Day 113 – 30 June 2014
Way back in October we’d planned to do some back to the floor days as part of Customer Service Week. For personal reasons I was unable to complete mine. I know things can take their time in public services but I’ve only just managed to get round to rearranging my session. This afternoon I was at Spectrum to try and do some programming.
Before I go into that though it would be best if I clear up a couple of things. Back to the floor is one of those expressions I’ve never really liked (I have a long list). It implies that those who go back, that is people in senior positions, are somehow above all that and that working on the ‘floor’, the base level, is a retrograde step. It also suggests that at one time I was doing a job similar to those people that I will be working with but this is not the case. I have never been a programmer (and I doubt that I have the skills ever to be one). How about a ‘familiarise myself with the real work’ day? Not very snappy.
Also, having seen both sides of the coin, the pace of life in the public sector is not slower than in the private it is just different. My experiences of commerce were that the decision making process was much more linear and so easier to get proposals agreed. In the public side the decision making process requires much more consensus which takes time. Once we get going things normally operate at similar speeds. This could be someone’s thesis.
I’ve started ‘the end of men’ by Hanna Rosin, another of the books recommended at Thinking Digital 14. It starts with an interesting quite from Simone de Beauvoir’s book ‘The second sex’: ‘This world has always belonged to males, and none of the reasons given for this have ever seemed sufficient.’
In the morning we had a couple of project progress meetings. Both the Highways Asset Management System and the Payment Card Industry Standards projects are going well enough after the usual bumpy starts. We’ve agreed how we are going to go out for procurement of the highways system and the work we’re going to do to secure our network for payments when the card holder is not present.
Over lunch I met with Lawrence, my wingman. We hadn’t managed to get together for a while and it was good to catch up.
As for the FMWTRW day it was really interesting. Kevin introduced me to who does what and then Clare showed me how to build up the data layers (we have over six hundred of them). Chris and Mark showed me how they develop programmes to make this data available. I even got to right some HTML (there is a first for everything) which worked first time though more by luck than judgement.
Ben then took me through the National Land and Property Gazetteer and showed me how we maintain a record of all the properties in the county. There were over three hundred and eighty new ones last month alone. Finally mark took me into the car park to use a hand-held highways mapping application. Excellent stuff.
Learning points for today: It isn’t human resources anymore, it’s human capital management; no one knows what CAIC stands for but it’s something to do with revs and bens; bidding for money can cost more than you get back; a land terrier is a record system for an institution’s land and property holdings; the council has a street naming and numbering officer (doesn’t every one) and; pot holes are now called sharp edged depressions
Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – really enjoyed the GIS visit.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 