Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web
Sensible security | Cabinet Office technology
The answer isn’t to compromise security in order to meet the user needs. The answer is to think about security as part of the user needs, something that is integral to (and should be balanced against) every other facet of the service.
Five Whitehall lessons that Sir Humphrey never learnt – FT.com
The first thing I learnt was that there is no such thing as HM Government. Westminster is a ship without a bridge; there is no captain who can observe everything and steer a course. There are only the departments – 20 or so disparate organisations, peopled by stubbornly uncommunicative officials, each with its own direction of travel and prone to colliding with the others.
Everyone is doing strategy right now. – disambiguity
You are already doing strategy today. Don’t waste time trying to come up with the perfect strategy. Take time to understand the strategies that are in play today, make those as visible and addressable as you can, and start iterating.
The Internet With A Human Face – Beyond Tellerrand 2014 Conference Talk
I’ve come to believe that a lot of what’s wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.
Everything Is Broken — The Message — Medium
It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.
Computers, and computing, are broken.
Everything is Distributed – O’Reilly Radar
There are no complex software systems without people. Any discussion of distributed systems and managing complexity ultimately must acknowledge the roles people play in the systems we design and run. Humans are an integral part of the complex systems we create, and we are largely responsible for both their variability and their resilience (or lack thereof).
Guest Post: Culture, context and ways of working | Government technology
To really get the benefits from our digital journey, it is not just about rethinking our customer interactions. We need to re-think the whole organisation: culture, context and ways of working are as important as the technology.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data [pdf]
Economists suffer from physics envy over their inability to neatly model human behavior. An informal, incomplete grammar of the English
language runs over 1,700 pages. Perhaps when it comes to natural language processing and related fields, we’re doomed to complex theories that will never have the elegance of physics equations. But
if that’s so, we should stop acting as if our goal is to author extremely elegant theories, and instead embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data
How to write a risk log in 6 easy steps | Freedom From Command And Control
Writing about risks is a powerful weapon. Risks can’t read so they won’t know what you said about them. A completed and signed off risk log is a credible deterrent. A draft or incomplete risk log is a major threat.
Don’t Force Google to ‘Forget’ – NYTimes.com
Data is data. Google and company have not internalized just how significant that first page of search results has become to someone whose name has been queried. What they place on that page may do more than anything else in the world to define a stranger in others’ estimations.
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