My Digital Life

I just stumbled across a great initiative from the UK Cabinet Office.  The ‘Show us a better way’ site asks the world at large how it could best mashup the vast data sets the UK government has at it’s disposal to provide useful services.  To support this the Power of Information Taskforce have released some previously unavailable data to get people started (no personal info!).

Given the vast amount of raw statistical data that a government must hold, there’s got to be a serious amount of potential there.  There are already hundreds of ideas that have been submitted, and looking through them quite a few look like they would be useful if built.

Rightly or wrongly I’ve often thought that the public sector seems to lag behind the private sector in terms of its utilisation of new technology.  Initiatives such as this show that in some areas the opposite is true. 

Hopefully this will lead to some new useful services for us Brits, but more than that this has to be an encouraging sign for things to come.  I can’t remember a government crowdsourcing a problem before, could this be the start of a new trend?  For things like this it would seem to make a lot of sense.  It’s good to see the government trying to harness some of the ingenuity innovation out there in the world.   At the very least it shows that areas of government aren’t ignorant of the changing word around them.

Yesterday I had an interesting training session on the British Computer Societies Skills Framework for the Information Age.  For those not aware of it, SFIA (pronounced Sophia) is a standardised framework for identifying IT relates skills and expertise. 

The idea is that once you have standardised way if identifying skills and then measuring levels of competence in those skills (with evidence), it’s far easier to target career development, identify skills gaps and benchmark what skill you might have, or need in the future.  There’s plenty of info online, so I won’t go into the details here, but overall I think it’s a great idea - despite the slightly awkward web interface.

As an individual your record within the system would hold a complete history of you’re skills and competencies as measured and agreed by yourself and your managers, the objectives you’ve been set over the years, and all kinds of other useful info.  Assuming you’re good at whatever it is you do, this stuff could be gold dust.  I can think of tonnes of uses…

- Imagine if you could walk into an interview, not just with your CV but with a record of all your skills and performance measured by your previous employers.  Ok, that could be a slightly scary prospect… but conceptually it works for me.

- As an individual, it would be great to be able to search for jobs that matched my current skills and aspirations.

- As an employer I’d love to target opportunities at people who can demonstrate their ability to deliver the skills I’m looking for.

- I’d like to be able to network with other people who either have the same skills as me or who are working in an area I’d like to do in future.

Although the SFIA foundation and BCS are selling a toolset, surely it’s the data that has value.  Maybe the course didn’t cover everything, but certainly this sort of thing seemed to be missing.  I did ask a few questions about this, but it seems like the information doesn’t follow individual identities within the system, so if I moved jobs my history would not follow.  Of course there are all kinds of Data Protection issues here, but these could be worked out. 

If nothing else it would seem like a great way of driving BCS memberships - signup and receive an identity that’s yours and not just a table in a corporate system.  Provide an API for people to access these subsets of this information and all of a sudden you’ve got what imagine would be a hugely valuable tool.  Maybe this isn’t something that interests the BCS, I don’t know.  Seems like a good idea to me though.