Why public services need better architects...

So I am all for automation. "Rationalise the mundane and develop our capabilities" is one of my main mantras: i.e. stop doing things that don't give us a business edge and focus on the things that do. Removing manual process not only reduces human error, but also frees up people to add real business value.

The UK government is a sprawling mass with tonnes of systems, and a lot of people helping to keep the country moving in the right direction - hopefully forwards! With a large budget deficit and a tax paying public looking for more from their pound, you can understand why there are lot of high budget IT projects looking to streamline and make the enterprise run more efficiently. Ahem to that.

I had an interesting situation recently which showed such an efficiency, but also exposed a serious flaw in the rolled out solution. About 6 months ago I ordered a new car from a Fiat dealership in the UK, whom shall remain nameless. All was well until we went to collect the vehicle, only to discover it had the wrong colour interior... we rejected the car, and after much re-negotiation with the dealer, we ordered a replacement car.

Three months later I collected the new car, and was happy that we had waited to get the right specification. Then I received a fine from the DVLA for non-insurance of a Fiat vehicle. I thought this was odd since I had a policy out on the the car, so I checked the details, and the car in question was the one we'd rejected and never actually owned! Obviously the DVLA have a process in place to try and catch motorists that don't insure their vehicles, which in principle is a great thing to do: correlate across data-sets, and look for exceptions.

Where the process falls down is that the workflow that manages exceptions is a completely closed loop: you cannot speak to anyone at the DVLA about the fine, you can only pay it. The only way to contact them is via good old snail mail... so I write a letter, only to receive what looks like a standard automated response in an even more [legally] threatening tone. In the end it took multiple letters from both myself and the car dealer to state the car was never owned by me and that it remained in-trade. The DVLA dropped the case at the last moment, but it does make me wonder how many people pay the fine just to avoid the stress. Is that an acception of guilt?

It's an interesting one. This was either a use-case that they hadn't thought of, or the guiding principle is assume everyone is guilty because the data can't be wrong. Veracity anyone? It's the latest Big Data dimension! I also feel that there should have been some human break points in the feedback loop. Automation is great, but sometime things need a human's touch. That or a decent machine learning algo ;-)

"I am not a number, I am a free man"