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Well, the UK does both. It has both incredible barriers to entry that exclude anyone other than consulting firms whose central skills is dealing with them from
by moomin 3y ago
Well, the UK does both. It has both incredible barriers to entry that exclude anyone other than consulting firms whose central skills is dealing with them from participation, and it also has VIP lanes for routing work to your mates.
- ido 3y agoSo why are online gov services still so much better in the uk then in Germany?
- jetbooster 3y agoThe only cynical solution I can think of is someone is getting obscenely rich by keeping Government Digital running effectively
- michaelt 3y agoIn terms of motivation, online services do save the government money on administration costs like manual data entry, costs of returning forms that have been filled out wrong, etc. And every government likes efficiency savings much more than increasing taxes or reducing government services. In terms of implementation, the government employs a small number of competent people directly - the "Government Digital Service" - who accomplish some projects. Other IT projects are done by organisations like Accenture, CSC, Atos Origin, Fujitsu and BT. They are generally paid more if the project is late or buggy, with predictable results. But they'll often produce something eventually, if enough money is thrown at them. The "VIP lanes for routing work to your mates" are more for things like buying overpriced PPE during the pandemic.
- BucketsMcG 3y ago1) Most of uk.gov is actually designed and built in-house. 2) Germany, as a nation, got to about 1991 and collectively decided "This is nice, let's keep it like this". Even the most technologically progressive regions of Germany still think it's 1997. Elsewhere, it's like the wall never came down.
- tormeh 3y agoHonestly, this just reflects the age of the population. Change is more painful when you're old, so stasis becomes more attractive. Usually Germans like the general idea of improvement, but they hate change.
- ethbr1 3y agoAh, so that's why Germany and Japan have such an easy trading relationship.
- tormeh 3y agoYes, finally someone else with whom to fax.
- alex_suzuki 3y agoAnyone here who has written a fax gateway (receive TIFF of fax, do OCR, save somewhere and convert to PDF)? raises hand (fax is alive and well in Switzerland)
- ethbr1 3y agoThis boggles the mind on the cultural-legal implications in fax-centric countries of doing: Fax to TIFF to OCR to PDF to internet transfer to TIFF to fax But anyone still requiring fax would probably just be happy "it came out of a fax machine / software."
- tormeh 3y agoFax is a secure channel, apparently, which of course is complete horseshit. It uses the phone network, which is only marginally better than the internet. Many know that email headers can be faked, but not so many know that phone numbers can, too. Legally I guess this becomes the problem of the party that introduces the intermediate stages. The other party doesn't need to care.
- tim333 3y agoWe have this stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911218