Mar 2, 2011
A challenge, before #ukgovit tonight
I know. I’ve gone on about this before. The URL http://hmrc.gov.uk doesn’t work. It’s a very small thing, a very minor impediment to using the site. But for me and probably many others it is a glitch that we trip over again and again when doing routine things like paying our VAT. A few seconds bother, going back to put in the “www”, multiplied by many repetitions, is actually worth fixing.
And it would take moments to fix.
It’s not a big disaster in government technology terms, by any means. But it’s a useful indicator. Of flexibility, of attitude, and dare I say it, of agility.
Here’s an amusing comparison. A few weeks back I was having a look at the great works of one of our big IT supply companies, Cap Gemini. To be precise, at their website’s information about their services to, funnily enough, HMRC. But the link on their site to that content was broken. Didn’t look great. Much like the HMRC URL.
I tweeted about it. They picked it up, just based on the words “Cap Gemini” (good monitoring, there, well done). And within hours they’d fixed it and tweeted me to let me know (good closure, 10/10 all round).
I replied, asking when they’d be so prompt about sorting out the HMRC URL so it didn’t look quite so, well, amateurish, considering all those millions spent on the project. (Especially since they showed alarming eagerness in making sure their own online wares didn’t look shabby.)
They said they’d get back to me.
I’m still waiting.
So, we’ll be hearing about agility tonight, about short, sharp, focused delivery to make things that actually work, at the launch of a new report on the way forward for technology in government.
I’d be a lot more convinced about the substance behind this if, say, by the time I walked into the Institute for Government this afternoon that URL issue had just been fixed.
Go on, rise to the challenge. Make it so. If you can.
(Because if you can’t do a little thing like that..?)
Paul Clarke has done a lot of things over the years, on client and supplier side, where public services meet technology. He’s currently working with dxw.com, who specialise in Agile development. Get in touch if you’d like to know more, at p@ulclarke.com.
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Update: 12 July 2011
I’ve just heard, via Twitter, that you might not be able to get any sense out of http://hmrc.gov.uk, but you’ll be fine to use http://hmrc.com. *Face hits palm*
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Update: 17 August 2011
STOP THE CLOCK!
Or TEAR UP THE CALENDAR, more like…
It’s done. It redirects. Now–time for that FOI on how much it all cost, hehehe.
(Would I be so cruel?)
add http://gateway.gov.uk/ to your list … I pointed that out in around 2002 I think …. if this simple stuff is so hard to fix, no wonder the hard stuff never gets anywhere.
A tiny part of me hopes they won’t fix this… Because then we’ll be deprived of your colourful mini-rants on the subject – you’ve honed it well over the *many months*. Oh damn, that reminds me it really should be fixed sharpish!
A small DNS change like this should take moments. But like the £600 favicons issue, will it?
How many people have to authorise it?
What testing will be necessary? How much will it cost?
How should this job be prioritised with respect to other tasks?
You’re absolutely right of course Adrian – these are the right questions. It’s just that the answers always seem to be utterly disproportionate :(
I described in my first post on this subject that the necessary change request was probably languishing in a big pile somewhere, never having the relative importance to make the cut of any new release…
Do you know. I wish I could unlearn everything I’ve come to know in the last 6 months.
It’s all getting to be a little bit depressing. Because I can see exactly how this will be missed, how it will never get addressed. It will be because the crucial person in the chain, either the sign off or the end person who must make the change, simply doesn’t give a damn any more.
I’m both proud and deeply ashamed to announce that as of today http://hmrc.gov.uk now redirects to our website.
I’ll have a blog post outlining it in a little more detail in the next couple of days, but it’s been around 6 months since Tom Szekeres and I picked this up, and frankly a number of those months were spent finding the people responsible for changing it (lots of ‘not me, try this person’).
Adrian’s comment is unsurprisingly prescient, as a number of those questions were asked, with some using the answers to justify the status quo.
Though once we did get to the right people, and some executive sponsorship, Fujitsu, Capgemini and our internal team worked hard to deliver this quickly and for free.
For free?
Wowser – you all forsook your salaries while working on it? Now *that* is what I call service…
No, well done. I know from bitter personal experience how much it takes to push stuff like this through.