On Bazalgette @govuk

I chuckled when I saw a quote from Mike Bracken, speaking at a recent conference.  He is reported to have talked about:

The 'public service ethos' of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who designed the main drainage and sewerage system for London in the 1850s, Bracken said that the Government Digital Service's (GDS) first focus was on meeting user needs, with making savings a secondary driver.

It's probably not often that Government's main online service delivery is compared with sewage transport mechanisms ... though the last time I'm aware of was when I made a similar link in September 2004 at an IDeA conference:

The picture in the top left corner is of the monument to Sir Joseph which is, obviously perhaps, on the Embankment in London.

On Bazalgette @govuk

If IT Is Broken ... Have We Got The Right Fix?

The main problem with Government IT, many will say, is that contracts (and so power, revenue and so on) is concentrated in a small number of very large vendors, mostly in single prime contracts. Even when they're not in single prime setups they are in dual prime (e.g. MoJ has Atos and Logica, Home Office has Atos and Fujitsu, HMRC has CapGemini and, wait, Fujitsu and so on). So the fix, we are told, is to no longer allow such single prime contracts and, as a consequence of deciding that, break the market open to new players. Job done.

A new model has been crowned that goes by the name of "towers". In another time, it might have been called best of breed. Essentially, several different suppliers are chosen, each of will be skilled in a specific tower - where those towers will be functions such as hosting, applications development, security, desktop support and so on (some tower models have seven such towers, some as many as thirteen). Such towers sometimes exist within the context of a single prime model but, this time, it is the contracting authority (i.e. the government department) who will own all of those contracts. They will, the thinking goes, have complete visibility of all of the prices and eliminate any "margin on margin" that results from the prime holding subcontracts. The result? A better deal will be had by government.

There is a very special kind of tower though. We might call it the sine qua non of the tower model. It's various called the service integration tower or the SIAM (Service Integration and Management). In effect, it's the old prime contractor (though not necessarily one of the companies that holds those contracts now) re-appearing as the company that manages all of the different towers, but doesn't actually hold the contracts.

If we know, then, that the prime contractor model was so broken that it needed to be replaced, are we sure, I wonder, that the new model is going to fix all of the problems inherent in the old world? Well, let's see:

- Lack of transparency ... fixed to some degree ... the contracting department will now see the cost of each of the components of the service. That doesn't mean that there is full transparency within each contract of course. Whilst everything is "open book" there are a million definitions of what that means.

- No margin on margin ... fixed to some degree ... the absence of a prime means that one layer of margin is gone, but there will be other layers within the towers (particularly where small companies are encouraged to play by coming in under the "safe" wing of a bigger company)

- Shorter contracts so more regular competition ... fixed to some degree ... Whilst G-Cloud encourages one year contracts (the framework forces such contracts though there is nothing to prevent renewal at the end of the period), the new models seem to encourage durations somewhere between 3 and 7 years. Better than 10 years but still gives plenty of room for prices to keep up (the regular iterations of G-Cloud services will provide very useful benchmarking though as is already being seen)

- Lack of innovation ... uncertain ... it's probably true that big IT companies struggle to bring new capabilities to bear but I suspect that it's equally true that government has struggled to adopt such interesting developments as became available. Splitting contracts into smaller chunks doesn't necessarily make them lighter weight and easier to change, but it might if government carries on with its plans to change the protective marking of data (and if the 50% of new spend via the public cloud promise is held on to, there is certainly scope for more innovation, but I don't see that as related, particularly to the towers model)

- Greater involvement of SME ... Uncertain ... Breaking what were very large contracts into smaller, shorter contracts should certainly allow new players into the game, but it's not clear if small players will make the cut. The recent PSN framework perhaps demonstrates that with only two small players involved - though that's still two more than before. Without a wholesale shift away from complexity towards commodity, small players will still struggle to navigate the arcane bureaucracy of most government contracts and so will likely need to shelter uner the wings of the bigger players for some time to come

- Better delivery ... Uncertain ... I guess we have to wait and see. There will, though, be several schools of thought. The large players will say that they can only deliver if they have control of everything; others will say that the more complex the interactions between the contracts, the harder it will be to deliver; still others will say that competitive tension between the suppliers and the knowledge that the contracts are much shorter (or that individual pieces of work can be competed) will improve performance all round. How the SIAM looks and works may turn out to be the key here - how they operate, influence and drive change could make all the difference to delivery (for better or worse)

- Lower risk or, at least, better and clearer risk transfer ... Also uncertain ... With many more moving parts and overall control resting with the customer, aided in some way yet to be determined by the SIAM, the risk picture certainly looks more complicated from the outset.

The net of that is that, in my view, it's unclear if this new model solves the problems of the old model. Much of whether it does will be in the detail of the contracts and the behaviour on the ground, by which time it's too late to do much about it until the end of the first contract term - and at least that is a shorter period than it has historically been.

What worries me most about the new model is not whether it fixes any problems of the old model but how it will actually be put together. There are three stages that need to be got through, each of which will be more challenging than the equivalents ever were in the old model.

1. Buying it all. With the prime model, there were many potential suppliers at the beginning, a few in the middle and 2-3 near the end. Negotiations completed with just one. With the new model there will be multiple, parallel, inter-dependent commercial negotiations underway. That will put a huge burden on the client side buying team. In the past those teams have been heavily supported by external parties; that may not be possible this time, although some will put the SIAM or an equivalent in place first to mitigate that problem. Of course, several parts of government will be doing this at the same time putting pressure on customers, suppliers and potential partners.

2. The transition. There have been relatively few changes of contract over the last ten years. HMRC moving from EDS to Cap is one, for instance. That was largely a one to one transition. With the new models there will, if the point of the model is realised, be multiple transitions to manage - staff will be parcelled up and moved to any one of perhaps a half dozen suppliers (some may go back to the customer), systems will move to any of several data centres, support for apps will move (supplier, location and perhaps even country) and so on. That's going to take a lot of management. Departments may say "that's what the SIAM is for". Suppliers may be giving work away for one contract at the same time as they are taking work on as a result of winning another contract. That could get interesting.

3. Running day to day. All of those moving parts, everyone looking at each other when a problem occurs, many pointing fingers away from themselves. How to diagnose a problem? Who moves first? Who pays service credits? Who proposes, funds and benefits from improvements? What happens in a crisis? All to be figured out. Again, some will give much of that role to the SIAM.

I used "SIAM" in each of those paragraphs deliberately. I get the feeling that it's the role that everyone thinks will fix the problems of the past. Yet whoever operates there will not have contractual leverage unless they are, actually, the client themselves (that is, the owner of the contracts). At the same time, the SIAM looks a lot like a prime, without the ability to take on / share / divest / pass back risk. It isn't, in my view, as simple as breaking up the contracts and creating a phantom integrator who somehow brings it together.

I wonder if the analsysis - and the sharing of understanding, lessons learned, best practice etc - is in place to support such a comprehensive and largely parallel implementation of the new model. It's going to take a lot of work from all parties to make it work and, even then, it may turn out to be no better than the old model in some ways. It may be worse in some, better in others. But we'll be in it, across the board, by then. So best to do all of the thinking now.

If IT Is Broken ... Have We Got The Right Fix?

Just 18 Months

Now that it's out that Chris Chant is retiring a common phrase in articles is that he's going after "just 18 months" running G-Cloud. It's Chris' style to leave quietly and, as I've known him, worked with him, and for him, for about a dozen years I thought I might recap some of the things he's done, both in just 18 months as well as over the period I've known him.

G-Cloud has proved to be a hot topic in the world of government IT - and a little beyond - with attention increasing dramatically after Chris' #unacceptable speech in October 2011. In this climate of openness, transparency, blogging and tweeting, I don't think anyone has (ever) managed to be quite as open, provocative and engaging - nor respond to as many comments, articles, opinions and analyst reports - on as Chris has. He will be a hard act to follow. 

Some have already claimed, or at least thought, that he was only as open as he was because he knew he was going - and those same people usually refer to his twitter handle (@cantwaitogo) as evidence of that. I know they're wrong - Chris has always been as open as he is now, it's just that he has been able to take advantage of new channels recently to ensure the message gets out more widely. His twitter handle shows only that his spelling is as questionable as ever and refers to some volunteer work that he did at Ambue Ari (hence his leopard profile picture - apparently the Mario pictures were all copyrighted).  If anything, his post-retirement twitter handle, rather than being @gone, will be @cantwaitogoback.

In the just 18 months Chris ran G-Cloud he managed to design, develop and launch an entirely new approach within government procurement, aided only by a tiny team from departments and the Government Procurement Service, most of whom had day jobs as well. G-Cloud plainly leads the world in its thinking and its action. The second iteration, due in the next couple of weeks, will further extend that lead and provide a more flexible procurement platform whilst making it simple for those on the existing framework to transition.  In a while, we will look back and see 2012 as a pivotal year in the evolution of government IT, even though the changes orchestrated now will take some time to bed in.

But before there was even a procurement vehicle, Chris had to galvanise the inevitably disparate parts of government to want such a thing - a truly open, transparent, everything published and visible to all procurement catalogue. He had to bring people together to think about how it might work, get funding, get support from permanent secretaries and ministers, convince people to become foundation delivery partners, work with suppliers to shape it, persuade lawyers and commercial people to accept a radically slimmed down approach, convince SMEs to play a major part (70% of those on the framework are SMEs), figure out how to publish all supplier information (including prices - a first time ever), persuade people that rating suppliers not only made sense but was absolutely necessary and present endlessly to audiences inside and outside of government to help get the message over. On top of that he had to fight to convince those who said it couldn't be done, that suppliers wouldn't sign up for it and that customers wouldn't buy from it. Creating change in government has never been easy and G-Cloud shows that, whilst that is still true, it can be done but that it takes enormous effort, huge commitment from a small number of individuals and relentless focus.

Alongside that Chris was breaking the mould in other areas - introducing public cloud email into the Cabinet Office (their first taste of their own dog food I am sure) and switching people away from expensive government standard devices to far cheaper off the shelf devices (showing an 80% cost saving). He also laid the groundwork for an entirely new approach to government web delivery by kicking off what became known as Alpha.gov and that will result in direct.gov being replaced a year or less from now.  Somewhere on this path he managed to become the 17th most influential person in UK IT (more to his own surprise than that of anyone else I'm sure).

When I first met Chris he was a tax man- not a career IT guy as some have said (actually Chris knows as much about IT as the average dormouse - something that has certainly counted in his favour as he sought simpler and simpler solutions). He went from there to delivering online transactions at the Inland Revenue (now HMRC) including PAYE the first time, upgrades to Self Assessment, Corporation Tax and so on. Since 2001, HMRC has had by far the largest take up of online transactions across government - they were the first to try out incentives (few will remember, perhaps, the £10 rebate for filing your Self Assessment online), the first to move to mandation (after the Carter report) and will likely be the first to get 100% take up if not already, then very soon. Chris also worked on or ran direct.gov.uk and a dozen other government websites as well as the the government gateway.  

In other roles, Chris has switched departments from 100% desktop to 100% laptop so allowing remote working and a reduction in carbon footprint, rolled out collaboration tools to support joint working, assured technology for the Olympics and many other things, not to mention loitered outside fish and chip shops counting the sacks of potatoes being delivered so that he could estimate sales and so, in turn, figure out how much tax the owner really should have been paying - them's proper metrics them is.

And, along the way, he has routinely regaled his friends, colleagues, customers and suppliers with endless tall tales, mostly crap jokes, comments about the poor quality of football at Arsenal (and the significantly better quality at Tottenham), infectious enthusiasm for the latest gadgets (from 'phones to cameras to televisions and beyond) and, until he switched to eating only carrots, was one of the finer dinner companions in the UK - certainly higher than the 17th most influential dinner companion in the UK I believe.  Not every day was a blast with Chris and he didn't get everything right, but I'm hard pressed to remember the bad ones amongst the torrent of good ones.

If only others could accomplish as much in such a period as Chris has managed to, in just 18 months.  As wiser folks than me have said, success has 1000 fathers (and failure is an utter b*stard).   Chris will be missed by many though doubtless some, particularly those who were on the receiving end of some of his more explosive blasts, will be pleased that he's gone, hoping that the cloud will become what they always thought it was, vapour.  It won't.

I'm sure the world of Government IT will be a slightly quieter place come the beginning of May, but I am confident that few of the changes Chris has kicked off will be unwound. And some will be reinforced even more strongly by the tiny team with the day jobs - they're still there and will be working just as hard to support Chris' successor, Denise McDonagh.

Just 18 Months

Ages of e-Government

Pre-Envoyian, also known as CeCeTAcian ... characterised by rapid activity amongst many life forms, mostly concentrated in two strata, Norfolk's Broads and Upper Whitehall.  Significant invention and development of new technologies.

Citucene ... period of outlandish creativity amongst new lifeforms and the launch of entirely new streams of life along with the first exchanges of information between lifeforms across something akin to telepathy known as GSI.

Neo-Envoyian ... a quieter period of calm reflection and preparation for renewed growth.  Early indications of polices on digital lifeforms and how they might interact in the future digital age.

Envoyian ... a lengthy period characterised by a focus on achieving targets for growth and interaction, many thousands of new website lifeforms emerged many of which would be relatively short-lived.  Also a period of invention and development of new technologies and, for the first time, co-operation between the various species found across government.  Much of the activity was in a previously little known part of the planet known as Victoria.

Unitiferous ... an age of consolidation as the website lifeforms previously created began to decay (their fossilised remains can sometimes be seen in a special preservation area near Kew).  Also saw the emergence of new attempts to control future lifeform development as the more powerful denizens of the age came together for the first time.

CIOzoic ... a sustained period of little change though filled with occasional bursts of life that often escaped into the wild uncontrolled and eventually contained only after great expense.   The period of decay from the earlier age continued during the CIOzoic.

Brackonian ... only just beginning and appears to be similar to the Envoyian age with the rapid emergence of many new technologies that iterate quickly and take on new forms almost faster than anyone can identify.  This could be an age where all user lifeforms experience great beauty ... or the rapid profusion could result in difficulties sustaining life later.  A new area has been colonised for this experiment, known as Holborn.

Ages of e-Government

ICT Futures for non-ICT deals?

Liam Maxwell's ICT Futures team are, as far as can be seen, getting properly stuck into IT deals.  But who is going to look at the other deals going on in government?

1) Frameworks are being generated across every part of government.  Central government has its PSN, G-Cloud, commodity (known, I think, as Achilles) and according to the GPS site there are more to come and, whilst these deals are set up for the entire public sector to use, there are still other frameworks being generated including regional and local PSNs, NHS frameworks and also frameworks within departments themselves.  And then there's the overlap between frameworks, such as PSN and G-Cloud both offering, for instance, e-mail. Pretty soon suppliers will have a choice of three dozen routes to market for any given deal yet will have little in the way of business to show for their hard efforts.  After all, getting on to a framework isn't free - far from it in many cases.  There needs to be a charge to rationalise all of the frameworks, eliminate overlap and ensure that everyone knows where to go to buy what they need, rather than have them think that what they need is yet another framework.

2) BPO deals are shortly to become common place, I suspect, as departments move their attention away from the apparently "easy to count" (the PASC might disagree) world of IT to the more complicated world of business process.  Whilst IT costs anywhere from £13bn-£25bn a year depending on who you listen to, government's spend on its core business may soon be up for grabs - and that annual spend could easily reach £100bn-200bn (again, depending on who you listen to).  Figuring out what is and isn't a good deal for these will be a complicated process.  We need a BPO futures team to look across the public sector, starting in the centre perhaps, to see how these deals are being structured and what needs to be in place to help prevent poor deals being done, ensure lessons are learned and that service improves as a result.

So John Collington is doubtless the Liam Maxwell of "Framework Futures" though he'll want to get moving and put the "hairdryer treatment" on all those setting up their own frameworks in competition with his own.

But who is going to be the BPO Futures lead? The person who reviews business outsource deals to make sure that they make sense and are in line with the overall strategy?

ICT Futures for non-ICT deals?

Reinventing Government IT - #G-Cloud

"On hot sunny days please wait for your ticket to drop down. There are problems with static! Thank you for your patience"

There was a time when, had this been a Government IT project, the requirements would have contained provision for how this device should be modified to ensure that it operated on such hot, sunny days.  That modification would have cost millions and would have been deployed just as the UK entered a phase when the summer temperature didn't exceed 20C for years.  That time was no more than a year ago.

Things are different now.  Now we're content with workarounds and products that do 80% of what is needed with no customisation.

Bring on gCloud. 

(This photo is from a car park ticket machine in Wells, Somerset.  Taken on 6th April 2012)

Reinventing Government IT - #G-Cloud

Banking Web Delivery 2012 #fail

I hold accounts with two different banks.  One chose this weekend to carry out a four day upgrade of its IT - from Friday 30th through Monday 2nd. Four days turned into five as "teething troubles" meant the service didn't actually come back on time.  Today it's working but it has my account history only since the 1st April in it - prior data will apparently "be applied over the coming weeks" until I eventually have a 6 year record.

The trouble is, it's the end of the tax year this week.  What kind of numpty would figure that the best time to carry out a major upgrade of a bank's customer-facing IT systems is just before the financial year end when people are doubtless trying to top up ISAs, move money into pensions, pay out salaries, reclaim expenses and so on?  I'm sure that there's no good time, but year end must be the daftest.

Funny thing is that every April, HMRC carry out a series of major releases around this time, in preparation for the new tax year.  We rarely hear about these, partly because they're mostly back office systems but mostly because they're very good at it and have few failures.  So major upgrades can be done at this time of year but it helps to practice.

The second bank rolled out its own major upgrade in March after some months of beta testing (I declined to participate - the idea of beta testing moving money around just didn't grasp me as a great idea).

The result is an awful website that has gone from usable with some trouble to almost completely unusable.  It's the basics - not allowing a date format of "30/3/12" to be entered and insisting on "30/03/2012" for instance; or, here's another, if I want to transfer £100, why make me enter £100.00 before you'll make the transfer?  Tasks that use to be one click away are now buried in dynamic menus that pop up and disappear as you move the mouse across the screen.

Two different banks, neither owned by the taxpayer, but both failing to deliver in entirely different ways.  And, of course, none of them are being open and out loud about it.

We all find it easy to spot government IT failures - and ensure that they get massive coverage - but let's remember that there are plenty of private sector failures that just drift by us without getting the same scrutiny, even now.

Banking Web Delivery 2012 #fail

Capita And The Fallacy Of Offshore

The IT news media carried stories this week that Capita is to lay off an expected 1,000 staff (other sources say only 400) and move their jobs to India.  These are all jobs Capita's IT Services division (the one that managed to put forward more than 200 products, out of 1700 odd total, on the G-Cloud framework).

They're certainly late to the party as TechMarketView pointed out.  They may even be too late.  I worked for an organisation that moved much of its IT development to India in the early 90s, and by 1992 their team there were assessed as CMM Level 5 (which, I appreciate, doesn't mean the output is good, just that the processes are highly repeatable - so plenty of potential for highly repeatable rubbish).  In 2001 I moved some UK government work offshore - I think we were probably the first to do it then, but others have followed since - we used it mostly for burst capacity (when we didn't have the capacity locally and needed only very short term work to be carried out) but we also did some IT development.

In 2001/2 I advised some companies that said that they were struggling to attract and retain staff what I had learned in the 90s.  I suggested that competing with the local majors - Wipro, Tata, Infosys etc just as much then as now - would be challenging as people would be naturally attracted to home grown brand (one solution I proposed was to do a dual-listing on the Indian stock market and start presenting a carefully cultivated local image) - but that the bigger problem would be the inevitably high staff turnover.

In moving work offshore - not just India but any perceived low cost economy - before I'd quickly seen that if you are first, you enjoy the pick of the people and you get the lowest rates - but just as anomalies close in the stock market - everyone else discovers this same opportunity and competition for resource increases.  Soon you are paying more and your staff are, anyway, leaving for just a thousand pounds or more a year - when the base salary is £10,000, moving for £11,000 can be an easy decision.  Turnover rates can quickly reach 20% and even 40% or more - with the worst rates being in the relatively lower skilled jobs.  Your costs go up both directly - salaries - and indirectly - replacing lost skills over and over again.   Local brands have shown that they can manage this attrition better than foreign brands but not always.

I don't know that the economies are really there in cost terms now.  I'd be surprised if they are as obvious as they once were certainly - especially when you offset redundancy costs from the UK, transition costs, the need to maintain a mixed team, turnover, travel and so on.  Once the cost economies are gone - and I think they finished in 2002 or maybe 2003 - the real benefit comes in being able to use your offshore capability as a kind of "service delivery cloud."  By that I mean if your work comes in irregular peaks and troughs, you use offshore resource to allow you to quickly stand up a set of trained, smart people - and then you move them on to something else when the peak moves on.  But you'd probably be better off partnering in doing that, giving up the few points of margin in return for not needing to manage the whole process.

So 20 years after it became popular, have Capita latched on to a trend that has already moved on?  Are they the last one buying into the idea of a January rally?  I think they probably are.  Chasing the low cost option means being very quick on your feet and opening new operations regularly as market anomalies open and close - it can also mean being ready to move work back to the UK because you have capacity or capability there (or, in this climate, because it turns out it is actually the lowest cost environment, either in direct labour costs or in costs measured against quality of service). Capita already operate services - particularly BPO - overseas so they will know all of this.

In a market where the UK government says that they want to use more SMEs, they want to give business to companies that pay tax in the UK, where unemployment is increasing and where quality of service is an important consideration in evaluations, I think they may not know it deeply enough.

Capita And The Fallacy Of Offshore

Posts From The Past About The Future

(Just found this draft from a couple of years go ... can't think why I didn't post it)

- the original IT outsource deals were driven by customers who thought that it was non-core, that they wouldn't be able to develop or retain the skills that they needed and that there was an opportunity to lower costs by having experts do it.  That all started late 80s and early 90s. Most big companies and governments have had their IT managed by outsiders for probably 20 years now; most small companies and local authorities have retained everything in house. 

-similarly,big projects were pushed to outsiders because of a need to transfer the risk.  Costs were supposedly fixed, scope was fixed and the problem given to someone else.  Name any recent IT project to see the fallacy of that effort. The expected risk transfer certainly didn't happen. 

- so everyone who tried it has been burned to some degree and now there are new questions about what is right and, finally, new answers

- any company starting from scratch today would own no hardware. In fact, desktops are the new company car; it used to be that you got one when you joined a company.  Now you won't, you'll have your own, it will meet some key security standards and you'll get to work. Even in government. 

- any company starting from scratch today would have no servers in house. Why would they need them? They rent them from amazon or google or rackspace. They know that even the busiest servers are only 10% busy so why pay 100% of the cost.  Servers in the office have been replaced by the equivalent of zipcar/streetcar. Someone owns them, maintains them, replaces them so that you don't have to. All you need to know is that when you want them, they're right there. 

- Any company starting from scratch today will do its best to own no software. Payroll is payroll, accounts is accounts, intranets are called Facebook or google circles, email is practically free etc

- any individual is used to doing their own it integration. Email is from google, calendar is from apple, billing is from freshbooks, friends are in Facebook, files are in Dropbox, phone is on windows 7 etc. 

So the question then is if all that is true for a company starting from scratch, when does it become true for an existing company with a big legacy estate?

Over the next 2-4 years, every company and government entity will move its easy stuff to shared facilities - email, intranet, payroll, development, test etc will all go shared. Suddenly the outsource company is making no money.  If they charge too much, the customer will look for a cheaper deal. 

The big it companies can't afford to go to their customers and say "you know that email service that we charge you £1,000/head/year for? Well, we have an idea and we'll only charge you £1/head/year for it".  Their corporate process won't allow it, their annual bonus won't allow it, their shareholders won't allow it. So the only people who will offer that are people who can afford to make the shift. Some big companies will make the shift because they know that they have to - because if they don't, they'll die. Most will be too dumb. 

From 4+ years what we have come to think of as complex, heavy duty back end apps will move to commodity apps in a shared facility.  Government only needs one place to pay money to people and one to receive it.  They only need one place that figures out how to buy paperclips. 

The outsourcers, if they are smart, will recognise that it outsourcing was always a bad idea. What should have been outsourced was business processes - people doing routine work.  Routine work can be got rid of through efficiency, through automation, through moving services online etc. 

Posts From The Past About The Future

Agile, Out Loud and Proud. Or Not. Universal Credit.

The hottest two ways of working in UK public sector today are "agile" - delivering in rapid, iterative ways - and "out loud" - talking (often incessantly) about what you are doing, why you are doing it and seeking feedback (on blogs, twitter and doubtless other places too) on both of those. Both of these approaches are plainly to be encouraged.

You can, of course, do (or be) one of these at a time, or both at the same time. The finest proponent of both together is the Government Digital Service - motto "we may not quite know where we are going,but we are going to get there fast and elicit your comments at every possible step so that, rather than doing the wrong thing faster, we are more likely to do the right thing" (mottos need not be agile where I come from). The gCloud team are certainly working out loud - louder and more controversially than perhaps any project in government has ever worked before - and they are agile too (slashing away at the bureaucracy that has encumbered government for the agile equivalent of eons).

But then there are the big projects in government. At least one of those is apparently working in an agile way, but is remarkably reticent about how things are going. I speak of Universal Credit - one of the single largest IT programmes in government (ever I believe, but certainly in today's land of austerity). Hundreds of millions will be spent on this programme before it is done and it is treading the path of less than successful forbears like Tax Credits. UC involves significant changes to the way government operates at both a central and local level - the management of benefits will be moved in both directions, substantial integration will need to be achieved with HMRC's Real Time Information (where real time doesn't quite have the definition that we usually give it), legislation is changing, it will rely on the creation and rollout of a new identity scheme to replace the ageing government gateway (that I helped put in place a dozen years ago), billions of pounds will be moved (or be prevented from moving in the case of attempted fraud) and up to 30m people will be affected (thankfully not all at once, but in a phased rollout) by changes to what they claim, how they claim it and how much they receive.

So it's big. It's so big that offshore workers will be involved (not for the first time but it's still rare). The technology is certainly big, but the operational changes are even bigger.

Agile they may be - though I am sceptical to be honest because it is hard to imagine hundreds of millions spent in an agile way, with vast teams from multiple suppliers working on the programme, complex dependencies that are very likely binary (it works or it doesn't) in each case and some monolithic systems that it will replace entirely (gradual replacement of such systems in the agile style seems unlikely). Another fact that counts against it being agile, for me anyway, is that at a conference late last year I heard a senior member of the team note that they were now 34% code complete for the core of the system. I don't think agile people count in percentages (who can do maths when you're sprinting?). Great is the enemy of good but if you want to be agile, you need to know when you can leave things out, switch track and maybe never come back to what you planned; that doesn't align with a precise figure on code complete.

But what I don't think UC is, in any way, is "out loud". And that's a shame. Stakes are high for this one as I outline above. The potential for a re-run of NPfIT is very high. Yet, there are no official (or unofficial that I can find) blogs, little activity on Twitter (the brilliant @pubstrat notwithstanding, though he comments only occasionally and even obliquely on UC) and no sign of an alpha, beta or demonstration release (the front end will be delivered by www.gov.uk but they plainly have a lot of other things to do right now). Please correct me in the comments if I've missed something - google lists 37,000 pages with "universal credits" and 13,000 when I add the word "blog" to that phrase; nothing obvious appears in the first dozen pages.

The uncertainty over how it will all work has already caused one supplier to local government, Capita, to write to all of their customers and say that they won't be ready for the changeover from how things are to how they will be under UC. Other suppliers may be keeping their heads down or perhaps may not even know what is coming and whether they can deal with it.

UC, in my view, needs to be out loud and proud. At least twice as out loud as any other project - even when that project is www.gov.uk - given the stakes involved and the vast amount of scepticism out there. And it needs to do it now.

Agile, Out Loud and Proud. Or Not. Universal Credit.

How Do Freelancers Really Spend Their Time?

There have been endless stories over the last few weeks about freelancers "dodging tax" through using limited companies.  Seth Godin published a lovely graph (via SwissMiss via APhotoEditor) and I thought, why not publish the same for a freelancer?  So here it is ... how the Daily Mail thinks their time is spent and how I imagine it is probably spent:

Seth's text goes like this:

"Part of the magic (and the risk) of the internet is that if you want to, you can use your access to tools, markets and media to go even further in the direction of the chart on the right. You can become your own booker, accountant, publicist and more. Hey, it's free! You get to keep all the money!  Of course, it also means you don't get to spend very much time at all doing what you set out to do in the first place, which is shoot pictures, or write music or coach or whatever it was.The other thing you can do is find the guts and resources to move even more to the left. Hire other people (at huge expense) to do all those things you certainly could do on your own, so you can actually do the work you were born to do. One thing to consider: finding and retaining a great salesperson is more difficult than you might think, since a great salesperson might very well contribute even more value than you do."

I think the same could be written for any freelancer in business.

How Do Freelancers Really Spend Their Time?

The Missing Reinvention in Government IT

Two weeks ago I wrote about how IT in Government is being reinvented, driven by four main factors - real innovation, rejection of the SI model, relentless commoditisation and radical transparency.  There is, though, a missing reinvention, and that is what to do with applications?

There are essentially two categories of applications in government - those the customer sees and uses, and those that are used only by internal staff. Most departments have at least hundreds of the latter, some even have thousands.  Sometimes one application, Self Assessment for example, has one in each category.

The declaration of "digital by default" means that there is a looming shift where thousands of applications are going to be retired.  If you don't receive paper forms any more, then you don't need an internal application to process them, you don't need a rules engine inside the firewall to validate and verify what has been entered and you don't need armies of people processing that data.

This alone will certainly class as a total reinvention of government.  There are, though, plenty of issues ahead.  If the Government Digital Service is truly going to make a difference, it will soon grapple with transactions and, there, it will find that things really do start to get ugly.  Tinkering around with content and search is all well and good, but opening up the guts of government is where the fun really starts.  I say fun only in the sense that when the job is done, someone will look up and say "well, now, wasn't that fun!"

Departmental applications have not been built in a way that they can be easily exposed.  Rules are not always clear and available (some are indeed quite secret), breakpoints that would allow the citizen to see the progress being made generally don't exist (I can already visualise the screams as the application staff say "wait, you want a progress bar for your benefit claim?"), data is certainly dirty at best and really quite messy at worst and many of the applications tie in to dozens of other applications - all in all it is not so much the "citizen journey" as the "citizen meander down a long and complex path".  GDS may well find that the best advice that they get as they start work is "well, I wouldn't start from here".

Which, actually, may be the best way to do this half of the reinvention.  Simply start afresh.  Build a new world of applications - in the style of Egg as we would have said 10 years ago - and move people onto those, severing their links with the old world.  At some point, you get to turn off those old applications and everyone gets better service as a result.  But that sounds quite slow.

At some point I can see a decision being made about who holds the IT budget for applications.  At the moment it's all in the departments.  If it's true that the current government IT budget is about £13bn (estimates range all the way up to £20bn) and that 80% goes on BAU, then the 20% will soon be moved to Mike Bracken at GDS so that he can start the reinvention.  And then, not long afterwards, a good chunk of the other 80% (less the austerity discount that is being demanded of all departments) will go his way too.  I suspect that Aviation House isn't nearly big enough to house the team that will be needed to pull this off.  Which means that a different strategy will be called for - one that embraces the principles in the Government's own ICT strategy regarding using SME suppliers and so on.

The other half of the application reinvention is much harder to call.  What to do with all the applications that are used in house?  If all the citizen facing work goes digital then plainly there's a need for a big general ledger in the middle that counts all of the money going in and out, but what about the other systems - the ones that dispense grants, manage cases (be they criminal, probation or immigration-related), track passenger movements and so on.

The usual rallying cry for these is "shared services" but, as we've seen, everyone wants to share services provided it's their services that they're sharing and not the other way round.  The NAO's recent report on Shared Services in the Finance / Payroll / HR world show that this is still very much the problem.

The approach above - rebuilding them and migrating - isn't likely to work.  The infinite variety of business processes and the vast number of those applications would make that a very expensive job and one that would take at least a geological age.

This problem could be solved, perhaps, with the massive outsourcing that government is just starting to look at again - where, this time, it isn't the IT that goes out but the business processes.  The new providers would then be free to invest in new platforms and capabilities to make them more efficient and cheaper to operate, sharing the benefits with shareholders (be they traditional ones or the employees themselves within mutuals), with government or just keeping it all for themselves (can anyone say A4E?).

This second half is the next big problem and the reinvention that will truly transform government.  It's also the hardest reinvention.

The Missing Reinvention in Government IT

All Software Breaks

Using the Public Tender website just now I was shown this error message when trying to search for a tender.

I'm not sure why they think me contacting MY site administrator will help them.  Still, as I said, all software breaks, be it open source or commercial.  The trick is to spot it before your users and fix it - and, even better, anticipate the likely problem and make sure the error message is useful #fail #doublefail.  They're probably all watching the rugby.  

All Software Breaks

The Identity Problem

I tried to sell something on eBay the other day. I'm not a prolific user of eBay, though I've had an account for perhaps a decade. I've bought a few things but never sold anything. Crafting the description took quite some time - I wanted to be sure of a sale of course - so I worked to  figure out the right price, get a good photo and that kind of thing.

Twenty minutes after I listed it, someone had clicked "buy it now.". Rats, I thought. Too cheap. 

Five minutes later I got an email from the buyer asking for my PayPal id and some better photos - apparently mine were "blurred".  So someone wants my PayPal ID sent direct to them and some better photos … suspicious.  The eBay ID had been set up not more than 15 minutes before the email arrived.  And the name of the account came with a big fat zero results when I searched for it.   A made up name.

Plainly a scam.  Took me 90 seconds to realise that and verify my conclusion. And, contrary to eBay's excited email, I hadn't sold it, no one was happy "right now" and, oh, I hadn't pocketed the cash.

I ignored it and waited to see what happened.  Effectively, the thing I was selling was sold but I wasn't sending it to the London address I was given.  I wanted to know, though, what eBay would do about it.  If I was wrong and it was legitimate, then I'd be in trouble for not sending it.  And if it was a fraud, eBay should get in touch with me.

Five days later, eBay's Advanced Automated Anti-Fraud tools kicked in and alerted me that I was the possible victim of fraud and urged me not to send the item, or get in touch with the buyer, or provide them any more information. Five days!

It's absurd, really, that in 2012 we have not yet put in place a system for proving identities on the web - where such a proof of identity makes sense (I'm not going down the "real names" rabbit hole).  In a financial transaction, everything relies on trust.  And a higher level of trust - and so a lower level of fraud - can be achieved through such identity proving.

The Cabinet Office is pursuing this through the Identity Assurance programme, although initially for government transactions.  But, by establishing a market and seeding that market with funding (by committing that Universal Credits, in the first instance, will require such identity checking), that opens up the possibility of the private sector hooking onto that same service.  

Imagine if eBay users had an attribute that said "Trusted Identity" (along with who had verified it) ... It can't be that far off surely?

The Identity Problem

Reinventing Government IT

In the 80s the theme in Government IT was inhouse development of big Line of Business applications. In the 90s, it shifted to outsourcing both development and maintenance of all aspects of IT. By the 00s we had two themes - the move online and the creation of multi-billion pound programmes (most of which have resulted in abject failure for whatever reason).

In the 10s we are, again, re-inventing Government IT. With re-invention comes risk, sometimes significant risk.  The models in place today are well understood and well practiced yet have also come with significant and continuing risk; there has been no avoiding it.  Few would be able to point at more than a handful of successful deliveries in government IT.  And yet in the past, changes have occurred relatively slowly.  Today we are running several themes at once - vast reinvention on a pan-government scale - which inevitably brings with it more risk.  And with that risk will come, again, the risk of failure - sometimes with individual point solutions adopted, other times with whole threads of activity.  Spotting those failures before they occur and addressing them will be a time sink for the elite SWAT teams that will doubtless be needed. But some will escape the risks and deliver brilliantly of course; if only we knew which ones up front.  Learning the lessons and applying them to everything else going on - as they occur and almost in real time - will be the activity that differentiates this reinvention from those that have gone before.

1. Real Innovstion - gCloud

This week saw the launch of the gCloud framework and its associated CloudStore.  For the first time, government buyers can see the price of services upfront and compare across lots of different providers (ok, so it's not easy to do that yet but it will get easier I'm sure).  Companies that had little or no access to government customers before can now chase business and, if they're priced well, win against the big players.  Government can, in turn, try services out with little tail risk. Want to try collaboration for a project? Sign up to a new service for 2 or 3 months and see how your team adapts before committing your entire organisation to it. Fed up running an old version of Exchange that doesn't support modern mobile phones well? Move to another.

We already know how this plays out in the consumer scene.  We sign up to services, use them for a while, abandon them in favour of something newer and shinier and then repeat the process, often with a dozen different services at one.  Of course, we rarely pay for these services and there is little tie-in beyond whatever data we commit to them (and so services, naturally, try and take as much off us as possible - hence the recent storm about address books being uploaded into the cloud).

We don't, though, know how this will play out in government.  Big, slow, old-fashioned government is used to buying from big, slow, old-fashioned suppliers and living with them for a decade or longer. Will departments break that mould quickly and buy IT for their staff the way that they buy IT at home? Will they have the courage to bring together 5, 10 or 15 services from different suppliers and manage them as a whole, without the shield of a huge prime contractor?  Will they overcome their innate fear of "security" and adopt innovative ideas from new suppliers inexperienced in the government world?

gCloud's main risk is not that the services fail, but that the whole idea behind it fails - that departments hunker down and ignore it, that they don't switch enough of their existing spend to it so that it makes a difference or that they use their existing suppliers to do what gCloud wants to do and so undermine gCloud.  The incredible energy behind gCloud - small team that it is who manage it - goes a long way to holding that risk in check, but departments are the buyers and they need to show their hands.  A move to these kind of services is inevitable, it's only a question of when.  Departments publishing their plans for what they plan to buy (e.g. email, collaboration, storage as a service, etc) and when would allow suppliers to focus their efforts on core products whilst still looking to provide innovative services that departments didn't even know they needed until they were shown them (or, better still, recommended them by the gEnius tool that doubtless will come with gCloud v2 - "services you need that you didn't know you needed"™  or perhaps "service discovery as a service"(tm)

For me, gCloud has to work and will work, although there will be bumps, because it's actually the foundation of the second area of reinvention:

2. Rejection of the old SI model - Service Integration

If the 90s outsourcing model was single, behemoth suppliers providing all of a department's IT (though not meeting all of its needs, often despite best efforts all round), the model in the 10s is quite different.

The model adopted for the 10s, by at least a few departments, with MoD and MoJ leading the way, is to buy services from as many as a dozen providers - and to have a single Service (as opposed to System) Integrator bring all of those together.  The twist is that the SI no longer owns all of the other contracts - instead, they're all owned by the department.  This has the advantages of eliminating the margin on margin common in traditional prime contracts as well as allowing the customer to pick what might have been called "best of breed" (back to the future!) suppliers (either through competition or from a framework) for each strand. On the downside, the procurement process becomes significantly more complicated and operating the end to end service becomes even trickier - liabilities, ownership and incentives will be murkier than government is used to.

To pull this off requires far greater client side expertise to be in place than either currently exists or than has been thought about.  In a world of reducing budgets and prohibitions against consultants and contractors, sourcing enough people within the public sector (or transferring them in) will be a huge challenge.   Those people certainly exist internally, but given going on for £40bn of contracts at original signing value coming up for renewal in the next 5 years, I very much doubt that there are enough to handle the forward workload.  In the 00s, one of the consequences of the multi-billion pound contract era was that government directly drove inflation through its own buying process; that could happen again and so needs to be carefully planned for - by managing the timetable for procurements, by being clear with suppliers about where frameworks will be used and where procurements will take place, by being clear about the baseline that will be in place at the point of transition (departments are not standing still after all, they are busy virtualising their servers, hopefully looking at buying gCloud services and bringing their costs down in line with overall targets) - any procurement underway in the next 2-4 years will be against a very dynamic departmental baseline.

This, then, is a riskier area of reinvention than gCloud.  With gCloud, departments are buying in to a service for a few months and maybe for only a small part of their organisation.  They are specifically able to try things out - one project team or one function - before committing.  And even if they commit, it might be that it doesn't work and they have to pull out (see the point above about reinvention brings risk of failure).

But the Service Integration model is trying several new things at once, and for longer periods.  And, of course, wrapped in these contracts are all of the legacy applications and services (many of which are much the same as they were in the 80s).  Failure with these is certainly bigger than with gCloud but of a smaller likelihood than with the old model - if a single provider from within the group of 6, 9 or 12 struggles, then they can be replaced (not, perhaps, by one of the others - that model hasn't exactly worked out well in the NPfIT/CfH world).  The risk may, in fact, be all on the buying process - are the resources there to package all of these services up intelligently and effectively, to establish a great competition amongst suppliers (when many other competitions are likely to be going on at the same time, forcing suppliers to pick where they field their best teams) and to ensure that all of the liabilities, incentives, controls, processes etc work across multiple providers of services so that the user sees things just "working"?

These models will also end up working but I think there will be significant bumps along the way - both during procurement, transition and operations.  They should also work better than the current model, but not immediately - I suspect it will take 2-3 years to bed the new model in properly.

3. Relentless Commoditisation

Typically government believed it was special and so developed everything in a "for government" way - it had one of everything and everything at least once.  Huge bespoke estates resulted with everything the department needed bought by the department (or the department's supplier).  That resulted in huge build costs and even larger maintenance costs.  In the last few years that has changed and, in the last 18 months, that change has dramatically accelerated.

Wherever possible, frameworks are being set up for networks, document archives, IT equipment, cloud services and all sorts of other things.  Looking at the GPS list of frameworks just now, I counted 24 for IT (including IT consultancy) and a further 16 for software out of over 600 frameworks in total.  I can only see that number going up as government tries to get its "managed spend" figure from its current level which I believe is somewhere over £1bn to far more than that.

Not all frameworks are created equal of course, nor are they used equally.  Within the Service Integration model above, departments, such as MoD, have already made clear that they will use frameworks where it makes sense to.  Others, like MoJ, have implied that they will create frameworks within their new model so that other departments can use their services (e.g. perhaps for hosting).  It's possible, likely even, that frameworks will be the route by which all equipment is bought even within, say, a hosting service - in which case, suppliers with high degrees of vertical integration (like HP & Fujitsu perhaps) may not, having won, say, a hosting contract be able to fill that data centre with their own hardware unless it is proven to be best value in a competition on a framework.

4. The One That Isn't Any Of The Above

Perhaps the biggest reinvention is going on within Government Digital Services.  There, they aren't using frameworks (at least so far), aren't looking for a service integrator or for a dozen suppliers to bring together a service under various contracts and they aren't doing some of the other things that the Government's own ICT strategy says should be done, such as using COTS or making the most of small businesses.  They are, though, rebuilding - from scratch and with in-house, largely permanent, staff - government's most visited website (direct.gov.uk to be renamed, or re-renamed, www.gov.uk).  If the rebuild succeeds then it's likely both visitor counts and visitor durations will go up - if it's easier to find everything you need, you may stick around longer to see what else is there and, if transactions are hosted on the site, then completing transactions will add to the stay time. It could be very, very big.

Building websites and services from scratch is, of course, relatively common. After all, there was no COTS for Facebook or Twitter.  It isn't, though, common in the public sector (not since a couple of bright people in CITU did it in the mid-90s anyway).  It also doesn't fit well with the public sector's current business model, whether IT or operations. I'd say that's a pretty serious reinvention.

This is early days. The "beta" of www.gov.uk is, at best, a proof of concept. It's got some impressive capability already and the rapid iteration and incrementing of features is exciting to watch.  But it's also got a huge do list ahead of it. One that, in less than a year, must allow direct.gov to be turned off.  The lessons to be learned by the .gov.uk team are doubtless very interesting (and they're learning most of them in the full glare of publicity); I hope that they are not learning every lesson from scratch although given the amount of from scratch building, I suspect they are encountering new problems every day that many others have already encountered, inside and outside of government.

Having your team inhouse is a fascinating experiment though - your only wasted cost is that of opportunity, i.e. would it have been better to have the team work on a, instead of b or did you not even notice c and what that could have done for you. It's still real money of course - and based on the team size, it might be a real lot of money.  You can achieve speeds and quality of delivery that I don't think can be achieved by all except the most integrated of supplier and customer teams.  But you can also spin wheels because the cost is essentially sunk. Every working day you burn £x and measuring whether you have achieved the same in value is hard - especially when your scope is shifting and evolving within the agile methodology.  Also, big companies manage turnover on an every day basis - they draft in new people, have a constant stream of more junior employees who can work for lower rates and who can progress up the ladder before moving to oer clients and can bring in additional bodies for particularly tough deadlines - all of that is hard with an inhouse team (especially a small one).

Predicting the future for GDS and the .gov.uk is hard.  I suspect a transition to an alternative model in the future - perhaps to a series of suppliers with GDS holding the integration role or, more radically, the creation of a mutual where GDS gets some investment and becomes a supplier to government itself, so adopting a mix of commercial disciplines with at least partial employee ownership.  That would free them up to compete for other business and would put all of the incentives in the right place, as well as provide a more structured career path for those in the team.   It would almost be a return to the days of CITU.

This is potentially the riskiest reinvention of them all.  I hope that the risks don't come home and that this programme succeeds enormously but I can't help but feel nervous for its prospects.  And Facebook disappeared during development or had a few outages in its first few months, few would have noticed or cared. But when you take on such a big and visible project with an entirely new approach, it could hardly be more challenging.

5. The Underpinning Reinvention

All of these changes are underpinned by an openness and transparency that is incredibly refreshing.  Seeing new starters in GDS blog about what it's like to work there and very senior people across government blog / tweet / respond to comments has opened up the workings of government - my guess is that the regular audience consists of a relatively small number of geeks but the occasional bursts into the mainstream press so no change in message.  We have done betas and pilots and test versions in UK government before, but never quite in this way.

As I said at the beginning, with reinvention comes risk. With risk comes the potential for failure. With failure comes interrogation and criticism.  The good news is, I think, that all of the interrogation and criticism will have been done on the inside and posted on blogs long before that point.

Reinventing Government IT

26.1 Tips For Marathon Running

With the spring marathons not far away, a lot of people have been asking me if I have any tips on training.  I've always responded with an ad hoc list to date but thought I would write down what I think is really important.

I'm not a natural runner.  At school I came pretty much last in every cross country race I ever ran.  I didn't run a kid (I played squash mostly).  I ran my first marathon, on a whim, at the age of 29 (it was brutal, I didn't know anything about training and I finished in about 4h 15m - and had to walk downstairs backwards for at least two days afterwards).  And I ran my second at the age of 35.  Since then I've run quite a few in several cities around the world, sometimes running two a year.  I've run enough to know what works for me and what doesn't.

So here are 26.1 tips for getting to the finish line. Hope they're useful.

1. It's (nearly) all in the head

Sometime around mile 20, your body will want to give up.  It will think it has nothing left.  Your head, if you're not ready for it, will let it.  Marathons are made in those last few miles. and so are marathon runners.  When it's dark, cold, wet (or all of them at the same time) is when you most need to commit to your training.  If you don't do the distance, it will do for you.   Most of your training is about teaching your brain to overcome your body's tiredness. You won't run a full marathon distance during your training, you may only run 30km (with a marathon another 12km beyond that - but any runner can run 12km can't they?), so getting your brain and body aligned so that neither quits when it gets tough is the most vital lesson.

2. Running is just running.  

You have everything else to fit in too - family, kids, work, evenings out, friends and whatever else occupies your life. Make time for those. The race is important. But it isn't life. 

3. When it's not in your head, it's in the training

You need a plan but probably not the one you think.  Pick up any running magazine or book and they will give you plans for all abilities.  you might be able to work with one of those plans but my guess is that the rest of your life, your head, an injury or some other problem will screw up your plan, so be ready to improvise. 

I ignore all the plans that require me to run 4, 5 or even 6 times a week - I don't have the time, I don't recover fast enough and there are other things that I need to do.  Instead, I average two runs a week and peak at three. My plan, roughly, is to gradually run further and closer together with the aim of, eventually, running a near-marathon distance in three days.  But first I build up to running a marathon in a 7 day period (perhaps 3 times 10k runs in a week) and then narrow how many days it takes me to run the distance. And somewhere about a month away I run a 30km and two 6km runs across 3 days - perhaps 6-30-6.   Let me tell you, recovering from 30km even at training pace will take some time; if you can even walk 6km the next day you'll be doing well.

Here are the distances that I ran each week in the run up to the 2006 London Marathon (which I finished in 3h 51m).  One week I managed 4 runs in a week, the rest it was a maximum of 3 and often just 2.  You'll see that I tried to run pretty much marathon distance each week, once I was ready for it.  The blank week is when I was away skiing.  The week before the race - the second to last column - is me tapering (reducing how much training I do).  

4. Have a goal.

Be clear why you are doing this.  It might be for charity, in memory of a loved one, to lose weight, for the t-shirt, for the medal or even on a dare.  When times are tough, remember why you're doing it. And keep doing it.  But also set some shorter-term goals - that you will run 3 times this week, that you will do a 10km race in 50 minutes within the next month, that you will eat healthily for a week.

5. You have a certain pace built in.  

Marathon running is about tricking your body to be happy running at a quicker pace for longer.    The longer your run, the slower you will get so you need to keep working on tricking your body into being comfortable at a faster pace.  Here's how much you will slow down over a marathon distance, based on my typical figures:

5km - 22 mins

10km - 47 mins (+3 mins versus two times 5km)

Half - 1h 42m (+3 mins versus two times 10km + a 5 min 1km)

Full - 3h 50m (+26 mins)

The second half of a marathon is when you need everything you've got.  You'll see that my second half is quite a lot slower than my first half (it's slightly disguised here, I run the first half in about 1h 50m and the second in about 2h); I have tried several times to adjust for that but I seem most comfortable running a slower second half.  I only dream of negative splits.

6. Sometimes, just run, no music. 

Out running, my eyes are often drawn to the way other runners carry themselves.  But more often, I listen to the sound their feet make as they hit the ground.  Too many runners seem to slap their feet to the ground, as if they were clapping with their feet.  That's a waste of energy.  Of course, they're all listening to loud music and are oblivious to it.  So, every so often, especially early on, listen to how you run - especially when you're tired and so more likely to lose form.  If you can hear your feet slapping on the ground, you're wasting precious energy.

7.  Get geeky.

Record everything.  Record the distance, the splits, how you felt, what the weather was like.  Get a sports watch with GPS (I use a Forerunner 310XT from Garmin - I've tried pretty much every other watch and rejected them) or use your smartphone with Nike+ GPS, Adidas miCoach, Runkeeper or similar (trouble with the 'phone is that it's not always easy to look at how you're doing and the audio interruptions drive me mad, especially when I'm listening to an audiobook!).  Get some software to display all of your data - I use Rubitracks on the Mac; if I had a PC I would use Zone 5 software's SportTracks (again, I've tried all of the others and these are the best for me).

8.  Two kinds of run.

For all the talk in magazines and books, there are only two types of training runs.  Fast runs.  Or long runs.  That's it.  If you want to get scientific, you can run sections of fast run during your long run.  But it's still a long run.  If you get bored easily you will want to mix these up.  Go ahead. Run sprints between lamp posts, run hills, run track, run relays. It's all running and it all helps - just be sure to be geeky about it so that you know if you're getting better; if you're not, you need to do something different.

9. Trace out your routes.

I like to run the same few routes.  I'm lucky - I run along the River Thames so what I see changes every day, with the weather, with the time of day, with the traffic, with the buildings.  I can run a 25km loop starting eastbound and cross only 4 roads; i can run the westbound loop and go 30km or more crossing only 3 roads.  Starting off on any given run, I can make it 6.25km (the shortest loop), 10km, 12.25km, 15.5km, 16.6km, 21km just by extending the run a little and without covering the same ground twice - so if I'm feeling good, I can go longer.  If I'm not feeling so good, I can cut it short.  Inevitably what happens is that at the furthest point from home, it starts to rain of course.  Not everyone will be able to set out their routes like this and perhaps you will have to run multiple shorter loops (in which case, have as many different loops as you can so that you get variety).

10. Know your limits.  

If your head is right, you're training hard and you're healthy, the next challenge is how to push enough but not so much that you get in trouble.  if you get injured, you can't run. You will find that limit through trial and error.  If you're like me, it won't be the way they say it in the running books - there they say you should increase your running volume only a couple of miles each week. I increase it much faster than that, but I offset that by only running 2 times a week in the early stages and maybe 3 times a week in the middle if I have the time.  But you need to find what you can do, test how far you can run and how much rest you need.  It will, inevitably, be a very individual thing. 

11. Your shoes count for a lot.  

For all the talk of bare foot running and ultra-light shoes, unless you're Kenyan or less than 8 stone, you're probably not running in those.   I have tried every kind of shoe - newtons (that try and make you run on the front of your foot), lunarglides (I just get a sore knee), shoes that auto-adjust with a little motor, lightweight shoes, mizuno, new balance and all that you can think of. And i go back to Nike triax every time because I can run further, more consistently and with far fewer injuries.  Get the shoe wrong and you will probably injure yourself and set about fixing the wrong problem. Check the shoes first. 

12. Floss 

The biggest dent in your training will more likely come from illness, especially if you're training in the winter.  Now this might sound bizarre but, trust me, there's a lot of evidence to back it - floss regularly, daily if you can. The state of your immune system can be improved by giving it one less problem (I.e. gum infections and bacteria) to fight against.  The few points of improvement this results in can be enough to fight off your next cold before it stops you running. 

13. Halfway there.  

It really is all in your head from this point on.  Pretty soon, everything will hurt.  This is where those long runs, on cold, dark, wet days pay off.  Stay with it.  If you are behind your expected pace here, you probably can't make it up.  So knuckle down, keep going and let the crowd lift you along. 

14. Adjust but only a little.

You can and should adjust your running style.  But not much and not often. get it wrong and you're likely to consign yourself to the injury dump for a long time.  Be careful with gait analysis, orthotics and anything that suddenly adjusts your style. I am a sample of one (and therefore this is anecdotal at best) but I ran for years with little trouble, then had some analysis done that resulted in orthotics. Two torn meniscus cartilages later (after about 9 months of wearing them) and I went back to my usual shoes.  Your body has got used to working in a certain way - tendons follow certain grooves, muscles operate in a certain way ... Change that quickly and you will almost certainly get hurt. 

As you continue your training, as you get fitter and start to cover longer distances, your running style will automatically adjust at least a little.  You probably won't notice, but your form will improve and you will learn to run in a more efficient way.  You may also lose a little weight which will likely help too.

15. You do not run marathons with food alone

Supplements are essential.  It might be that you need energy drinks during a long run (or on a hot day) but it is also that you need vitamin pills, joint pills (I use Cissus as well as glucosamine), protein shakes after a run and so on.  You may also want to take a look at beta-alanine particularly.  Take it 30 mins before a fast run (one that you have done many times and know your pace) and see how you get on.  Some people, me included, get a funny pins and needles sensation from it but it helps me run a minute or so faster over 5km, all part of tricking the body to run faster routinely.   As far as I know, beta-alanine is not on the list of banned substances for any sporting body.

16. Run To The Beat. Sometimes.

Listen to audibooks, listen to classical music. I learned conversational Italian when running two marathons one year.  For races and really fast runs, switch to upbeat music.  And get anal about it - set up the playlist so that you have your favourite pieces at points of the race that you know will be difficult.  If you're very confident of your finish time, set a sequence of two or three tracks to play as your countdown to the finish. Corny, maybe, but I use "Gonna Fly Now" from Rocky to cover the last kilometre of any race I run; it's a huge buzz when i nail the pace that I've planned and that tune kicks in with 1km to go.

17. Run everywhere.

It isn't just about pavements.  Run on all sorts of surfaces, even though your marathon will most likely be on roads.  Run hills, run grass, run tracks and trails.  Just don't run on ice - that's a slippery slope. 

You don't actually need to "run everywhere" - I admire the people that run to work but I have no idea how they do it, where they keep their gear, how they handle arriving at work a crumpled ball of sweat.  But, golly, I admire them. 

18. The marathon is a race. 

So racing is part of your training.   Go to your local parkrun and run 5km as hard as you can.  and then run home from there.  My park run is about 18km away.  That run home is the hardest i ever do but it feels great when it's done.  Run a 10km race as part of your training and at least one half marathon, two if you can.  Getting ready for those races will teach you how you need to approach the big event - and will allow you to tune how you do it, what pace you can run at consistently, what gear you need to wear and how you're doing against your plan.

19. Dogs.  

Get used to them.  Don't get upset about it.  You will get chased by a dog sometime, perhaps several, perhaps regularly.  Get over it.  If you are chased, just stop dead and wait for the owner to get the dog under control.  Smile, laugh it off and carry on.  You weren't about to break the world record.  Speaking as a dog owner with a wayward puppy who occasionally likes to run alongside a jogger, I'm amazed at the anger that some folks display (at me, at the dog, at the world around).  I'm probably bias though.

20. Train as you plan to run.

I like to train on an empty stomach - to teach my body to run on low reserves.  Most of my runs are in the morning, because that's when most races are. On race day, i will have some protein (from a shake) and some carbs about 30-45 minutes before the race start - and I practice that for a few runs before the big day to make sure that my stomach can handle the food. Whatever you do, don't do anything new in the days before the big race and certainly don't do anything or eat anything new on the day itself.  Only disaster results when you do that.

21. Injuries come.

It's quite likely that you are susceptible to one particular kind of injury. The sooner you have it and take steps to fix the root cause, the faster you can get on with your training.  It might be shin splints, or ITB problems, or it might be plantar fasciitis. Or it might be that you just get a sore knee. When it happens, you will try and run through it and, usually, it gets worse. So find it, fix it and move on. 

22. Energy gels

Personally they don't do it for me. I see people with special belts with 6, 8 or even 10 gels attached on loops. It's not me.  I've run my fastest marathons, 3:45 to 3:50, mostly on water and a little lucozade (if it's a hot day, watch out for what happens near the lucozade tables on race day - the ground gets as sticky as Velcro!).  But figure out your own needs as you progress.  Energy gels generally taste poor and need water to wash them down with. So practice ripping the top off, squeezing the gel in and then drinking water long before race day.  

23. Bottles versus backpacks

During your training, don't carry bottles to drink. If you're going on a long run and especially if it's hot, invest in a camelbak or something similar.  Bottles adjust the way you run - they make you swing your arms differently or twist your hips and that might lead to injury. 

24. Booze

Before a half marathon I quit drinking for 2 weeks, before a marathon I quit for 4 weeks. There's no science in that, it's just something I do. The first drink after the run is always a very nice bottle of wine, or even an absolutely stunning wine.  And wow, is it all the sweeter for the pause. 

25.  Don't just run

Sure, you've got to run, and run a lot, whilst training for a marathon.  But don't just run.  There will be days when you just haven't recovered enough to run, but you could get a half hour on an exercise bike, or 45 minutes on a cross-trainer or 20 mins on a stairmaster.  Other times, you might run for 60 mins and then do another 60 mins on a cross-trainer.  The muscles you use aren't the same and it isn't the same as running, but it will boost your fitness, lesses the strain on your joints and, more than likely, round out some imbalances in your muscles.  Don't overdo it though.  Likewise, don't think that you can lift weights and gain muscle whilst you're running long distances - though do lift weights, again, to even out muscular imbalances and improve overall fitness.

26. Finish fast.  It's a race.

On every training run, pick up the pace as you approach home.  Even if you only do that for the last 50 yards at first, do it.  Gradually pick up the pace earlier and earlier.  Remember, you will be racing.  There will be spectators at the end.  They want to see you finish fast, like it matters to you.  Because, you know what, it really does. Crossing the line with a bit of speed will be a great feeling. 

Unless the event is a flight away from where you live, run the last mile or two (more if you can) of the race route during your training.  run it when you're tired.  you want to know that you can dance through those last couple of miles.  being familiar with that last bit will be a big help.  and when you run it for real, the hundreds or even thousands of people lining that bit of the route will lift your spirits in a way that you can't imagine until you experience it

26.1 Celebrate.

Raise your arms in the air, cry, look for your family, celebrate with another runner, get your photo taken wearing your medal.  Look at your finish time - be pleased whatever it is, be ecstatic if it is equal or better than your goal. All of those. Do whatever you need to do but keep moving forward. 

Within a couple of days you will already be wondering about the next one so make the most of this one. 

26.1 Tips For Marathon Running

More on email

As a follow up to yesterday's post on email volumes in government.  Here are the figures provided by DCLG in response to my questions:

Q1. Total number of emails sent and total received by the DCLG central e-mail system – A1. The total number of DCLG emails sent (outbound) during September 2011 were 338,971. The total number of DCLG emails received (inbound) during September 2011 were 643,280.  

Q2. Percentage of each that were entirely within the DCMS domain    Q3. Percentage of each that were to or from other government departments (with GSI, CJX or equivalent domain names) - Q4. Percentage of each that were to or from the Internet 

DCLG’s email system cannot disaggregate information to the level of detail you have requested for questions 2, 3 and 4.

So DCLG's mail system handled a little over 982,000 emails in September 2011.  DCLG has 2,500 staff (and falling I gather).

On average, a DCLG staff member:

Received 257 emails per heard per month
Sent 135 emails per head per month

That's just under 12 per day received and 6 sent.

The figures for DWP are quite different:

Received: 6.876m
Sent: 3.318m
Headcount: 90,000 (I see figures between 80,000 and 100,000 so picked the midpoint)

Received per head per month: 76
Sent per head per month: 37

It is likely, perhaps, that not all of DWP's 90,000 staff have access to email, but I haven't seen any figures that show how many that might be,

More on email

e-Mail in UK government

Last September I asked if anyone had any data on e-mail usage in government.  I got some useful data from friendly sources, and some from a small number of FOI requests. The conclusions are:

1) Few departments have any data beyond how many e-mails they receive and how many they send; they can't break down, for instance, how many come to or from the Internet.   Where I didn't get the data from a particular department, I've used the average of the other departments to blend all of the data - not ideal but seemed reasonable.

2) Departmental staff, if the figures are to be believed, receive between 30 and 80 e-mails a month and send about half that number.  I'm surprised by those figures - plainly the average hides a lot and there are likely users receiving and sending 10 or 100 times that many.

3) Roughly 60% of all e-mails in government are between users in the same department.

4) About 20% of all e-mails in government are to or from other departments who are on a secure network (such as the GSI, CJX etc)

5) Around 20% of all e-mails are to or from the Internet (e-mails received from the Internet are about twice the number sent though).  Remember that government anti-spam and anti-virus (still the same tool we put live back in 2002 or something like that) is good enough to ensure that almost no spam comes through (in 10 years of having a GSI e-mail address, I can't recall a single spam message getting to me)

It's been quite hard to get this small amount of data and I don't think it tells me what I was really wondering - that was whether a case for cloud-based e-mail could be made just from the headline numbers; more digging would be needed to get at e.g. the number of e-mails with "restricted" in the header (which I strongly believe would be ridiculously low, definitely single digit percentage, probably very low single digit) - but I suspect most departments don't have the answer to that (and may claim that because internal e-mails, by definition, go over a secure network, then not everyone labels properly - I would counter that they don't label properly even when they do take the time to label!)

e-Mail in UK government