This was another first for me this week. I managed to get a question raised during a live question and answer session at a conference that I wasn’t even at and it was all thanks to social media.
I’ve been using Twitter for several years now. I got myself started in order to see what all of the fuss was about and to understand the power and opportunity that social media presents. I’ve tried many of the others but I find Twitter to be the one that works best for me. It’s easily accessible, informative and great fun. I use it to let people know what I am up to, if they are interested, distribute interesting or newsworthy items I come across and engage in on-line dialogue.
And it was the latter use that I made the most of this week. A colleague of mine was attending the annual Society of ICT Managers (SOCITM) conference in London. In fact several of my colleagues were attending form various organisations across the region. I was unable to attend but was interested in the subjects that were on the agenda and in particular around the adoption of and compliance with the governments Public Services Network (PSN) security standards.
I was able to get a flavour of the conference using the hashtags #SOCITM2013 and #PSN. As PSN has affected the whole of public sector ICT it was clearly a major topic of conversation and I watched with interest as the debate grew. Quite rightly the industry is taking security very seriously. Some recent high profile security incidents and data losses remind us every day why this is important but there is a disparity in the overall approach.
The public sector authorities are being mandated to comply with a set of standards that the software and hardware vendors are not. Systems we are buying are not complaint and so I tweeted: What I don’t understand is how a supplier can provide a product which is not PSN compliant? Some tweets followed and the question was raised by the question and answer panel who were monitoring Twitter traffic.
I can only assume that they believed that the question came from the floor of the conference but that is the power of social media. I could be there even though I was hundreds of miles away. Anyway, a tweet came back saying: Panel said onus in on suppliers to offer #PSN complaint solutions. So why don’t they? Will any be ‘cut off’?
No doubt this debate will run and run. It is a live issue for the industry and it has been great to be able to engage even without being physically there. Putting the onus on the customer to comply with a set of standards that the providers are not obliged to is perverse and needs to be addressed. I hope that in a small way I have been able to contribute to the debate and that the industry changes. Or as one tweet put it: Ban the sale of non-complaint #PSN applications and hardware #NoComplyNoSupply.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 
Wouldn’t it be great to have a PSN framework that only sold PSN services? Currently we have two that includes PSN services and non-PSN services. Some suppliers beleive they are PSN compliant because they are on a PSN Framework.
It looks like the next PSN replacement framework will be the same.
Industry would like the PSN Framework and the G-Cloud. framework to come together and to take the best parts of each with a clear demarcation over what is PSN and what is not. Industry is happy to invest in PSN, but needs a clear procurement route.
It would. I feel that we have been put under enormous pressure to achieve something with one arm cut off. It’s like making drugs illegal to buy but legal to sell. I do support the aims of PSN however.
It’s not just the products in the PSN framework, but also those others that sit on our estate and thus impact on our ability to comply. For example if their product insists on us using out-of-date or unsupported elements.
Technology history is littered with compatibility issues – VHS vs Betamax to name but one. Normally there is more time to adjust.
We had a number of LA representatives on the PSN work streams 4 years ago, I thought some of these issues would have been raised when the standards were being written. I guess because it was envisaged that PSN would be adopted in a more organic nature rather than the sudden implementation of this year-next year.
Still, looking forward, there is a great opportunity ahead. It’s for us all to seize it and do something amazing.