Digital Divisions

Digital technology was touted as the great new hope in the Island's latest economic plan.  It ought to be a useful way to diversify the economy, but as I have commented elsewhere if is concentrates on financial services it could end up increasing strategic risks.  The other driver for digital in Governemnt is the potential to save costs, at least on the government side of the equation.  A bit like online banking, what it actually does is to move an element of cost from the organisation (branches and staff) to the customer - the need to have a computer  or similar, and connectivity to run the account.


There have been a few stories recently of our States involvement in technology.  Interestingly the reporting of them , which may well reflect the thinking behind the development is a little concerning.  They reflect a problem I have encounteed many times working spftware development: un-acknolwedged assumptions.


The first is an item that certainly has some merit.  https://blog.gov.je/2016/02/01/track-my-bus/  I know the original developer, Rob. I used to work with him many years ago, though in those days I did the javascript stuff and he did the presentation bits!  It is well worth reading the reasons the application was developed as a moble web rather than a smart phone app.  Also the rationale for replacing the text system.  They are all related to maintenance and support effort/costs by the provider.  That is typical of a tech driven solution.  So I ask , what about the end users.  Think about  typical bus users and wonder what proportion have smart phones.  Surely smaller than the proportion who have ordinary mobile phones. The result is an improved experience for those who have access, and a  proportion of user  will now have lost service.  Is that progress or not?  Would we be better spending the money on  providing service, actually having more buses on the  routes?  Thats the debate that should be happening in the States chamber, or at least it would be if we had a functioning system.


Second is the parking payment app http://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/new-parking-app-could-make-scratchcards-obsolete-september .  I think the headline suggesting that scratch cards could be obsolete by September is wrong.  The developer hasn't been chosen yet, so the timescale for deployment must be at best tentative. But far more important, does the States really think every car driver is going to acquire a smart phone and the app by September?  Clearly that's not going to happen. At best it is going to have to be a parallel system for sometime.  That is probably going to cost more, not less until the new system is ubiquitous.  Perhaps they have in mind some carparks for free or on a disc, and others app only.  Privilege for a digital elite , or possibly soon a majority, while the minority are left waiting  uninformed at a bus stop because they haven't a smart phone to hand to pay for parking or check bus times.

There is much more to this smart phone app  interaction mode with government than meets the eye.  It is terribly convenient for those who have an authoritarian, controlling, top down view of society. You can get a sense of it from this recent piece http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/09/internet-of-things-smart-devices-spying-surveillance-us-government There are frequent calls for moves to a cashless society - there are even governement agencies in other jurisdictions that will not accept cash http://www.therecord.com/sports-story/2565317-passport-office-refuses-to-take-cash-payments/  despite the fact you don't actually have a right to a bank account.  In fact with the ever more draconion KYC and politically exposed person limitiations being impossed,  ever more people will find it impossible to access the financial system.  I have no problem with people knowingly surrending their privacy and allowing governement and finaicial institutions tracking their every move and expenditure, if they want to, but I do object most stongly to being forced to do so.  I don't do loyalty cards, and while I do  have a couple of bank cards, I seldom buy anything with them if I can avoid it (and I usually can), and I certainly don't have a smart phone.

Part of the problem here is a mental mode of those that are doing what they think of as normal.  It happens all the time - the weather forecasters who describe rain as miserable, and sunshine as glorious, and the news broadcasts that claim interests rates going up is bad news, and going down is good.  It is all a matter of perspective relative to how you live your life.  Rain can be good news for growers and gardeners, whilst interest rates going up is a boon to savers.  But of course the overwhelming majority of those  who are in the editorial positions are car driving , smart phone using mortagors.  In their circles those given 'facts' are undisputed.  It is the same in politics - the Westminster bubble syndrome, and technology is not so very different.  It is a sort of attribution error thinking that you are yourself somehow typical or representative of pretty much everyone. That your lifestyle and choices and options are similar to everyone elses.   In reality you are comparing to a small select similar group, not the entire population.

Since we have moved on to politics and policy, I'll get to the last item, as reported here: http://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/digital-firms-angry-key-12-million-egov-contract-goes-uk-company/  I am not surprised they are angry.   It is rather problematic for governemnt to claim to be supporting and promoting  the local sector at the same time as effectively saying the local  talent is not good enough for their needs.  It something the States of Jersey is good at - wordy and sometimes worthy statements of intent, but ineffective or inconsistent action in implementing them.  I cite States Reform, the demise of tourism, and the state of our agricultural sector and the absence of a Rural Economy Strategy, and the persistent failure to meet the population policy (when we had one).  

It is harldy surprising then that I could name three or four talented people I know locally who used to be in software development, but are no longer in the field.  Interestingly all had decent careers in other fields beforehand, and all still live locally.  I rather suspect a large part of the problem here is that those who are making the decisions cannot recognise the skills and abilities of those who are local.  It is a common enough problem.

More than a few times when I worked as a contractor consultant I was hired by big consultancy firms like KPMG, PWC  to deliver projects they had won.  I don't know if the customers knew these big names didn't have the expertise they thought they were buying.  Often times it was about risk perception on the buyer side . If you get a big established consultancy to do the job you won't get half as much grief when it goes wrong than if you hired an 'unknown' name.  Backside covereing is an essential art in any civil service from what I hear, and  'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' still echoes faintly down the corridors. 

Of course it is a self perpetuating  situation - you never get credit for delivering - the consultancy claims that, and the buyer never really gets to know that the delivery was by a tiddling specialist third party.  If the States only throw low risk tidbits to the local developers while reserving tables at the banquet for external suppliers, you just end up with hungry and impoverished locals with no reputation in that aea  and money pouring out of the island's economy. Because if there is one thing those successful large consultancies do know it is how to succesfully live off  the host.

One in thirty four million?

A couple of States deputies have raised questions over why Jersey had not had iodine tablets issued as they had in areas in France near nuclear reactors.  In response CM Gorst is reported to have said he had research  giving the probability of a nuclear accident at Flamanville impacting on Jersey was ‘one in every 34 million years’. 

Without sight of the report or knowing exactly what it was assessing the chances of, I cannot categorically say that is wrong.  Such things are critically dependent on the assumptions  and inputs into the calulation.  I will however state I think that figure is rather unlikely.  My first point would be to call on CM Gorst to release this research.  Of course he won't do that if it is covered by 'commerical confidentiality'  in which case I would imagine it comes from a nuclear industry indsider, possibly even EDF itself.  That would harldy constititute  fair and impartial research.  You might want to ponder why the commerical sensitivity of a business is thought to more important than the safety of the whole Island's population too.

Even without resorting to research I could recall three nuclear incidents that had they happened at Flamanville would have impacted Jersey - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Sheep controls on farms in Wales and Cumbria were only lifted in 2012, 25 years afer Chernobyl spewed the fallout cloud that caused the problem. In fact out of roughly 400 nuclear plants operating worldwide there have been at least 30 meltdown accidents.  Any one of those if it happend in Normandy would affect us. Arguable eachone of them where ever they happen wil affect us eventually. There were other serious incidents too , but I cannot be sure they would have impacted us.  So in the sixty five years or so of commercial plant operations we have had 30 incidents among 400 plant. 


One of the factors that does make a difference is the age and the designof the plant.  Newer plant very pronbabaly are rather safer tha tthe old ones.  As it happens while I was preparing this piece , a new item apperaed raising concerns over some 1950's plant restarted in Belgium recently. Often the stats are done using the newest plant safety and construction criteria.  The existing reactors at Flammanvile are froom the 1980s, but  new facilites are being constructed.  There have been problems at flammanville on a number of occassion, but none so serious  (yet!) to meet the criterion of affecting us badly (who sets those crieria?) .  There is at least one significant concern that has been raise in repsectof  the plant in Normandy - the Blayais incident in 1999.  Rather as in Fukushima, if an event occurs that is beyond the parameters believed at construction,  then the building is outside of it designn parameters.  We know storms and surges are stronger now than they were in the 1980's and still increasing.


The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) usually gives the odds of a nuclear meltdown anywhere worldwide as one in a million years.  That is a similar ballpark to the figure Sen Gorst gives.  On the other hand the same NRC only requires reactors to be build to a 1 in 10,000 year core damage frequency !  And yet in Japan, where they are rather sensitive to such things they  reckon the probability of a major nuclear accident has reduced from 1 in 40 years post Fukushima to now 1 in 80 years !  That's some discrepancy.  Again it all depends critically on the assumptions you make and what you define as major.


A few other points to bear in mind.  Just because the probability of  some event is low does not mean it won't happen rather soon. A one in a million years may sound safe, but it could still happen tomorrow.  When doing risk assessements, not only should you reckon the probability, but also the impact.  In general I am happier facing a high probability event that isn't fatal, than a low probability of extinction.  The calculation of the probability of nuclear failure  is difficult because there are few incidents.  Estimating and extrapolating from a small data set is fraught with problems.    Attempting to do it by looking at the design and assessing failure modes and risks might be better , but then you have to accept that if you miss a possible black swan event like the size of the earthquake/tsunami that casused the Fukushima situation, you have a problem.

One in 34 million years.  I don't beleive it any more than I believe I will win the UK national lottery.  And just like that lottery my intention is to not buy a ticket at all, and thereby guarantee not losing .

http://jerseyeveningpost.com/news/2016/01/25/islanders-dont-have-anti-radiation-tablets-because-jersey-is-too-far-away-from-flamanville-says-chief-minister/

 http://www.france24.com/en/20160128-belgium-nuclear-reactors-doel-tihange-security

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Blayais_Nuclear_Power_Plant_flood


http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/safety-of-nuclear-power-reactors/ 

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201504160072 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

You dont have to take no as an answer from bureaucracy

A little over a year ago the Jersey Climate Action Network started a small campaign to push the States into divesting from fossil fuel investments.  The price of oil has halved in that time, and many of the associated exploration and production and integrated major companies have fared just as badly.  As far as I can tell, the States never acted on our recommendation to divest, so I tried to get a bit on information to identify what they were invested in.  Since oil and gas producers make a large part by capitalisation of the FTSE 100 and they are big dividend payers it is a fair guess they make a notable part of the portfolio.

This resulted in a FoI request, whose response in part I challenged, with an interesting outcome.  Since my original questions are repeated in the initial response, I'll skip that.

I cannot say I was overly surprised by the response in most respects.  However it raises some questions.  How can the States make statement of the ethical quality of its investments unless it goes into detail of what those investments are in?  And if it does go into that sort of detail, it ought really to be able to give a recent estimate of the amount in fossil fuels, nuclear etc?  Who is on the TAP, how frequently do investment managers present to them, and who sets the ethical criteria?  Is there any public or elected representation?  When was the last time a States members, or PAC or anybody reviewed the ethical criteria?

The one aspect I felt was unsatisfactory was the response about the report.   So I challenged it.

The proper response to a challenge (other than to plead mea culpa and release the info!) is an internal review.

And yes I did get a copy of the report, though it gave no particularly revealing insights relating to the actual ethics of investment policy.

The response tries to argue that everything was right, but clearly it was not.  The initial response was that reports are only shown to addressees, the review does not elaborate or provide a FOI complaint response for withholding the report, not does it refute my contention the report is covered by FoI.  I didn't think there was anything to be gained by pursuing this further - the information I wanted insofar as it existed was forthcoming.  But it might stand as a useful precedent in future should anyone try to gain access to a report denied on the grounds that we on only show them to addressees.

One other pont worth making here; just because a decision is made on ethical grounds doesn't make it a poor financial decision.  Indeed as in this case had the Island puled its fossil fuels investments a year ago as called for, we might now have who knows how many more millions in the Island's funds.

Gov.je and tax

Since the rains are rather heavy today , I'm getting a pile of paperwork done.  Or I would if I could. Despite the drive to digital everything and  e-gov is the future, I cannot submit a 2015 company tax return, because the States web site still has not been updated from last year!  I jest not.

Don't talk to me about....

Today I had one of those uncommon confluences of seemingly disparate items that spurred me into writing this piece. Oddly it started with me wanting to post something in agreement with a short paragraph in the speech CM Gorst gave to the IoD on the 8^th December. You can read the entire item at http://www.gov.je/News/Speeches/ChiefMinisters/Pages/InstituteofDirectors2015.aspx

The excerpt that caught me eye was paragraph/sentence 7 “Globally,  the population is increasing, economic power is shifting and concerns are growing over climate change and future food, energy and water security “. I concur. I said so repeatedly on the senatorial election hustings in 2008 and especially in 2011. In politics as in investing there is a world of difference between being right and being right on time. Nevertheless it has to be said the CM has grasped something very important. The question is what we do about it? But that is not where I want to go today.

Annually we have a social survey in the Island. It one of our few good sources of opinion in that it takes a relatively large sample, meaning the results should be pretty reliable. The latest one is out now at http://www.gov.je/Government/JerseyWorld/StatisticsUnit/PeopleCommunities/Pages/Socialstatistics.aspx Dismay hardly describes my feelings on seeing the chart at figure 6.4 :

If 60% do not think they have much if any influence over Jersey, who does have influence? Is it any wonder our election turnouts are so embarrassingly low? I do not propose to go into any detail about solutions here, but I will give a couple of exemplars as to the nature of the problem.

Recently the JEP have been running pieces on what various States members have achieved in their year since the elections. Again I'll eschew the opportunity for some humour at their expense. I want to go back the senatorial hustings at the RJAHS. Everyone of the successful candidates said they supported local organic growing when pressed, except arguably the now Chief Minister. So what have they done, these independent candidates? Has any of them bought a proposition, or even questions on the organic sector and its obvious decline locally?? Has any of them written to organic farmers to find out what is needed? Have they been in contact with the Jersey Organic Association about the problems? I can be pretty confident the answer is no, they have not actually done anything conspicuous. So what was the value of those repeated pledges at the hustings?

It was in trying to post a response (positively!) on twitter about the Chief Minister's speech I mentioned above that I discovered the Assistant Minister for digital etc had blocked me. I was somewhat surprised – I have been following him on twitter a number of years, and yes I do challenge some things he posts, but equally I often retweet his occasional blog posts too. For those who don't know twitter, it allows one to post short items and to choose who to follow ie whose postings you get to see. You can block someone from seeing your posts. The only reason I can see for doing that rather than simply unfollowing is to stop them being able to respond to your posts.

If I had to guess I would say the issue arose from a comment I made on another site about the senators recent posting on innovation see https://blog.gov.je/2015/11/20/action-on-innovation/ .  He had my hackles up before the end of the first sentence “Innovation is about dreaming up great ideas that change the world “ Simply not so, on so many counts. The piece is written from a very narrow and partial view of what innovation is and what it delivers. 

Perhaps the assistant minister knows more about it than I having spent less than a year in office, but it seems unlikely. I was there at the first AI blossoming, I worked for commercial research groups and centres for several years as the programme coordinator of the postgraduate training partnership with Cranfield University. I've been involved in patent battles (proving prior art), two trade sales of tech businesses I part owned, I was even an external supervisor for a couple of PhD students (one on multidimensional project management representation, the other on the application of AI to water asset management). While writing up my own thesis I was engaged as one of two people to set up and run what was them the largest medial trial database in Europe (100,000 cohort colorectal cancer study). My mate Dave and I set up one of the first commercial web sites in the UK, to support our SF and book trading business, before E-bay existed and EPOS software was available to us. Oh yes and I managed and co-owned a software house that grew in 5 years from a 4 person team to being bought out by one of our customers for several million pounds. That's just the software side for starters.

Really I am not bothered that the assistant minister blocks me. There are plenty of people about who will willingly tell him want he wants to hear. What scientists learn early on is that it is your critics and detractors that are your best friends in getting to the truth, the best explanation/model/solution.  Sycophants are of no assistance

Software projects can fail on the misplacement of a single punctuation mark in hundreds of lines of code. (It makes writing for people such a delight, thye being much more forgiving of my typing !) Miss-stated requirements and unacknowledged assumptions are usually catastrophic to projects. Opinion and theory count for little against delivering something that works. My best advice to anyone dealing with innovation and digital work is that practitioners are well accustomed to hearing & ignoring B/S and bluster. If you don't know your stuff, you'd be best to say nothing at all.

Unrequited Correspondence

Another in an occasional series of correspondence to States of Jersey ministers.  I know this one was delivered as I got an 'out of office' reply.  I'm not sure how long the Senator was away, but I'm sure he will have been back at his desk at some point in the intervening 4 months.

Farming conference preparation

I will be walking across to Trinity today to attend the Farming conference.  Some of us are intending to ask some questions.