3 ms·

The Government Digital Service are doing wonders for UK government web applications - which have gone from 'pretty terrible' to 'global standard setting', for t

by dflock 12y ago

The Government Digital Service are doing wonders for UK government web applications - which have gone from 'pretty terrible' to 'global standard setting', for the ones that they've got around to so far: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ Hopefully, this success will be repeated in the US.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Agreed - just wrote pretty much the same thing. I find it professionally embarrassing that my government does better work than 95% of the private sector. It should also be a minimum standard for the work any client should expect. Fucking scary :-)
- tim333 12y ago
  I watched Mike Bracken, who I think runs that, talk at Wikimania a couple of days back. Quite inspiring in some ways. He figures they have saved about £14bn in government costs by spending about £58m on developers. Quite a contrast from the NHS fiasco with private developers blowing £12bn before their thing was scrapped (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health) You can see Bracken's talk at http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/58615661 http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/586156... from about 2:14:50
- ownagefool 12y ago
  Whoever runs these departments is letting bright technical people make the technical decisions. This does result in some CV-Driven-Development, but for the most part it's a hell of a lot better than trying to explain VCS or DR to your pointy haired manager. These .GOV dept don't really need to worry about finances and they seem to be willing to hire contract workers and let them get heavily involved in the project. In the UK contractors will happily earn double your perm staff and that's before counting the fact they can bypass the 40% tax bracket. Compare that to the private sector, they tend to prefer that all decisions are made by perm staff who are often outdated and are happy to sit there at half the contractors salary, paying double the tax and costing the company over 1.5x their headline salary. Doesn't really make sense to me, you're not gonna find the best and brightest by paying them in a terrible way when they have an easy, more lucrative, alternative.
rkangel 12y ago
Yes. What's really worked for GDS is having some political clout. You can assemble the best technical team in the world, but if they don't have the ability to push back hard against some of the entrenched resistance to change in most government departments then they can't achieve anything. I hope the US DS is similarly well endowed with political might.

by dflock 12y ago

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

Agreed - just wrote pretty much the same thing. I find it professionally embarrassing that my government does better work than 95% of the private sector. It should also be a minimum standard for the work any client should expect. Fucking scary :-)

tim333 12y ago
I watched Mike Bracken, who I think runs that, talk at Wikimania a couple of days back. Quite inspiring in some ways. He figures they have saved about £14bn in government costs by spending about £58m on developers. Quite a contrast from the NHS fiasco with private developers blowing £12bn before their thing was scrapped (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health) You can see Bracken's talk at http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/58615661 http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/586156... from about 2:14:50
ownagefool 12y ago
Whoever runs these departments is letting bright technical people make the technical decisions. This does result in some CV-Driven-Development, but for the most part it's a hell of a lot better than trying to explain VCS or DR to your pointy haired manager. These .GOV dept don't really need to worry about finances and they seem to be willing to hire contract workers and let them get heavily involved in the project. In the UK contractors will happily earn double your perm staff and that's before counting the fact they can bypass the 40% tax bracket. Compare that to the private sector, they tend to prefer that all decisions are made by perm staff who are often outdated and are happy to sit there at half the contractors salary, paying double the tax and costing the company over 1.5x their headline salary. Doesn't really make sense to me, you're not gonna find the best and brightest by paying them in a terrible way when they have an easy, more lucrative, alternative.

rkangel 12y ago

Yes. What's really worked for GDS is having some political clout. You can assemble the best technical team in the world, but if they don't have the ability to push back hard against some of the entrenched resistance to change in most government departments then they can't achieve anything. I hope the US DS is similarly well endowed with political might.