Ministry of Defence | Defence News | MOD confirms loss of recruitment data

[Peter Tomlinson]

Roland Perry wrote:
> In article <479443DA.3070800@iosis.co.uk>, Peter Tomlinson 
> <pwt@iosis.co.uk> writes
>> So why are the civil servants not working out how to do the job 
>> properly?
>
> I seems to me you are expecting "the Civil Service" to act like the 
> kind of 'Society' that Maggie observed doesn't exist. Or do you think 
> that they do in fact get together over the port in some gentleman's 
> club in central London and plan a strategy to fix problems like this?
>
> In practice I think individual departmental civil servants can see 
> they have no budget or remit to re-design anything on such a grand 
> scale, however much some of them might privately realise that there is 
> a requirement for a better solution. It's someone else's problem.
>
And the 'someone else' group are the ones at the top of each dept who 
need investment funding from Treasury.

Don't you remember the Information Age Government Champions from 10 
years ago? Middle ranking civil servants getting together to look at 
what was needed by way of change. One thing that they did was to create 
the Framework for Smart Cards in Government (that was where I was 
involved). By 2002 we had the Information Assurance policies from 
Cabinet Office - but spending depts were not required to implement them 
and thus Treasury did not fund the business process re-engineering 
required. Cabinet Office carried on looking at the topic, with a 
re-written (but fumbled - Ross Anderson's comments refer) IA policy last 
year. Now we have increasing information sharing across depts - and 
volunteers have been requested for convening working groups on 
'standards' (specifications) - industry and Intellect are doing a bit of 
that - but we really do need the culture of the spending depts to 
change. Richard Thomas has got the bit between his teeth, so maybe 
behind him he's also got the support that he needs. Yes, I do expect the 
Perm Secs to get together.

Peter