Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Can Microsoft products always sell on their own merits?
MANY contributors to HoL use Microsoft products and those individuals, as "End Users Licencees" are unlikely to have received a financial inducement to do so. (MS were believed to be paying commission of $10 to $15 to salesmen to shift their hard-to-shift mobile phones.)
But in the corporate world, its a different story. The Wall Street Journal suggests that in China, Italy and Romania, MS have paid bribes to shift their stuff and that Microsoft is under investigation.
Haringey Council is a pure Microsoft site and it appears to be wedded to a corporation that frequently flouts laws around the world. The local council show little inclination for example, to adopt Open Source software that could offer savings in the long run. Can MS sell to corporates on merits alone? Is the quality of their products sufficient to be bought solely on merit?
Our local council's IT department already exhibits complacency over its wasteful, inefficient implementation of PDFs. Is it not overdue for a shake up?
Tags for Forum Posts: IT, Microsoft, bribe, bribery, contracts, council, department, merits, quality
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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Are you suggesting the Haringey Council IT Dept took bribes to go with Microsoft ?
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Permalink Reply by CanadianMichael on
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You've baffled me with the wasteful PDF reference. Are you claiming PDF's creator Adobe is also taking bribes?
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Canadian Michael, the council sometimes produces native PDFs that are highly efficient.
But they still engage in the wasteful practice of printing out onto paper, documents that originate in electronic form (e.g. Word, Excel etc.).
That is bad enough.
But in these difficult times, council staff are then employed, wastefully, to scan back in these sheets of paper to create highly inefficient PDFs. The disadvantages of this stupid approach are manifold. They've been told about this time and again but fail to do anything meaningful about it.
It's not about bribery: its about laziness and complacency and possibly ignorance.
As you probably know, portable document format is cross-platform (Mac, LInux and DOS-Windows) and it is an excellent file type, if used with some brains.
Rebel Cllr. Alan Stanton posed the problem perfectly properly, here.
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OK, that is a bit ridiculous. Not particularly M$FT-related, but I get how it's on the same "council IT waste" wavelength. Thanks for the explanation.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Michael, it may be helpful if I explain that Clive has a number of topics on which he's passionate. So passionate in fact, they often crowd into the same discussion thread. This sometimes leads to the problem that Clive is in the middle of making a cogent, evidenced, sensible and constructive case on one topic, when - kerpow! - another unrelated issue pops out.
This can sometimes be difficult to untangle. But go with the flow. At their best Clive's juxtapositions resemble surrealism. (Think of the films of Luis Buñuel.)
Anyway, to focus on Haringey's reports in PDF format, though Clive is speculating on the causes, he's describing a real problem.
Like me, he wrote to Haringey's Head Honchos not only pointing out the problem but suggesting a possible solution. And - all credit to Clive! - he got a lot further than I ever did on this.
He received a reply from David Airey, Haringey's "Head of IT Services", who didn't give one or more of the 101 reasons why Haringey is right and Clive is wrong. Instead Mr Airey said Clive had made: "a valid point about not printing documents and then scanning them to create a PDF version." He went on:
"The Chief Executive has asked me to respond to let you know that we will ensure that staff awareness on this topic is raised via an article on the Council’s intranet site and that this point will be highlighted in our Microsoft Office training courses."
Of course, Mr Airey was not to know that the name "Microsoft" would activate a full-scale system alert in Carter HQ. However, acknowledging the problem is still a giant leap forward. Though, like Clive, I am puzzled why Nick Walkley the Chief Executive doesn't simply send an email saying:
Printing out, signing, and scanning reports makes it harder for our residents to learn what we do and hold us to account. It's also a very silly waste of time, We need to stop doing it.
Instead, to ensure reports are secure they should consider Clive Carter's suggestion.
(Tottenham Hale Ward councillor.)
(P.S. I'm not a "rebel councillor", Clive. I remain a committed Labour Party member. It's some of the others who one morning, awaking from troubled dreams, seem to have found themselves transformed in their beds into Tories.
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Alan:
If not rebel, would maverick be okay as a moniker for you?!
I was disappointed with the feeble response including the platitude (awareness raising) but especially, that the point about scanning paper to pdf might be highlighted at a Microsoft Training Course.
I confess that the apparent delegation of this problem to something connected to Microsoft was a red rag to a bull, but of course, abuse of PDFs is a cross-platform issue and not necessarily related to M$.
In these anxious, straightened times it astonishes me that there could be such complacency. IMO there is a long list of matters to which the council needs to give urgent attention. Something like PDFs should be dealt with firmly and finally in 24 hours, so that far more serious matters can be tackled.
IMO, there needs to be a shake up.
On Monday, the new Chief Executive (Nick Walkley) was kind enough to send me an email that was a little more encouraging. Since this is a matter of public interest, I reproduce his email:Mr Carter.
Thankyou for your email.
I can assure you that I intend to ensure that significant effort is put into improving how Council staff use the computing resources available to them in order to best help residents.
With regards to the use of open source office productivity software, I have already asked that the Council is kept informed of developments in the use of lower cost or open source across the public sector, as part of reducing the costs of the support functions of the Council. I am of the view that much of the functionality offered by many of our applications is rarely used and therefore not needed. That said, from the conversations I have had to date about the few other local authorities across the country acting as pathfinders for using open source or low costs software they do not yet report an entirely positive picture. There are additional costs associated with migration and risk management associated with such a move which we would need to consider for instance.
However please be assured Haringey will continue to look at these authorities as it seeks to reduce its on costs.
Kind regards,
Nick Walkley
Although Mr Walkley did not specifically mention the PDF issue, I think he did make measured thoughtful and reasonable comments about Open Source software. Which is a good start, because some council CEO's probably think it's a bottle of HP with the cap left off ...
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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Clive, this is a disappointing letter from the Chief Exec and I suggest that, if you can, you take it further.
First, Haringey is not a 'Microsoft' Council, no matter how much money they're paying in licences. They do use open source software already.
The Chief Exec seems to be of a generation that simply does not understand IT and therefore how to best deploy it. They seem to operate a personality-based system too, with him at the 'Head'. We're all doomed :)
There are two real issues here, access and quality and it is access that matters most. Information is power and the Council produces a vast amount that residents have a legal right to see but cannot. We're shouldn't be forced into expensive FOI requests.
ACCESS
All that is needed is for Haringey to add it's internal document and email search engine to the public one on Haringey.gov.uk and it's sorted. Yes, they're going to have to make sure their system for keeping confidential data secure is working, but I think it's as good as it should be already, given the number of disaffected workers inside the organisation testing it all the time.
Do you think Haringey will go down this route? The Chief Exec reveals a disturbing ignorance of Government computing with this silly phrase:
the few other local authorities across the country acting as pathfinders for using open source
He clearly hasn't given this subject more than a cursory glance, yet seems to want to give the opposite impression. Suppose the temptation of Chief Execs to be 'master of all trades' is strong. As he reportedly came from a background of cut,cut,cut and the concomitant huge privatisation he presumably regards every internal Haringey function as an opportunity to pay contractors twice the price in exchange for less than half the service.
Every Council is using open source as much as they can, including Haringey's many contractors who are the real providers of their service. The suppliers do not generally use 'closed source' software themselves - they just sell and support it.
With this defensive, backward-looking attitude, I doubt there'll be any progress on the second issue (quality) which, after all, is what the guy is paid for and should be measured by - he's not some sort of Lieutenant Govenor of a foreign province, he's a functionary paid to execute Haringey's decisions. Because information is power he has a lot of it.
QUALITY
What is difficult to prosecute is, how well is he doing? The Civil Service have surrounded themselves with so many awards that every Council can claim to have won a few, no matter how terrible they actually are - there is no accurate popular measure and, as far as I can see, no effective scrutiny - the Chief Exec can do exactly what they like, when they like, as long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.
LBH may use open source, but have people been given a fair amount of training or are they relying on badly paid workers on short-term, 15 hour per week contracts to do things well? Is regular training on the latest versions kept up or are they hopelessly out of date? It's too complicated for ordinary mortals, there are few meaningful standards. All the internal stuff is kept secret by Mr Walkely to prevent us from discovering the embarrassing truth and realise the extent of the waste of our money that bad management guarantees.
The Executive has presided, doubtless with satisfaction, over an empire where they've successfully managed to erect so many barriers to access and information that they've alienated the residents they claim to serve.
So defeated that we can no longer be bothered to even vote in local elections - what's the point - the real power of the £1bn annual spend lies with Mr Walkely, not us. Only his department can make the life-changing decisions democracy promised us as a right and he's not going to share that power - why would he trust local residents with anything?
So, now that no Councillors have a convincing mandate, people like the Chief Exec act as judge and jury on everything and keep their heads down - it's our fault for being apathetic. In fact, writing this, I'm aware that the only role for critics seems to be to sling mud - we've all jointly engineered this situation, so I'll shut up after this final paragraph.
The Website can be measured using more open, public and well-used standards than practically anything else the Council does. What it needs is a Residents user group with real power to drive the 'public face' of LBH forward. Unless that happens, we've only ourselves to blame.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Clive, not sure what you are trying to point out. Is it all the fault of council employees yet again? They must be waiting to be blamed for the start of World War Two and global warming. Give em a break.
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Clive, if I was doing a startup firm it would be open source all the way. I don't think I would ever go through the pain of de-Microsofting a large firm though.
I don't think you've explained the PDF issue properly. This might not be your problem but the usual problem with printing out a PDF and then scanning it in to create another PDF is that no Optical Character Recognition is done on it so you get a huge file describing everything on the page in terms of lines and dots. There are services that will take your scanned in documents and OCR them, I use Evernote for instance.
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Thanks for this helpful criticism, John. I've amended the text on my Flickr photoblog - to try making the points more clearly.
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John, I hear what you say. When I replied to Mr Airey (Head of IT Services at Haringey), I said:
Finally, I wasn't surprised to see the reference to "Microsoft Training Courses". Can I suggest that another way the council might save money, is to wean itself off site licences from this criminally-convicted corporation ($2bn in fines; monopoly abuse etc.) and gradually take up Open Source software, as some progressive councils have?(my new emphasis above) Microsoft had a strategy of "Windows Everywhere" and they were successful salesmen, using every trick in the book. If we cannot start to de-Microsoft government and local government, we would have to accept that that level of quality is in place indefinitely.
I would accept that de-Microsofting firms should be done slowly and carefully. But it can be done. Bulent Ozlem in this thread has pointed out that France and Germany are going in this direction. In fact, go-ahead Local Authorities around the world know they must do this in the long run.
I think one also must recognise that it isn't just technical issues that are the obstacle: there are entrenched vested interests at stake, including staff who know nothing else and who know no better than Microsoft. Relegating or delegating the problem of pdf mismanagment to a "Microsoft training course" came casually, naturally and reflexively to Mr Airey.
PDFs - I think we both agree that scanning in million of dots is crackers. However, we have each made assumptions as to the kind of file driving the print-out:I've assumed its Word files or Excel files, whereas you've assumed that a (native) PDF was used. It would be a step forward if it were the latter, but I'm not sure that it is. The council hardly think its a problem, so we're unlikely to be told.
Optical Character Recognition would bring more technology to the problem than is justified. It would treat the symptom of the problem rather than the cause. I say, fix the problem at source!
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