who has noticed it?

I’ve commented before that my experience of IT in both the public and private sector is broadly reflective of a mass ‘plate-spinning’ exercise. Responsibility appears to exist vaguely with “The System” and one plate wobbles, unless the fix is almost instantaneous, the other start to crash to the ground in a slow and almost predictable ripple effect.

TV advertising constantly offers us the message that ‘e’ solves everything. It’s a magic dot. that takes a BT or a Barclays Bank or a government and transforms it into a slick and efficient virtual business, managed by quietly humming racks of machines instead of people. When however, things go wrong, the efficiencies of the system, which invariably involve running with a skeleton staff, mean that all the effort is focused on attempting to fix the problem and little if any effort is directed towards the end-user or customer. Because the Internet serves as a wall between the customer and the service provider, there’s a strong temptation to hide behind it when things go wrong, rather than confront the urgency of a customer service problem directly, as you have to do in the real world.

Far too much attention and effort is being directed towards the system(s) and far too little thought is being given towards the customer relationship element of an increasingly on-line society. Some business do of course have this problem solved but many more do not and show no real evidence of thinking about the customer element or experience when things go wrong. It’s a question of responsibility and where a company will have a nominated “First Aider”; it’s highly unlikely that it will have tasked anyone with any responsibility for dealing with the customer side of the equation when critical systems fail.

An eBusiness is much more than machines and expensive software, it’s a completely different commercial philosophy, which should, in theory, put the customer experience at the front of any strategy and not relegate him to the status of an expensive and under-resourced inconvenience. In the constant drive towards profitability, there’s a real danger of society embracing a “lose a person buy a cheap box” approach to business and when you lose people, you lose the useful features of initiative and responsibility with go with them.

Big companies will frequently talk a great deal about on-line customer relationship management and experience but talk is cheap and the evidence suggests that talking about the challenge is one way of avoiding doing little or anything about it when systems or procedures fail.

Time to Hang-up My Beard

I’m an equal opportunity employer. Really I am. I’m prepared to consider Linux as a serious operating alternative to anything available from the ‘evil empire’ and so it seems, do an increasing number of large businesses, encouraged by the power of the ‘Blue’ side of the ‘Force’, IBM.

It’s been almost three years since Bob Young gave me my own Red Hat to wear and since then and regardless of attempts by ‘You know who’ to marginalize the Operating System as a geeky fad, Linux has gradually emerged from its natural, open-source home among the Hobbits and has found the industry support it needs to launch it into the Enterprise Server market. Most noticeably, Oracle (9i) has announced that it is now giving Linux equal status in a market it now sees being split three ways, between Windows, Linux and Solaris. This is an enormous boost for Linux fortunes, as the OS now offers the credibility that goes with the support of both IBM and Oracle, an event that finally dismisses any suggestion that Linux is a risky “unsupported” environment attractive to only the very brave or the very foolish IS Director.

And it’s not just IBM and Oracle leading the charge. Linux continues to grow market share at around 30 per cent annually and according to Business Week both Dell and HP are claiming that 12 per cent of their server customers now wish to have Linux pre-installed while Sun Microsystems is seeing 25 per cent growth in sales of its Linux-based Cobalt server appliances.

Whenever an IT columnist makes a prediction about the future, you can be sure it’s wrong but it’s not so long ago that I was having heated arguments with people about the potential for utility computing and cheap Applications Servers using Linux. The first of these, IBM’s 21st century re-invention of ‘Bureau Computing’, which uses Linux Virtual Services, connecting customers to managed, Linux-based applications on Mainframes at e-business hosting centres, is already a gleam in Big Blue’s eye and looks set to revive one of more fundamental elements of the ASP concept that fell flat last year. The second, the arrival of a wave of cheap Server Appliances running Linux instead of Windows, is still, I suspect two years away – You could never really describe Sun as cheap - but the demand among businesses and governments to drive down the costs of computing, is driving the agenda at a pace, which is hard to ignore.

Tilting Microsoft off its comfortable perch is still going to be an uphill struggle, if only because 50 per cent of the market is still owned by the company and the other Unix flavours of HP-UX and Solaris are more likely to be a victim of Linux ambitions before any serious pain is felt by Microsoft, which is busily developing Windows into a powerful Enterprise OS and one good enough to take on any variant of UNIX.

Perhaps in the end, the future of Linux can be seen as a huge game of poker with the future of Enterprise computing represented in the chips. Buying a place at the table costs millions or even billions of dollars in development and marketing money and only IBM, Sun, Oracle and Microsoft can really afford to play. The winner may not be the company with the best hand. It could be the one with the best bluff.

It's Good to Talk - Sometimes!

It’s a secret you know, the new BT Anytime Lite Connect number. Well almost a secret but then, what kind of business genius thinks-up a name like BT Anytime Connect Lite in the first place?

Looking back on previous columns, this is far from being the first time I have had occasion to fire a broadside at BT and its Internet service. It’s bad enough that I can’t aggregate my Internet charges into my BT One bill but for heavens sake, you would have thought that if BT were going to change its access number, it would announce the new number in big red letters on its website?

Wrong. As of this evening, as I caustically pointed-out to BT Anytime Lite Connect’s telephone support number (calls are charged at 50 pence per minute) the access number is clearly given as a number which doesn’t work correctly. In fact it re-directs you to a BT OpenWorld web page called “dialleroutof date.html” and freezes Internet Explorer (more of that in a moment). Only by calling the helpline, are you relieved of hopeless hours spent trying to work out why your browser isn’t working properly.

“It should have been changed” said the pleasant voice from the support line. “Well it certainly hasn’t” was my reply and you‘ll be reading about it this week on CW360.Com.

“I’ll report it” he said. “I hope so and I expect my 50 pence to be refunded as well for telling BT to do the ‘Bleeding obvious’. “Sorry” he said.

For a further 50 pence, I learned that the BT Openworld web page that catches the unwary, which is anyone not using the number they haven’t told them about, attempts to download the BT dialler with the correct number. A word to the wise here. If, like me, you use a personal firewall, I suspect it’s a factor in blocking any attempt to download the new dialler in background and the BT dialler software, if you use it, forces you to the BT Openworld website whether you like it or not. It’s preferable to simply use the dial-up number they give you and plug it into a dial-up network’s properties in Windows.

So look away, if you would rather discover for yourself what the new number is for BT Anytime Lite Connect. Perhaps by now it’s on their web page and if it isn’t yet, it will be within a few hours of any senior BT executive reading this column I’m sure. Or maybe that’s too much to hope for, this is, after all, British Telecom I’m talking about.

It’s good to talk. Share your own memorable BT experience with a friend.

Oh yes, and the number is 0808 9933163

Forget the 21st Century, it’s the 15th you need to worry about.

Synchronicity, otherwise known as ‘acasual coincidence’. Like ‘Déjà vu’, have you ever experienced it? It’s what describes the kind of coincidence that has old friends constantly bumping into each other, against all the odds.

There’s an awful lot of Déjà vu in the IT industry but not much synchronicity. I did however find an example in the Sunday Times, which reflected what I had been saying in Monday’s ‘Thought for the Day’ about the ‘Takeaway Economy’.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison was talking about industry consolidation and predicts, that one day, there would be only three software companies left in the world, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and of course, Oracle. The remainder will of course dwindle and disappear, much as our own home-grown talent has done here in the UK and Ellison promises to retire when his ‘Killing Fields’ theory of software consolidation become self-evident; not long now then Larry?

Ellison, who is never short of a good quote, also told the Sunday Times “All government systems are a hotchpotch. The information architecture in most countries looks like 15th century Europe – Lots of distributed authority. – Horizontal integration will take years”.

Given the £6 billion size of the Government IT budget, Oracle, like rival Microsoft, is an enthusiastic eGovernment evangelist. Kingston upon Hull City Council is to invest a further £5 million in new systems that are expected to save the city an estimated £500,000 each month.

Whether Europe happens to be stuck in the 15th century is a moot point. Information Age Government has moved on slowly since the Renaissance but not that slowly, although there are notable exceptions, The Inland Revenue and The Home Office spring most quickly to mind.

The IDeA (Improvement and Development Agency ) last week published a white paper, "World View on Local e-Government" which makes the grand statement that England is ahead of other countries in achieving targets for delivery of the Government's e-agenda. The size of the challenge that lies ahead is reflected in the changes being made at the Office of the e-Envoy (OeE), which is now to concentrate almost exclusively on developing eGovernment, leaving the e-Economy remit, which includes Broadband Britain to the Department of Trade and Industry. In many respects, this change is a tacit admission that the urgent task modernising government is being lost in the complexity and detail of the larger Digital-Britain agenda.

If we are honest with ourselves, then we have to accept that eGovernment has a long way to go before it can prove itself and Larry Ellison is probably right when he predicts that integration will take years. With a multiplicity of systems and software and five million people working in the Government, progress will, I suspect, be rather slower than the 2005 target allows for.

One small detail could however speed the process up and wire-up the citizen government relationship much faster than is likely to happen without it. This small detail is of course the trust relationship with government represented by the personal identity card and other countries are accelerating away from us because they have no objection to carrying an identity card.

Without a national available means of offering a trust relationship, achieving the eGovernment targets will remain problematical, so as one can imagine, there is an increased interest in the notion of a personal ID card. But while most us would I suspect, have no great objection to carrying a citizen ID card as a kind of internal passport, civil liberties groups worry over giving the power and information that would accompany it to the same Government that only last month, tried to force through seriously flawed amendments to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.