Random reactions

Where do you stand?

Andrew Sullivan calls this blogging out loud, where you try to develop a thought during a post. I present these as thoughts that are surfacing and seem to be connected, but I confess I haven't developed this as much as I should have.

Let's start with the obvious: Britain did not allow mass immigration because it wanted diversity. Immigrants did not come to Britain because they wanted to make Britain a multi-coloured rainbow of diversity. If diversity is a benefit of immigration, it is clearly unintended. I think it is a benefit, but I think the case is more difficult to make than the Guardianistas would seem to believe.

Let's move to some related thoughts: Immigrants tend to demonstrate stronger social cohesion than the English. England finished the Second World War broke, shortly thereafter lost an empire, and subsequently abandoned its religion. Immigrants tend to stick together and consciously reinforce cultural elements from their homeland. They also are quick to perceive discrimination, and use the sense of their own 'otherness' to band together.

Immigrants have the capability to move policy and opinion in England disproportionate to their numbers, because of their ability to move in concert. They have not done so yet, which puzzles me. I'm surprised that Indians have had little more than a culinary effect on Brit culture, for example.

The question I'm trying to get to is one for Muslims in Britain: Where do you stand? Currently, the Muslim voice is one of self-appointed imams and whomever the BBC decides to place in front of a camera, usually on Newsnight. Do they speak for you? Is what they say an accurate reflection of what you believe? Do you believe you have the right and the freedom to voice your own opinion?

I ask because if the imams and public voices do not represent Muslims, it would be very prudent to find a channel for other voices. If I were Exec Producer for Al Jazeera, I would definitely be running a Vox Pop exercise. Because the implications are huge. If the majority of Muslims in Britain do not agree with what is being said, there is a good possibility that current tensions can be diffused quickly. All it would really take is a medium sized parade under the banner 'Not in My Name.' But if the voices that blame the West for all of Islam's problems are indeed representative, a much larger problem exists.

I find it odd that we are now receiving monthly opinion polls from Iraq, but we never see the segmentation of Brit polls to identify a Muslim meta-voice. It would be in the public interest to know.

So, how does thinking in blog format work? Critiques are welcome.

The Day After in London

Traffic on the Tube was a little light coming in, but the buses were full. In my office, a lot of people decided to work from home, but given the state of our offices, that's not surprising. More of us seem to have taken the opportunity to arrive a bit late. That extra half hour of sleep means a lot.

I think part of me wanted to see hordes of people marching to work under a Union Jack, clutching a cigar in one hand and using two fingers to give one sort of message or another. But that's not the way London works. That would be dignifying the terrorist message with a response, I guess.

Nonetheless, I can report with confidence that panic has not seized the north and the south of Britain, if central London is taken as representative. This pleases me.

I do have to say that I heard two people whistling the tune to an advert that was running a year ago, where a popular DJ from Capital radio station sang a song with the chorus, 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, that I choose Capital.' Pity I can't whistle.

The Impact of Technology on the Government Market

From approximately 1972 to 2003, technology has been hugely disruptive for business decision makers in government. Elected politicians might be for or against new technology, but business decision makers felt threatened by the consequences of improvements in the ease of communications and were unable to see short term advantage in reduced cycle times or collaborative work processes. What was perceived as an opportunity to improve productivity by the private sector was seen as a threat to organisational control in the public sector.

Organisation leaders were not thrilled to see new job titles at Director level—CIOs and CTOs took some of their power, told leaders they should do different things in different ways, and generally asked embarrassing questions.

Almost immediately, governmental business decision makers began fighting to protect their sphere of influence. They enlisted technology to help them, and through the aid of mechanisms starting with enterprise resource planning and continuing to today’s integrated performance management systems, business decision makers have succeeded in limiting the threat to their role in the organisation and pushing technology issues back down below board level, where they feel technology in general and ICT in particular, belongs. They have clawed back their decision making powers.

This situation will last about as long as it takes to drink a cup of coffee. The technology explosion that started in the ‘70s radiated in many different directions, as a thousand flowers bloomed. A generation later, many of these flowers are uniting and producing combined solutions. The urge to merge is strong. Kable has written about the combination of RFID and GIS as an example of two different strands of technology coming together in a way that will surprise everybody. There are many others.

Business decision makers will be dismayed and obstructive regarding these new technologies. This is not because they are Luddites. It is because it will bring a range of issues onto their plate that were seemingly unalterable facts of life previously. These issues will cry out for solutions. All of the solutions available to business decision makers will be even more disruptive and offer fewer opportunities for success for these leaders and their organisations.

The easiest—and technologically, the simplest—example of this is identity cards. Two technologies re-invented in the ‘70s, very large databases and digitally transmitted biometric markers, have combined to give government organisations the capability of holding pertinent (and impertinent) data about every citizen in the land.

The existence of this new capability forces a political decision to be made: either to adopt and use it, or to say ‘we don’t want it.’ But it also introduces a business decision: Whether to reach for more organisational power that comes with a large budget and a larger remit, or to lose relevance and importance while another department reaches for the stars.

It should be emphasized that as a case study, ID cards are not sufficient to describe the decisions facing government organisations in future. This is because ID cards are too simple and the costs and opportunities are too easy to quantify to be highly relevant to future combinations of existing technology. How long will it be before every government field worker is deputised as a Community Service Officer, authorised to issue ASBOs and make family custody or even medical care decisions, using mobile working technology for communications, authorisation, access to appropriate paperwork and virtual attendance by officials from appropriate departments?

It's Politics, Not Technology

Large ICT initiatives in the private sector have a poor rate of success. The current government is showing that it is possible to attain equally poor levels of achievement in the public sector.

Chancellor Gordon Brown wants very much to help poor people. He has offered to pay people who are moving from benefits towards work on a sliding scale calculated to make it worthwhile for poor people to get a job.

Brown made two huge mistakes: He made qualification for the scheme too complicated, and he left the administration to an integrated technology system that was, to all intents and purposes, automated and unsupervised.

This is Gordon Brown's error. Up to 2 million people may suffer to varying degrees from this error. The fact is that some companies and some governments get it right. When they do, the benefits are very large. When they get it wrong, it is usually down to a senior decision maker who doesn't take the project seriously enough to get into the details, oversee the implementation, test and re-test prior to lighting it off, and having a plan B. Yes, Chancellor, I'm talking about you. Your job is looking inwards at the ship of state. It is Tony Blair's job to look outwards. You should leave Africa to Geldof, and to a lesser extent to Tony Blair. It's not that the problems of developing countries are less important than the UK's benefits schemes. It's that it's not your job.

If the UK makes a similar mess of the ID scheme, people will die.

Why Citizens Don't Trust Governments

Outside Defence, the biggest use of technology by government seems to be CCTV. I say seems because the data is not held together. There are more than 4 million cameras recording what goes on in the UK.

The technology was sold to the public on a popular premise--preventing crime. Politicians argued that the presence of cameras would serve as a deterrent. In practice, this hasn't happened. Cameras are used in solving crimes, but not enough--too much footage to watch. However, nobody is talking about changing the way the UK uses CCTV. Nobody, for that matter, is talking about changing the way the UK deals with crime. Incrementalism is the order of the day in a situation that would seem to me to call for a broader-based approach.

Some types of crime are going down, but some types are going up. Interestingly, the types of crime that are decreasing are those least likely to be caught on camera. Those that are increasing are precisely those most likely to be videotaped. I don't see anyone (other than the website "Watching Them Watching Us" at www.spy.org. The news links in this post come via their website.) who seems to have noticed this.

The same website says, "The Home Office has now published "Home Office Research Study 252 Crime prevention effects of closed circuit television: a systematic review" which is a meta-study review of all the available research into the effectiveness of public CCTV surveillance.

'Overall, the best current evidence suggests that CCTV reduces crime to a small degree. CCTV is most effective in reducing vehicle crime in car parks, but it had little or no effect on crime in public transport and city centre settings.' "

If the UK government cannot use tried and tested (video's been around for quite a while) technology to address an issue of high importance, why should we trust them to use newer technology on issues that are not as visible to the public eye? I would submit that they have yet to make the case.

Something that worries me

I have no doubt that I'm coming late to this party. I'm sure it's being discussed at length across the web. However, in case others haven't noticed...

Google is great! Their motto is do no evil. I think we all had better hope that they live up to it.

Google has a downloadable tool that will index your computer and allow you to find things using the Google search engine. I haven't done this yet, but my friends and colleagues say it works wonderfully.

One friend told me that now, when he uses Google to search the web, the results include files and emails from his own computer as well as the results of the web search. I kinda sorta think that this means Google can search his computer any time they want.

Can someone tell me I'm wrong or paranoid about this? Could someone point me to the discussions others have been having about this topic?

Britain, Productivity and Management

Okay, I'm doing this post because I'm too old for Saturday morning cartoons (well, because I can't find Bugs Bunny on British telly).

The UK is in the middle tier of world economies, in tems of growth. It really should be in the top tier. It is in the middle tier because of poor productivity, which overcomes a variety of huge advantages over other countries.

Why does the UK have poor productivity? My answer is poor management. William Lewis of the McKinsey Global Institute has written a book called The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty and the Threat to Global Stability. Tech Central Station recently published an interview with Lewis. For me, the money quote is this:

LEWIS: Just because people are not educated does not mean that they are incapable, which is a mistake educated people in the West often make -- and not just the West but probably in Japan as well. These people can be trained on the job to accomplish quite high skill levels and quite high levels of productivity. And that's basically good news because if the World Bank and everybody else had to wait until we revamp the educational institutions of all the poor countries and then put a cohort or two of workers through it, we are talking about another 50 years before anything happens. That's not acceptable and it's not necessary, thank God.

Obviously, Britain is not an emerging economy. But with increasing coverage of NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) lads and ladettes, it's important to note a couple of things:

1. NEETS can be trained to be as productive as anybody. The problem is elsewhere
2. American companies are more profitable in Britain than British companies, despite making (and re-making) foolish mistakes about British habits, tastes and business practices. And it's not just Americans--European companies operating in Britain boast higher margins as well.

Americans make these higher profits with British workers. The reason is that they train these workers. American companies train their workforce because they have to in America, due to inferior education--they have had the NEETS to work with for much longer than Britain--and it's the only way to get the job done.

I see dozens of British managers every month as part of my job. I find them intelligent, committed and willing to adopt modern practices (sometimes too willing). But they are, by and large, hard men, determined to be as focussed on the bottom line as Chainsaw Al. They forget what happened to him and the companies he served. They tend to view employees as costs, not assets. They are willing to push their workers, but not to train them.

We (and every developed country) have NEETS because we have not succeeded in making education keep pace with the new world we are busily creating. Until that reform is accomplished, companies will have to hire for aptitude and train for skills. America has done this. Britain has not. That accounts for the difference.

All the Mysteries Explained

What is a Lango? Why is the SWP inviting a racist holocaust denier to play jazz for them? Why did the chicken cross the road? (Ask the Funkasaur). And just how white is Britain? As always, the answers are there on the Britblog.

Road (to perdition) Pricing

Tim Worstall posts on someone buying black market water in India from 'furtive municipal employees.' Tim notes accurately that pricing water rationally would lead to conservation.

As is so often the case, Rational Thinking on Markets is best left for areas, technologies and products/services that act in well, markets. Water in India doesn't quite qualify, and pricing it at cost of provision (let alone introducing a margin of profit) would kill millions and lead to farm failure. Think Enron/energy/California. Deregulating half a market gives the other half a little more power over a public good than is healthy.

Which leads us naturally to Britain's topic of the week, road pricing. Alistair Darling wants to use high tech to charge us for road usage. Were I a Brit, I would offer the quaint observation that my taxes built and maintained the roads. But I'm a resident Yank, so never mind. If congestion really bothers y'all so much, have at it. There are several points that I hope are discussed before implementation:

1. Transportation taxes currently provide the UK government with three times the revenue spent on transportation. Redirection of this revenue during any phase-in could improve public transportation to the point that citizens could make a rational choice when road pricing occurs.

2. Certain roads should be free. Free roads can then be a tool to direct growth (new housing, economic development), and can change over time.

3. Create a market--issue an annual credit for road usage to all, and let those with a surplus sell miles to those in need.

4. Current tax policy is a market force for fuel conservation. I'm not one of those in a panic about greenhouse gases, but does New Labour want to throw away this tool?

5. Price alternative means of delivery--there are lower tech methods of providing this monitoring and taxing 'service.' What are the costs/benefits of satellite surveillance as opposed to other forms of provision?

6. Would the platform be American satellites or Galileo? Have you thought it through?

7. If implementation coincides with National ID scheme, there's going to be an awful lot of new data generated about citizens. Correlations might be quite interesting to an analyst like myself. However, they might be of even more interest to a nanny state trying to coerce optimal behaviour from a blessedly bloody minded bunch. I'm not sure that the social consequences of such research are in the interests of UK citizens.

I managed to get through all seven points without screaming at my computer--"Are they all crazy? Don't even think of doing this!" Because, you see, I want to make a rational contribution to the debate... I feel like standing on a street corner and muttering 'It's people. Soylent Green is people...'

Weekend Warrior

Quick reminder in response to an email--I'm a weekend warrior at blogging. 90% of my posts are Sat/Sun/hols.