Highlights of a few random articles that caught my eye this week … Apple and ID As expected, Apple’s letting users store their driving licences
Category: software engineering
Back to the past with government identity
The Government Digital Service (GDS) has a generous £400m budget to develop “One Login”, a single sign-on and digital identity system for government services. But it comes
UK Government Platforms | Revisited
The UK Government was a platform pioneer. It was amongst the first to understand the potential of platforms in the design and delivery of public
What can politicians learn from Universal Credit?
The unfortunate saga of Universal Credit is a powerful reminder of the repeated failure to successfully integrate policy making with technology. A failure that comes
The political cost of legacy systems
Passengers arriving at airports across the UK recently encountered irritating delays because of problems with the automatic eGates. One likely cause is the Home Office’s
The curious ‘failings’ of Facebook – and the true cost of ‘free’
Facebook manages to achieve the near impossible. It often appears technically and politically incompetent, yet remains highly profitable. Its ability to track, monitor and profile
The wellsprings of UK digital reform part 2 – separating porcine lip enhancement from transformation
Previously This is the second episode of a mini-series of blogs looking at the origins of the UK government’s digital reform programme since 2010. Part
“Artificial Intelligence” and the House of Lords inquiry
Below is a copy of my submission to the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence. Intentionally absent are more sensitive aspects of AI
Escaping waterfall government and the myth of ‘digital transformation’
Writing with my colleague Cassian Young, in a new article in Computer Weekly we consider why an agile approach to digital programmes will not transform
dev, DevOps and trusted systems
Software’s coming home Software development and technical architecture design have been taken back in-house over the past 5 years – ending the era when Whitehall departments outsourced almost everything to
Visualising privacy
Privacy seems to have an image problem: it seems acceptable for it to be sidelined and sometimes even ridiculed in public. We hear the Stalinesque
Westminster eForum — implementing ID cards
The text below is a copy of my speech delivered today at the Westminster e-Forum session on implementing ID Cards (keynote speaker Andy Burnham, MP,
new tech observations from the UK (ntouk) 