Disqus - Latest Comments for CraigThomler

Re: We created the system, and therefore we can reinvent the system: The urgency behind public sector reform

CraigThomler — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 21:35:38 -0000

Well said Pia.
These are largely the paradoxes I see and contend with.
I am particularly concerned with Paradox 4 - lack of vision. In some senses I believe it is due to the rate of change - technology is outrunning many people's ability to define a future state vision, either by surpassing their future view in the present or by creating a level of uncertainty that makes it harder for folks to generate a future point-in-time view.

Also Paradox 2 - increasing uncertainty over political leadership & what the roundabout of Ministers will value - plays into making it harder to set a future vision for Australia or in specific policy and operational areas.

The detriment to this is that we're lurching reactively towards a future that is poorly defined, not understood and has significant downside risk for governments and nations.

Many of the solutions being put in place today for surveillance (to improve/hold the line in policing), for customer service, for infrastructure and so on, may not prove to be sustainable or long-lasting (have a positive return) or may produce significant market or social distortions and empower future governments to make decisions that limit democratic expression and involvement.

How do we address this? We need more vision, not less. We need to define the future we want and drive towards it.

Re: Whose Business is It Anyway? When I Got Climate-Bullied on Twitter

CraigThomler — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 18:09:01 -0000

There’s some interesting misrepresentations in this post.
Firstly Thunberg does not claim to be a scientist, or even a leader. She simply calls for leaders to listen to scientists because it is the future of her generation that is being impacted. She repeats well evidenced science that is globally accepted, but doesn’t claim to be the authority on it. So attacking her on the basis of not having credentials is a strawman and not befitting an actual scientists, as Vijay claims to be.

Next Vijay seems to be offended when his views on other people’s children are challenged. For a scientists to not like being challenged is, in itself, suggestive that he is not very good at his profession, but putting that aside, it is perfectly warranted to call out adults for loudly sharing their views on how other people’s children are raised. It is literally not his concern, and I am sure that Vijay would be equally annoyed, if not more so, if people publicly criticised his child rearing techniques - noting that I do not know if he has had, or will ever have, the privilege & pleasure of raising children.

Next, getting concerned over children taking half a day off school to attend a democratic protest seems to me as very valuable experience for adolescents growing up in democratic states. Understanding how to protest again government decisions effectively and legally & engaging in the political process is an important thing we need to teach all our children to protect and preserve democracy. Waiting until people are adults to teach this important skill is very short-sighted, or perhaps reflective of an authoritarian perspective by Vijay. Personally I valued my own participation in school strikes in Australia in 1987, and support children today gaining this valuable lesson across 4hrs in one day of their 13yrs schooling journey, if anything they should be spending more time engaging further in how to effectively engage in civic life.

And as to the us vs them mindset Vijay is fostering by his ‘wealthy west” vs “developing nations” narrative, I would ask him to consider that it is the poorest nations who risk the most damage from climate change and are least resilient against it. Thus it is imperative that we all play our part in limiting and adapting to the changes ahead.

Only a fool or a fascist would try to make this a political adversarial point to create unnecessary tensions that will only harm the entire globe, and I am sure Vijay believes he is neither.

Re: Diversity at the top: still a way to go

CraigThomler — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 21:46:21 -0000

Worth noting that the ultimate boss for Mark Green, who is CEO of The Monkeys (an Accenture company) is Julie Sweet, the new CEO of Accenture (https://techgraph.co/inside...

Re: Marshall on AI ethics framework - InnovationsAus.com

CraigThomler — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 01:26:11 -0000

This is about AI behaviour, not about their intent - so doesn't imply life or sentience.

We want AIs to avoid human biases, which is hard as we train them using data that may reflect our biases (even historically).

Also, as they are not sentient, AIs do not judge their own behaviour from an ethical perspective, so may focus on patterns that are efficient but unfair in human terms. At times we will have to program them to behave in what they regard as suboptimal ways to protect equitable outcomes.

Re: The Mandarin

CraigThomler — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 21:29:29 -0000

This is a good opportunity to reflect on this Fjord trend... Silence is Golden - and consider when & why agencies are engaging & how they might respect citizens in order to gain greater engagement through reduced messaging - https://trends.fjordnet.com...

Re: Record Cold Forces Rethink on Global Warming

CraigThomler — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 03:13:22 -0000

That’s a deliberate misquote of the following:

The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of newmethods of model diagnosis, but such statistical informationis essential."

In short, the IPCC is saying that we cannot precisely predict the future climate state; however, we can produce a probability distribution of possible future climate states, which is precisely what the IPCC report proceeded to do.

Vaccinia has misrepresented the IPCC report by selecting a single sentence that serves a convenient purpose out of context, and choosing to ignore the text immediately following, not to mention essentially entire sections of the IPCC report where they do indeed detail the probabilities of future climate states from model ensembles.

https://skepticalscience.co...

Re: Record Cold Forces Rethink on Global Warming

CraigThomler — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 02:57:05 -0000

1) whether glaciers were in retreat before 1900 is irrelevant. Glaciers have grown & shrunk throughout history. What is new from the 20th century is the speed and uniformity of their retreat globally. Virtually every glacier in the world has been shrinking - a clear sign of global warming. https://www.e-education.psu...
2) the sequence of ice ages is irrelevant. We know what causes them and the mechanisms by which the earth’s has warmed and cooled. Current warming is occurring while the sun is in a cooling cycle which is clear evidence natural causes are not at play in modern warming. https://www.theguardian.com...
3) The last twenty years include 15 of the hottest in recorded history. While there were some early signs of a pause, scientists discovered several years ago where the heat was going - into the oceans - which are warming rapidly. https://www.sciencedaily.co...
4) Over the last 200 years atmospheric CO2 has increased from 280ppm (pre industrial level consistent over thousands of years) to about 410ppm today (with a little seasonal variation) and are continuing to rise. That’s over a 40% increase. Studies of the isotopic signature of the additional CO2 show that it is derived uniformly from fossil fuels - aka human emissions at industrial scale. In fact humans have emitted trillions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (with even more absorbed into the ocean causing the ph level to fall). So your stat is misleading and irrelevant because it is free CO2 in the air that’s amplifying the greenhouse effect - not the CO2 locked in rocks. In fact then more we releas by burning rocks (coal) the worse climate change will get & the hotter the planet. http://www.realclimate.org/...
5) it was not warmer in the 15th century - and that would be irrelevant anyway. The earth has been hotter in the past... due natural drivers of climate change. At those times there were NO HUMANS. Modern climate change is caused by humans (per last point), and is affecting our society. We have no precedent for this. https://www.skepticalscienc...
6) see 5. The claim is also untrue. By the way the earth did cool in the 1940s-1970s due to human release of CFCs and other aerosols, further example of how human activity can affect regional and global climate. https://www.atmos-chem-phys...
7 & 8) these show NASA doesn’t lie about climate change. Yes we saw tiny sea level falls in 2017. As to cooler earth, yep slightly and for the same reason - there was an El Nina in play (which causes global short-term temperature drops). 2017 was the hottest el Nina year on record, which shows that these effects cannot overwhelm the long term warming trend. https://www.snopes.com/fact...
9) not in climate science. And it would not be possible for a few scientists to manipulate the data collected on weather around the world. If you are calling out the so-called climategate involving hacked data (an actual crime), multiple inquiries cleared the scientists of manipulating or hiding data. It’s a false claim. https://www.scientificameri...
9) scientists don’t predict the climate. None can tell you the precise temperature at a given time on a given day years in the future, or even the average global temperature for a future year. They create projections of trends - whether the earth will get warmer, Cooler or stay the same. The biggest variable in these projections is what humans will do - accelerate, maintain or cut co2 emissions. All natural cycles are considered (sun spots, orbital variations, etc) and are easy to do as they are quite predictable, using past data and physics.
Have the projections of climate come true? Yes. For over 50 years. We do keep improving the models for minor factors (whether clouds accelerate or restrict climate change, the impact of human air pollution, the albedo effect of growing vegetation replacing ice fields, methane released by melting permafrost) but these are all minor and don’t affect the trend - which remain strong strongly upwards, more than 10x the speed of previous (natural) climate change. https://www.forbes.com/site...
10) this is false and irrelevant. Al Gore is a politician, not a scientist. Also he never said this about Florida (indeed he did not even release An Inconvenient Truth until 2006) though he has made other claims about climate that were exaggerated, as politicians are wont to do. It is true that coastal Florida faces an uncertain future however - https://www.omicsonline.org...

Finally - climate change is not political. It is science. Many countries with conservative governments recognise the science and are acting to limit and/or mitigate climate change. Only in a few countries like the US has a political party defined itself by opposing climate change - and that’s pretty dumb when you think about it.

For myself, I see addressing climate change as a conservative cause. If we wish to preserve what is best about our democracies, societies and traditions, we need to avoid radical environmental change that risks destroying trillions in coastal infrastructure and causes mass dislocation of people fleeing farming failures & rising seas.

Only a radical could oppose acting to limit human caused climate change, which has now reached the same scientific evidential level as gravity & evolution, and no radical is a real conservative.

Re: Tom Burton: the case for the Department of Digital

CraigThomler — Thu, 03 May 2018 17:24:29 -0000

I think the government feels that the Digital Transformation Agency serves this function - when this really is not the case.

Re: Michelle Grattan: why won’t you talk to the media, mandarins?

CraigThomler — Tue, 01 May 2018 19:24:16 -0000

There's not much meaningful engagement between the public sector and commercial world either. As a former public servant with a fondness for helping agencies improve their service delivery, I find the opportunities to either volunteer help or actively participate collaboratively with the public service to jointly delivery improvements are far too rare.

Re: What the public sector can learn from Wetherspoons: you don’t need social media

CraigThomler — Tue, 01 May 2018 19:21:17 -0000

An interesting starting point - but got there in the end. All media & engagement choices should be driven and shaped by business goals. IMHO public sector organisations with a focus on meeting citizen needs have a broader need for social media engagement than do many commercial entities, where the primary goal is sales (backed by brand engagement).

The public service should maintain a continual dialogue with citizens to understand, and sometimes influence, their expectations and needs - social media, as a set of multi-directional engagement channels - suits this purpose far better than one-way traditional media. However to leverage this requires some thinking to shift within agencies that have long had a risk-based reputation management approach to communication and restricted engagement to very small 'boxed' processes that are not meeting the objective of really understanding citizen needs or bringing citizens along on decision-making journeys to address concerns.

The current use of social media primarily for communication by agencies is missing its true value across policy development and customer service.

Re: National Survey of Research Commercialisation

CraigThomler — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 16:14:35 -0000

Does the 2014 dataset correctly reference the questions?
It only includes Q8, Q17aiv, Q20, Q20dii, Q22, Q28, Q24, Q26a, Q26b however the question index below the data refers to Q7 rather than Q8 and Q19 rather than Q20.

Are the column headings of the data incorrect, or the question index?

Re: The pitfalls of performance measurement | Digital Transformation Agency

CraigThomler — Sun, 07 May 2017 20:36:16 -0000

A sixth common pitfall to be mindful of is when agencies don't benchmark before building.

I've encountered a number of situations in government where a senior manager or team simply decided something (system/tool/service) was broken or not fit for purpose, without testing this assumption with the actual users of the service, or validating what the actual issue was (instead focusing on a symptom).

They've then decreed a change to the thing and gone into redesign and build mode without a solid benchmark on how it was performing prior to the 'fix'.

Then they measure the reception to the thing after it has been 'fixed' and claim it's a great success because it achieves a <larger than="" 50%=""> satisfaction/usage level - despite not actually knowing if this is greater or less than the level prior to the 'fix'.

Also they commonly don't track primary and secondary impacts on how long it takes a user to end-to-end complete a task using the system/tool/service, any contingent impacts on other systems, on intermediaries or flow-on changes to the 'price signal' sent by the 'fix'.

Without benchmarking all of these prior to the 'fix' it is often impossible to establish that the change had a positive impact, on who it had a positive impact, or whether there was actually a positive ROI.

In a small percentage of cases the system/tool/service is wildly better or worse than the prior version and this ROI (positive or negative) is visible publicly - but in most cases this impact is harder to see, and sometimes can take months or years to be visible.

So benchmarking is critical if agencies wish to improve their outcomes - and performance metrics can't simply be determined 'early on' during a change, but should be established and measured for a period of time before the type of 'fix' to improve the performance is even developed.

Of course this kind of benchmarking can expose agencies to higher levels of criticism if their fixes do not result in significant performance improvement - and it is possible to cherry-pick which metrics are tracked to make a fix appear in a better light, while it actually provokes broader havoc across dependent systems.

However if this benchmarking is not done then no performance metric used by an agency can ever be treated with anything other than strong skepticism.

Cheers,

Craig

Re: Trump was right after all on the Obama wiretapping claims

CraigThomler — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 16:19:23 -0000

Let's see if Trump puts a legal case together. If he doesn't, keep asking him why not.

Re: Trump was right after all on the Obama wiretapping claims

CraigThomler — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 16:16:42 -0000

Except that this surveillance is legal, approved by Congress and strictly controlled by them, not the President.

It would be more honest, but still reaching, to state that the Republican majority Congress authorised the surveillance - but only to track the foreign persons of interest.

Re: Trump was right after all on the Obama wiretapping claims

CraigThomler — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 16:13:47 -0000

Yes it is. And it's also good that his lying to congress was unveiled. Did you want a liar advising the President?

There's often this tension between what is and isn't legal - some illegal leaks serve the public interest, some don't. Judging which is which depends on where you stand and the timeframe you look at.

In this case this illegal act appears to have had a positive outcome - ensuring Presieent Trump can better serve the US by not being lied to.

Re: GOP rep: Health bill ‘one of the worst’ I’ve seen

CraigThomler — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 15:57:25 -0000

How many Republicans will defect?

Re: Early Marketplace adoption pays off | Digital Transformation Agency

CraigThomler — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 19:06:49 -0000

The interview makes the Marketplace sound like Upwork for government :)

Re: Parkinson: stop flogging dead cats and take innovation seriously

CraigThomler — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 23:05:25 -0000

Fantastic sentiments. However we've heard these words before and not seen effective APS-wide execution.

I look forward to seeing more, and better, efforts in the future.

Re: Directory.gov.au full data export

CraigThomler — Sun, 04 Dec 2016 17:31:02 -0000

Can we get an annual update of this dataset please - maybe just an API into the live site to reduce repeat effort.

Re: Digital Marketplace: sharing ideas at the roundtable

CraigThomler — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 20:31:47 -0000

Great article. Sounds like a good conversation.

It's often risky for small companies to come to a government agency with a good idea/system/methodology/tool, as agencies have been known to take that idea/etc, put a tender out sharing that idea/etc and asking for a commercial solution, and then award the tender to a different company (often a big one) - effectively stealing the IP from the original company.

When considering how companies can pitch ideas to government, some consideration should be put into both educating agencies about 'stealing and publicising' corporate IP (which small companies cannot easily defend themselves against the Commonwealth) and some formal processes allowing small companies to feel safe that their good ideas (when protected by IP) are not misused by governments.

I'd also like to see a challenge system put in place so agencies can stop going out to tender for carefully specified, but ultimately ineffective, wrong or sub optimal solutions, and instead simply pose a challenge to external parties to provide a wider and more innovative range of potential approaches.

This has been in place in the US for over five years and has worked very well (www.challenge.gov).

Cheers,

Craig

Re: How to destroy a business owner

CraigThomler — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 23:33:01 -0000

Well written Dave - this is a huge challenge for many solopreneurs & small business owners.

Re: In defence of trial and error: the public sector innovation we all deserve

CraigThomler — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 00:49:59 -0000

Dan,

Census 2016 was well past the innovation stage for an electronic Census, with the ABS first offering the option in 2006 and again in 2011.

There were a lot of learnings from those first two outings, which were shared, but not well internalised by the ABS. Very few of the learnings fed into the latest effort, partially due to timeframes and partially due to systemic challenges which limit the government's capability to learn from mistakes.

Being the third outing for an eCensus in Australia, with both the ABS and IBM involved for a third time, the takeaway isn't related to innovation, it's related to a failure to learn from past events, a failure to adequately design and test a digital system attracting significantly less traffic than most major commercial sites and a failure to plan the risks or to engage based on good crisis communications principles.

Innovation involves a significantly higher bar than upscaling and tweaking a system that's already been used twice before in a decade - there's plenty of good example of innovation in government, but, sorry, the 2016 Census is not one of them.

Re: Welfare investment approach ‘revolutionary’ — or is it?

CraigThomler — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 01:27:42 -0000

I like the 'Try,Test and Learn' concept and portion of the strategy - it embeds innovation (with funding) into the system, allowing for more diversity in approaches than governments have previously supported to combating welfare dependence.

However experimenting on the poorest and most disadvantaged groups in society is problematic, so any such innovative approach needs very, very, very effective governance and monitoring to ensure that any particular innovation doesn't harm those it is intended to help.

The area is ripe for user-based design, aka organisations working with directly with disadvantaged groups in the community to design solutions, or for disadvantaged people to propose their own solutions for testing with appropriate funding.

However without conveying this clearly to groups, providing them the resources and support to consider this type of innovative approaches, the likelihood is that we'll see standard grant requests from the usual suspects - those who understand how to use the process to access funds, rather than those with innovative ideas that may just work.

I'm sure there will be some gems of ideas suggested, potentially ideas that could transform the larger picture of how we manage and fund welfare, but they'll have to get past the traditional gatekeepers - career bureaucrats and politicians - who may not have the skills to recognise the great ideas.

Re: Machinery of government changes: could there be a better way?

CraigThomler — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 00:48:58 -0000

Good piece and an important conversation.

Note that Australia also often has more than one Minister per department, with both Federal and State level having, on occasion, up to four or five Ministers, Deputy Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries (effectively Assistant Ministers) within a specific Departmental portfolio.

Australian governments have even been known to have Ministers that cross departmental portfolios, holding specific responsibilities with multiple Departments. This is most often used for specialist or niche portfolio areas (i.e.: Art and Sport).

MOGs are indeed a regular source of tension and significant cost - which has to be absorbed by agencies rather than having extra funds provided to manage the movement of people into new buildings, switching networks or rebranding.

Besides the cultural integration challenges, the differences in payscales (a particular concern for PM&C with its Indigenous policy areas), I've encountered units who essentially silo themselves from integration with any department as they are moved so regularly. It's equivalent to living in hotels, always keeping the bags packed.

Also MOGs can produce 'IT hell' (that's the technical term) where areas are moved between networks, buildings and between agencies with entirely different IT stacks.

In one case I know of recently in Federal government, one significantly sized portfolio area was moved from one department to another.

Due to the complexity of the networks and IT infrastructure required by the area, by the time all the IT work to integrate them into the new Department was complete, the government had shuffled Ministers and told the Department to move the area back to the original Department.

That meant a substantial proportion of the efforts of several IT teams over the period was wasted - not by the public service, but by the insistence of the Ministers who demanded the changes, for no productivity or efficiency savings whatsoever.

Re: Don’t spit the dummy: merit and discrimination in the workplace

CraigThomler — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:47:49 -0000

So why did the dummy application get shortlisted and the real one not?

That wasn't addressed in the article and remains a very interesting topic.