8 ms·

This project has obviously been carefully planned out, well defined ahead of time, and overseen with a militant eye for detail and style. That has lead to a nea

This project has obviously been carefully planned out, well defined ahead of time, and overseen with a militant eye for detail and style. That has lead to a neat, tidy, and immediately accessible code base that delivers what look like rock solid UI components. Compare and contrast that to every private sector project I've worked on (for global household names none the less) and this sort of thoughtfulness and consideration simply is not compatible with the business objectives, and as such is the first thing to get the chop, leading to code bases that grow increasingly incoherent over time and deliver flakey solutions at best. The next time anyone tries to sell me on the notion that the public sector can't do anything as well as the private sector, this is what I'll point them to. They wont understand what they're looking at of course, but that won't make them any less wrong.

mr_isomies 8y ago
While I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment about the public sector, as a first hand user of the NHS I can attest that it is completely falling appart. Sure, maybe they can make a UI framework but this is watering the lawn while the house is burning.
umvi 8y ago
> The next time anyone tries to sell me on the notion that the public sector can't do anything as well as the private sector What if I try to sell you on the notion that getting quality this high out of the public sector is extremely unlikely?
- jacobtwotwo 8y ago
  What if I just ask pointless hypothetical questions and follow them up with no substance at all?
- jarvuschris 8y ago
  It doesn't happen most of the time yet, but that doesn't mean it's a gamble. I wouldn't describe it as "extremely unlikely" We actually have figured out how to run public sector software projects successfully. It's not a mystery anymore. There's a lot of barriers still to practicing agile service design within the constraints of most government organizations, but good results are consistent where you can carve out the space to implement it. Look at "digital services" teams at every level of gov: - UK Originals: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ - US Stormers: https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/ - US Normers: https://www.usds.gov/ https://www.usds.gov/ - CA State Child Welfare: https://cwds.ca.gov/ https://cwds.ca.gov/ - CA Benefits Enrollment: https://www.getcalfresh.org/ https://www.getcalfresh.org/ - CA Digital Services: https://github.com/CDTgithub/DigitalServiceOpportunities https://github.com/CDTgithub/DigitalServiceOpportunities - MA Digital Services: https://www.mass.gov/orgs/digital-services https://www.mass.gov/orgs/digital-services - Philadelphia: https://www.phila.gov/departments/office-of-open-data-and-digital-transformation/ https://www.phila.gov/departments/office-of-open-data-and-di... - San Francisco: https://digitalservices.sfgov.org/ https://digitalservices.sfgov.org/ - NYC: https://playbook.cityofnewyork.us/ https://playbook.cityofnewyork.us/ - Boston: https://www.boston.gov/departments/digital-team https://www.boston.gov/departments/digital-team
- starbeast 8y ago
  What if I try to sell you on the notion that getting high quality is extremely unlikely by definition, otherwise it would be called average quality?
- jtloong 8y ago
  This is what the whole digital government movement is trying to change. Public sector organization's in the UK (GDS), Canada (CDS, ODS etc), Singapore (GovTech Singapore), even 18F in the US, are all trying (and relatively succeeding even if incrementally) to change the public sector's ability to put out quality technology services.
dgzl 8y ago
I think the argument of private sector vs public sector for quality also comes with a price. As in, how much did that fancy UI cost the public, vs. how much (edit: it would have cost) the private sector to build.
- lghh 8y ago
  It didn't cost the private sector to build it... because they didn't and wouldn't.
  - dgzl 8y ago
    Are you really missing the point? The cost to build something in the private sector is almost always cheaper than asking government employees to do it. The public sector "didn't build it" like you said, but if they had, it would have been cheaper. This is almost always the case.
    - Traster 8y ago
      It's worth noting that whilst the cost of producing something in the private sector is cheaper than the public sector, the cost of the public sector acquiring something from the private sector is orders of magnitude larger than the cost of doing it in the private sector. I always think it's rather odd that people who propagate the idea that the private sector can do things much better than the public sector simultaneously need to believe the public sector is better at negotiating contracts in order to believe that contracting out work makes sense. I think the key here is that the British government have reproducibly found of way of creating high quality sites. That should be examined, embraced and extended.
    - frobozz 8y ago
      Nonsense. In the private sector, shareholders take money out of the system in the form of profit. Something that costs £X in labour and consumables must be charged at £X+Y% in order to make that happen and still give money to investors. If they can do it cheaper, they still charge £X+Y%, and give the surplus to the shareholders. In the public sector, there is no shareholder. If it costs £X in labour and consumables, then the cost to the public purse is £X. If they manage to do it cheaper, then that money remains in the system and can be used to either improve the offering, or subsidise another project. Public sector workers are also often paid considerably less than their private sector peers, and departments are often highly restricted in their ability to pay market rates for specialist employees. Although the total benefits package for public sector workers has historically been equal to or better than their private sector peers, this has typically been due to Final Salary pensions, which have been mostly phased out in favour of Career Average or even Defined Contribution pensions, all without a corresponding increase in salary.
baddox 8y ago
Not to downplay the quality of this work, but being able to extensively plan and specify requirements ahead of time is a luxury that a lot of engineering teams at private companies would love to have.
- lghh 8y ago
  Yes, they would love to have the luxury. I doubt the parent comment is saying that engineering teams would not want to be able to produce something like that, but rather given the confines of the lust for ever increasing profit, they can't.
  - baddox 8y ago
    “Lust for ever increasing profit” is one way to put it. You could also say that private companies have requirements that are constantly moving as the market changes and must be discovered and adapted, rather than legal requirements that are roughly static and well-specified.
    - iosonofuturista 8y ago
      I would _love_ to know where are those public sector projects where the requirements are “roughly static and well-specified”.
      - user5994461 8y ago
        How about every single one of them? They gotta fill a request for proposal in order to outsource a project, then there can be multiple rounds of back and forth to review and revise proposals. That includes quite a few documents, covering requirements among many other things.
- jarvuschris 8y ago
  Having done a lot of work in both spaces, trust me -- there's nothing luxury about getting this work done in the public space. Also, extensively planning and specifying requirements ahead of time is exactly the opposite of how you pull off delivering well-designed public UX like this. In the public space you inherently never have a single person who can call all the shots, because organizationally you're accountable to all of the public. Orgs have to be set up to carry on operations resiliently outside having a controlled lineage of management. How you do things is far more directly and heavily influenced by legislation, and that landscape is constantly shifting over the course of your project. BY FAR the private sector is where engineers can enjoy far more luxury.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ng12 8y ago
Not to be curmudgeonly but this is exactly what I would expect from public sector. - Odd technology choices. It took me a long time to figure out what .njk files were. - Misapplication of popular technologies. They're using webpack for... something? But most of the actual bundling is done by hand with gulp, and a lot of the JavaScript is operating in the global scope. - Overselling. It's just a bunch of scss with some mostly-HTML components.
- bendmorris 8y ago
  >It took me a long time to figure out what .njk files were. Nunjucks is a very popular JS templating language (more or less a straight port of the even more popular jinja2) - it's not an odd choice at all. https://github.com/mozilla/nunjucks https://github.com/mozilla/nunjucks
- chickenfries 8y ago
  Would this be more impressive to you if it were React or Angular? Your users don’t care that it’s Nunjucks or Sass. Nunjucks and Sass are perfectly fine.
  - ribs 8y ago
    But obviously the users are not the only or even major constituency here. These are UI components to be used by other developers and (like all software) to be modified down the road to satisfy new and changed requirements. Technology choices matters greatly.
    - chickenfries 8y ago
      The NHS is probably concerned with stability, accessibility and performance. Also I would like you to please explain why sass and Nunjucks are not good for “satisfying changed requirements” Edit: Also, are you serious that GDS should consider front end developers their constituents and not their users?
- tomelders 8y ago
  This entire thing will compile down to regular HTML/CSS. This is about as future proof as you can get.
afarrell 8y ago
I think you’re right to say that this is an existance proof of good public sector work. But you have to then ask for the specifics of how this project came about. You have to dive into how the Government Digital Service build a culture which could not just develop this product but could spread to other organizations.
rukittenme 8y ago
> The next time anyone tries to sell me on the notion that the public sector can't do anything as well as the private sector The Soviets sent the first rocket to space in 1961. Twenty-one years later the first private space company launched its rocket using repurposed government technology. There is no doubt that governments can do things. They are, after all, just groups of people; the same as private enterprises. But while the Soviets were launching rockets, their citizens waited hours in line for their day's rations. "The accepted norm is that the Soviet woman daily spends two hours in line, seven days a week, daily going through double the gauntlet that the American housewife undergoes at her supermarket once, maybe twice a week." Hedrick Smith. When you marshal the entirety of society towards a goal you can accomplish great things. But always at a cost. When a private business makes a terrible app, I can sleep soundly at night knowing I never gave anything up for that app's creation. If I see a beautiful, well-constructed, publicly funded app, I might be pleased at the attention to detail and admire the construction of the thing. But I have to wonder, what did I give up in return? How many people with broken arms waited in an over-burdened system for the prestige of a beautiful website? The problem isn't that the government can or can not. Its the choice to do or do not. Its the opportunity cost to the society that poisons the government's action.
- tomelders 8y ago
  Well NASA put a man on the Moon and America's economy boomed at the same time. Also, your tax dollars are absolutely being handed over to private organisations in one way or another. Either through subsidies, tax breaks, welfare, economic initiatives, or direct investment.
  - briandear 8y ago
    A tax break isn’t handing money to anyone— it’s not taking it in the first place. There is a difference.
    - jarym 8y ago
      Not to socialists
jdietrich 8y ago
The remarkable success of British public sector IT largely stems from the disastrous failure of the NHS National Programme for IT. We spent £10bn on a hugely ambitious project and ended up with nothing to show for it. This disaster was the worst of many expensive failures in public sector tech procurement. Eventually, it became apparent to even the most out-of-touch politicians and civil servants that the weird nerds talking about "agile" and "lean" might have a point. The Government Digital Service proved that a small team could get huge results by using the right methodologies; we haven't looked back since. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service
- Spearchucker 8y ago
  And even GDS isn't getting it right. Some mind-blowing examples of that are the Government Gateway replacement, Office of the Public Guardian, Border Force and Home Office... GDS does really good work. Not denying that, and it's awesome to see that in the public sector. However when your only(!) tool is a web app, every project starts looking like a thumb. It should also be noted that others like the MoD have had even bigger successes than GDS, that simply cannot be publicised. Even the NHS Digital Service is struggling with spend. The still-born Type 1 Diabetes project from a year or so ago a is prime example of writing off months of work without a word.
  - djaychela 8y ago
    >And even GDS isn't getting it right. Some mind-blowing examples of that are the Government Gateway replacement, Office of the Public Guardian, Border Force and Home Office... Yeah - I used money claim online this year to take a non paying client to court. It was a really nasty experience - the login is needlessly complex and had I not made manual notes I wouldn't have been able to log back in. Awful.
    - DanBC 8y ago
      I think MoJ is not using GDS because they want independence from government.
ToFab123 8y ago
A big reason for this is include that public IT projects tends to have more relaxed deadlines than private sector projects. Private sector projects are often managed by people who has chainsaws fitted to their elbows and that has zero tolerance for delays. There is a degree of flexibility in public IT projects that I rarely come across on private projects. On the other hands, I have seen more huge project failures on the public sector jobs than on private sector projects. Those elbow chainsaw people often catch fundamental flaws earlier than their public sector counterparts. Given the choice I would pick to work on public sector projects than private sector simply because the much lower stress level and that you have more time to produce quality;Like the NHS guys has been able to on this project. Disclosure: I have spent the last 18 years working as systems architect / technical leads on countless large government and private sector projects (web/intranet)
- arctangent 8y ago
  I'm the tech lead for the NHS website (www.nhs.uk) and I oversee the team who are building this frontend library. I largely agree with what you have written above, however things work very differently now in NHS Digital. Every piece of work we embark upon is based on strict requirements from a commissioning body (typically NHS England or Public Health England) and is managed tightly according to budget and demonstrated realised benefits. We have a highly capable layer of delivery managers who help translate and interpret these "business goals" into things which our agile teams of developers can work towards. It's not perfect, but we're improving all the time. If we fail then the money taps get turned off quickly, and we move onto something else.
jaabe 8y ago
I work in the Danish public sector and we’re miles ahead on some areas. Our authentication and user-role setup, around a national SAML token and context handler, which functions with ADFS seamlessly is one example. It works, we integrate with it and it makes security plug and play. Except very few companies in the private sector knows what ADFS or even token based authentication is. So we have to sell them schooling in how to build what is essentially basic user authentication. The internal services we get to build are also miles ahead of anything you’ll see in the Danish private sector. Probably because we can move a lot faster because we don’t expect our customers to pay for our updates. Our goal is to provide efficient, secure and stable software at the lowest price, and if that means we move things to the cloud, then that’s what we’ll do as soon as possible. That’s the positive side. The negative side is the big failures, and we certainly have those. Mostly on a national basis, but that doesn’t make the seriousness of them any less severe.

mr_isomies 8y ago

While I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment about the public sector, as a first hand user of the NHS I can attest that it is completely falling appart. Sure, maybe they can make a UI framework but this is watering the lawn while the house is burning.

umvi 8y ago

> The next time anyone tries to sell me on the notion that the public sector can't do anything as well as the private sector What if I try to sell you on the notion that getting quality this high out of the public sector is extremely unlikely?

jacobtwotwo 8y ago
What if I just ask pointless hypothetical questions and follow them up with no substance at all?
jarvuschris 8y ago
It doesn't happen most of the time yet, but that doesn't mean it's a gamble. I wouldn't describe it as "extremely unlikely" We actually have figured out how to run public sector software projects successfully. It's not a mystery anymore. There's a lot of barriers still to practicing agile service design within the constraints of most government organizations, but good results are consistent where you can carve out the space to implement it. Look at "digital services" teams at every level of gov: - UK Originals: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ - US Stormers: https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/ - US Normers: https://www.usds.gov/ https://www.usds.gov/ - CA State Child Welfare: https://cwds.ca.gov/ https://cwds.ca.gov/ - CA Benefits Enrollment: https://www.getcalfresh.org/ https://www.getcalfresh.org/ - CA Digital Services: https://github.com/CDTgithub/DigitalServiceOpportunities https://github.com/CDTgithub/DigitalServiceOpportunities - MA Digital Services: https://www.mass.gov/orgs/digital-services https://www.mass.gov/orgs/digital-services - Philadelphia: https://www.phila.gov/departments/office-of-open-data-and-digital-transformation/ https://www.phila.gov/departments/office-of-open-data-and-di... - San Francisco: https://digitalservices.sfgov.org/ https://digitalservices.sfgov.org/ - NYC: https://playbook.cityofnewyork.us/ https://playbook.cityofnewyork.us/ - Boston: https://www.boston.gov/departments/digital-team https://www.boston.gov/departments/digital-team
starbeast 8y ago
What if I try to sell you on the notion that getting high quality is extremely unlikely by definition, otherwise it would be called average quality?
jtloong 8y ago
This is what the whole digital government movement is trying to change. Public sector organization's in the UK (GDS), Canada (CDS, ODS etc), Singapore (GovTech Singapore), even 18F in the US, are all trying (and relatively succeeding even if incrementally) to change the public sector's ability to put out quality technology services.

dgzl 8y ago

I think the argument of private sector vs public sector for quality also comes with a price. As in, how much did that fancy UI cost the public, vs. how much (edit: it would have cost) the private sector to build.

lghh 8y ago
It didn't cost the private sector to build it... because they didn't and wouldn't.
- dgzl 8y ago
  Are you really missing the point? The cost to build something in the private sector is almost always cheaper than asking government employees to do it. The public sector "didn't build it" like you said, but if they had, it would have been cheaper. This is almost always the case.
  - Traster 8y ago
    It's worth noting that whilst the cost of producing something in the private sector is cheaper than the public sector, the cost of the public sector acquiring something from the private sector is orders of magnitude larger than the cost of doing it in the private sector. I always think it's rather odd that people who propagate the idea that the private sector can do things much better than the public sector simultaneously need to believe the public sector is better at negotiating contracts in order to believe that contracting out work makes sense. I think the key here is that the British government have reproducibly found of way of creating high quality sites. That should be examined, embraced and extended.
  - frobozz 8y ago
    Nonsense. In the private sector, shareholders take money out of the system in the form of profit. Something that costs £X in labour and consumables must be charged at £X+Y% in order to make that happen and still give money to investors. If they can do it cheaper, they still charge £X+Y%, and give the surplus to the shareholders. In the public sector, there is no shareholder. If it costs £X in labour and consumables, then the cost to the public purse is £X. If they manage to do it cheaper, then that money remains in the system and can be used to either improve the offering, or subsidise another project. Public sector workers are also often paid considerably less than their private sector peers, and departments are often highly restricted in their ability to pay market rates for specialist employees. Although the total benefits package for public sector workers has historically been equal to or better than their private sector peers, this has typically been due to Final Salary pensions, which have been mostly phased out in favour of Career Average or even Defined Contribution pensions, all without a corresponding increase in salary.

baddox 8y ago

Not to downplay the quality of this work, but being able to extensively plan and specify requirements ahead of time is a luxury that a lot of engineering teams at private companies would love to have.

lghh 8y ago
Yes, they would love to have the luxury. I doubt the parent comment is saying that engineering teams would not want to be able to produce something like that, but rather given the confines of the lust for ever increasing profit, they can't.
- baddox 8y ago
  “Lust for ever increasing profit” is one way to put it. You could also say that private companies have requirements that are constantly moving as the market changes and must be discovered and adapted, rather than legal requirements that are roughly static and well-specified.
  - iosonofuturista 8y ago
    I would _love_ to know where are those public sector projects where the requirements are “roughly static and well-specified”.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      How about every single one of them? They gotta fill a request for proposal in order to outsource a project, then there can be multiple rounds of back and forth to review and revise proposals. That includes quite a few documents, covering requirements among many other things.
jarvuschris 8y ago
Having done a lot of work in both spaces, trust me -- there's nothing luxury about getting this work done in the public space. Also, extensively planning and specifying requirements ahead of time is exactly the opposite of how you pull off delivering well-designed public UX like this. In the public space you inherently never have a single person who can call all the shots, because organizationally you're accountable to all of the public. Orgs have to be set up to carry on operations resiliently outside having a controlled lineage of management. How you do things is far more directly and heavily influenced by legislation, and that landscape is constantly shifting over the course of your project. BY FAR the private sector is where engineers can enjoy far more luxury.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ng12 8y ago

Not to be curmudgeonly but this is exactly what I would expect from public sector. - Odd technology choices. It took me a long time to figure out what .njk files were. - Misapplication of popular technologies. They're using webpack for... something? But most of the actual bundling is done by hand with gulp, and a lot of the JavaScript is operating in the global scope. - Overselling. It's just a bunch of scss with some mostly-HTML components.

bendmorris 8y ago
>It took me a long time to figure out what .njk files were. Nunjucks is a very popular JS templating language (more or less a straight port of the even more popular jinja2) - it's not an odd choice at all. https://github.com/mozilla/nunjucks https://github.com/mozilla/nunjucks
chickenfries 8y ago
Would this be more impressive to you if it were React or Angular? Your users don’t care that it’s Nunjucks or Sass. Nunjucks and Sass are perfectly fine.
- ribs 8y ago
  But obviously the users are not the only or even major constituency here. These are UI components to be used by other developers and (like all software) to be modified down the road to satisfy new and changed requirements. Technology choices matters greatly.
  - chickenfries 8y ago
    The NHS is probably concerned with stability, accessibility and performance. Also I would like you to please explain why sass and Nunjucks are not good for “satisfying changed requirements” Edit: Also, are you serious that GDS should consider front end developers their constituents and not their users?
tomelders 8y ago
This entire thing will compile down to regular HTML/CSS. This is about as future proof as you can get.

afarrell 8y ago

I think you’re right to say that this is an existance proof of good public sector work. But you have to then ask for the specifics of how this project came about. You have to dive into how the Government Digital Service build a culture which could not just develop this product but could spread to other organizations.

rukittenme 8y ago

> The next time anyone tries to sell me on the notion that the public sector can't do anything as well as the private sector The Soviets sent the first rocket to space in 1961. Twenty-one years later the first private space company launched its rocket using repurposed government technology. There is no doubt that governments can do things. They are, after all, just groups of people; the same as private enterprises. But while the Soviets were launching rockets, their citizens waited hours in line for their day's rations. "The accepted norm is that the Soviet woman daily spends two hours in line, seven days a week, daily going through double the gauntlet that the American housewife undergoes at her supermarket once, maybe twice a week." Hedrick Smith. When you marshal the entirety of society towards a goal you can accomplish great things. But always at a cost. When a private business makes a terrible app, I can sleep soundly at night knowing I never gave anything up for that app's creation. If I see a beautiful, well-constructed, publicly funded app, I might be pleased at the attention to detail and admire the construction of the thing. But I have to wonder, what did I give up in return? How many people with broken arms waited in an over-burdened system for the prestige of a beautiful website? The problem isn't that the government can or can not. Its the choice to do or do not. Its the opportunity cost to the society that poisons the government's action.

tomelders 8y ago
Well NASA put a man on the Moon and America's economy boomed at the same time. Also, your tax dollars are absolutely being handed over to private organisations in one way or another. Either through subsidies, tax breaks, welfare, economic initiatives, or direct investment.
- briandear 8y ago
  A tax break isn’t handing money to anyone— it’s not taking it in the first place. There is a difference.
  - jarym 8y ago
    Not to socialists

jdietrich 8y ago

The remarkable success of British public sector IT largely stems from the disastrous failure of the NHS National Programme for IT. We spent £10bn on a hugely ambitious project and ended up with nothing to show for it. This disaster was the worst of many expensive failures in public sector tech procurement. Eventually, it became apparent to even the most out-of-touch politicians and civil servants that the weird nerds talking about "agile" and "lean" might have a point. The Government Digital Service proved that a small team could get huge results by using the right methodologies; we haven't looked back since. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service

Spearchucker 8y ago
And even GDS isn't getting it right. Some mind-blowing examples of that are the Government Gateway replacement, Office of the Public Guardian, Border Force and Home Office... GDS does really good work. Not denying that, and it's awesome to see that in the public sector. However when your only(!) tool is a web app, every project starts looking like a thumb. It should also be noted that others like the MoD have had even bigger successes than GDS, that simply cannot be publicised. Even the NHS Digital Service is struggling with spend. The still-born Type 1 Diabetes project from a year or so ago a is prime example of writing off months of work without a word.
- djaychela 8y ago
  >And even GDS isn't getting it right. Some mind-blowing examples of that are the Government Gateway replacement, Office of the Public Guardian, Border Force and Home Office... Yeah - I used money claim online this year to take a non paying client to court. It was a really nasty experience - the login is needlessly complex and had I not made manual notes I wouldn't have been able to log back in. Awful.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    I think MoJ is not using GDS because they want independence from government.

ToFab123 8y ago

A big reason for this is include that public IT projects tends to have more relaxed deadlines than private sector projects. Private sector projects are often managed by people who has chainsaws fitted to their elbows and that has zero tolerance for delays. There is a degree of flexibility in public IT projects that I rarely come across on private projects. On the other hands, I have seen more huge project failures on the public sector jobs than on private sector projects. Those elbow chainsaw people often catch fundamental flaws earlier than their public sector counterparts. Given the choice I would pick to work on public sector projects than private sector simply because the much lower stress level and that you have more time to produce quality;Like the NHS guys has been able to on this project. Disclosure: I have spent the last 18 years working as systems architect / technical leads on countless large government and private sector projects (web/intranet)

arctangent 8y ago
I'm the tech lead for the NHS website (www.nhs.uk) and I oversee the team who are building this frontend library. I largely agree with what you have written above, however things work very differently now in NHS Digital. Every piece of work we embark upon is based on strict requirements from a commissioning body (typically NHS England or Public Health England) and is managed tightly according to budget and demonstrated realised benefits. We have a highly capable layer of delivery managers who help translate and interpret these "business goals" into things which our agile teams of developers can work towards. It's not perfect, but we're improving all the time. If we fail then the money taps get turned off quickly, and we move onto something else.

jaabe 8y ago

I work in the Danish public sector and we’re miles ahead on some areas. Our authentication and user-role setup, around a national SAML token and context handler, which functions with ADFS seamlessly is one example. It works, we integrate with it and it makes security plug and play. Except very few companies in the private sector knows what ADFS or even token based authentication is. So we have to sell them schooling in how to build what is essentially basic user authentication. The internal services we get to build are also miles ahead of anything you’ll see in the Danish private sector. Probably because we can move a lot faster because we don’t expect our customers to pay for our updates. Our goal is to provide efficient, secure and stable software at the lowest price, and if that means we move things to the cloud, then that’s what we’ll do as soon as possible. That’s the positive side. The negative side is the big failures, and we certainly have those. Mostly on a national basis, but that doesn’t make the seriousness of them any less severe.