The £105m website
Posting: Well I was in the wrong place by some mishap, so I am posting here again -
I have written a comment of 699 words which has been moderated. As a result, unfortunately, the strength of the points I have been trying to make may have been lost. Or, worse, you now get in excess of 1,900 words in this post! I am going to quote from the BBC legal guide lines on this topic:- " It is against the House Rules to post defamatory material to any BBC community site or message board. If you post content that we believe might be defamatory, we will remove it. Potentially defamatory material, may, at the Editor's discretion, be posted if there is credible evidence supporting your claims, or if the content is deemed to be fair comment.
What is Defamation?
Defamation is the legal term that covers both slander and libel; slander is defamation by word of mouth, and libel is defamation in written form. It is, therefore, the type of defamation we are concerned with in content posted onto the BBC. A statement about an individual or organisation is deemed to be defamatory if it harms their reputation by:
" Two points. I don't know the law in any detail but I assume the following. 1. There is a difference between fair comment and unsubstantiated allegation (a substantive allegation), here the difficulty is that someone who may have a contribution to make to dialogue based in experience and the facts of that experience cannot comment either way on, for instance, whether there is fraud, while others obviously unconnected with the parties can say "fraud" as that is fair comment, not substantive. 2. While I cannot comment either way substantively on whether there is fraud, looking at this story on on its own and the frequent references above (17 mentions) I would say no it isn't, and that misses entirely the point.
My moderated post could have used different language and the meaning would have been undiluted.
If people are interested in substantive comments about BT and Serco study carefully comment #181. It is interesting in the fact that it too hedges about and also does not find an overall view of the issues. It remains, in my opinion, rather confused as a result.
I have looked up both of the words fraud and collusion on word-net. Any good dictionary would do. The problem I have is that while these are both legal terms were I to use them I do not mean them in a legal sense. I have nothing to say either way on any legal connotation in the situation I describe. What is more difficult for me is that I mean something along the lines of one or the other term, but in a Group Psychoanalytic sense.
I am trying to move from the particular, this contract and its execution, to the general, how government deals with these types of contracts with an emphasis on the aspect of it that I understand best, software development. In making generalised inferences I conclude that the relationship between the government in power at the time, the Civil Service as contract holders and the contractors is not a happy one. This was the essence of my moderated post. That there exists in this unhappy relationship huge pressures on individuals and organisations and that, from the evidence such as cost overruns, requirements drift, change and nonfulfillment and unfathomably expensive contracts, there is an unforgiving system in place that is tending to militate these difficulties rather than mitigate them. In the moderated post I characterised the unforgiving system in stark terms, but, once again, I meant it from the Group Analytic perspective where I was drawing on common (group and political) references to the nature of these issues.
One may wonder about the nature of the moderation where a person with the handle 'metaphorical metaphorical male appendage in the right places' (comment #215 & co.) which seems to break the House Rules and, more to the point, shows in its choice aggression and contempt of others, can put forward, I must assume, his company's views quite forthrightly ("I'm afraid Rory has not told the full story and pretty much all of you have been duped.") while I have to be excessively guarded because the BBC are afraid that Serco may pursue them in the courts. This has the regrettable result that I have to circumvent references to the literature that actually study these issues.
In terms of informed debate, this does concern me very much.
One would like to say that instead of letting these accusations fly around let's look at the facts, but, I'm afraid, that is not possible.
Before I pursue that point let me explain briefly what is meant by collusion in the Psychoanalytic context. The Law has no notion of the Unconscious, and there is no need to believe it here either, all that I need to explain is that the secrets of a collusion in this framework are the unsaid things to oneself and to others that are, nevertheless, implicitly understood, and that I permit someone else to do something (this the act of collusion) because their reasons for doing so are mistakenly identified by me as similar or the same as my own secret from myself reasons. In this way, I believe, behaviour that would result from my secret reasons is enacted, although not by myself. The consequence is that were I to explore the secret from my self reasons I might not let the other do as they do.
In the context of work this is inflammatory material. The simple depiction above is vastly complicated by multiple strands and chains of command and power. At least this notion of collusion may be a starting point.
In fact, one can see this here in my moderated comment. Is there a conspiracy to suppress? That is, something to feel paranoid about if you like. No, from the above, obviously not. Has the moderator colluded with Serco (in this case). Without casting aspersions, it is a possibility, although, in fact, I doubt it very much (I think from the moderators point of view reading my comment was probably clear cut). So now you can see how it might work over a multitude of strands and over issues where the details are aggregated into very high level points.
I have said that the facts are not available.
Let us ask the more direct question of these projects: "What mistakes have been made in their execution?" And have the contractors and Civil Servants volunteered them into the public realm.
I believe that there should be an Open Contract movement parallel to the Open Source movement (which, predictably, has become its own heated subthread. Just to mention, OS is open contract in its own context). Companies pursue open book policies and may proudly trumpet their profits to their teams and their clients in such arrangements. But the public cannot find these details. The details and the measures of success are in the contracts held between contractor and government with more detail to be found in the accounts of each piece of work. There is also an audit trail of documents. (Part of my former post was to count those documents - they numbered over 300,000 and counting over four years of the contract under discusion. One may wonder about this plethora of documentation too, but I will try not to get distracted.) No one person would be equal to the task of inspecting this information, and I doubt if the Civil Service teams themselves are always. I seriously doubt they would have the capacity for a retrospective inspection. But members of the public and various interested companies could divide the work, for the benefit of ourselves and, in the case of companies, themselves as potential future bidders.
Cameron has mentioned the desire for government to use more open source and to open source its own software where there is no security implication. These are brave words and one couldn't expect him to understand the implications entailed in achieving this or the level and nature of the use of open source at the moment.
Open source is no panacea, certainly not as it is now used, which is more with greedy contempt than respectful gratitude. Open source, when used by big companies, should be subject to at least the following three criteria. a. There should be a version migration strategy otherwise the software will be locked into deprecated code. b. There should be a reasonable audit of dependencies and an understanding of different OS contract implications. c. Open source projects should be contributed back to, or there should, at least, be the facility to do so, including the coverage of the costs of so doing, however minor the contribution.
From the above it is quite clear that a huge culture change is required in government for this to take place.
These are the crucial steps I have outlined:- Greater openness, for instance about mistakes made. Exposing to public scrutiny:- - contracts in their detail. - accounts and other audit material.
This would be part of a framework whereby the Civil Service would then have the confidence to:-
- Break contracts like this down into modular constituent parts (£5 mill cap?).
- Put out to fair and open competitive tender each module.
- Limit the number of modules anyone company or consortia can handle.
-Put in place strict measures that ensure interoperability of modules.
This last is the most important constraint. Many good things flow out of it.
Looking at the contract in question there are two important broad issues that should be considered. 1. If such a radically different approach had been adopted what guarantee is there that the delays caused by it - if any - would not have cost HMRC more than any possible savings? My view is that government expects too much of software, the requirements are too finished from an early point. So in this case the management task would be to identify those requirements essential to bring about the savings, while taking longer to build further requirements. I think the public would accept this process. 2. How would so many cats be managed in the cat house? I leave this to you imagination. I think the image suggests part of the solution.
Technology has moved on. If there are not to be huge, ongoing, maintenance just to achieve stasis, then such solutions have to be designed for the reality of continual change over time. More modern approaches make this more possible than those embraced a few years ago.
There is a new requirement that data be exposed for consumption by third parties. It is unclear how this might apply to the site in question, but it is certain that it does. I count this a major deficit not accommodated by any of the three government portals to my knowledge and it will have to be revisited soon.
What, in this overall process, may need to be kept commercially secret is not clear to me. It seems that in dealings with government the reasons for such commercial privilege are minimal.
In conclusion, we desperately need different approaches to procurement in the broad involvement of politicians, the Civil Service and contractors. We need a process that opens up public involvement and the involvement of small competing firms who bid against each other in open competition where proposals are submitted in an open way.