This column deals with some aspects of change management processes experienced almost in any industry impacted by the digital revolution: how to select, create, gather, manage, interpret, share data and information either because of internal and usually incremental scope - such learning, educational and re-engineering processes - or because of external forces, like mergers and acquisitions, restructuring goals, new regulations or disruptive technologies.
The title - I Changed My Mind Reviewing Everything - is a tribute to authors and scientists from different disciplinary fields that have illuminated my understanding of intentional change and decision making processes during the last thirty years, explaining how we think - or how we think about the way we think. The logo is a bit of a divertissement, from the latin divertere that means turn in separate ways.
How to cite this article?
Longo, Brunella (2015). Transparency is the new privacy.
About public procurement, policies and information security. Part 1: Trust.
icm2re [I Changed my Mind Reviewing Everything ISSN 2059-688X (Print)],
4.6 (June).
How to cite this article?
Longo, Brunella (2015). Transparency is the new privacy.
About public procurement, policies and information security. Part 1: Trust.
icm2re [I Changed my Mind Reviewing Everything ISSN 2059-688X (Online)],
4.6 (June).
I removed the original attachments published here in 2015 because after several years they are not relevant anymore and risk to be improperly indexed by search engines. The description of the events and facts remains detailed enough to document them.
Monsignore, Your Lordship has sent to me saying I am to begin painting and to have no fear. My answer is that a man paints with his brains and not with his hands, and if cannot have his brains clear he will come to grief. Therefore I shall be able to do nothing well until justice has been done me. The ratification of the last contract is not forthcoming, and under the terms of the other, which was drawn up in Clement’s presence, I am daily pilloried as though I had crucified the Christ.
(Michelangelo Buonarroti, from one of his Letters to the Cardinals - October 1542. In Michelangelo: a record of his life as told in his own letters and papers. Translated and edited by Robert W Carden. Constable & Company, 1913).
London, 24 July 2015 - Like many other micro businesses that operate in high tech and volatile markets, I am wondering wether the new government has any credible chance to bring about a real change in public procurement processes. There have been many announcements, conferences, open calls and pledges to support the interests and the growth of small businesses in the digital industries after the overwhelming expectations the coalition government generated for investments in social enterprises, big society and open data projects.
In this and in the following article I will give an account on how I came to the conclusion that on the two very important themes of trust and accountability, that are extremely relevant for change management, there is an urgent need to increase the transparency of public processes and fill a policy gap that leads straight to inequalities, discrimination, abuse of power and waste of resources, causing more miscarriages of justice and pillories than unicorns, social rampage more than social enterprises, mental health issues more than knowledge diffusion and education.
First, the trust argument.
I turned to various online sources and web platforms for public procurement. I registered with mainstream institutions in the UK and in Europe to receive notifications of forthcoming invitation to tenders and contracts opportunities.
One of the first opportunities I came across was too good to be true.
It showed up with a major organisation, let’s name it just TM, the core business of which is in the construction and transports sectors. And it echoed an exchange of correspondence I have had with their Chairman in 2013. At the time in which I had talked with TM Chairman in 2013 I was still bankrupt, not allowed to be self employed and make any trade, and therefore forced to apply for jobs including receptionist at leading Barristers Chambers, Strategic External Resource for the Fire Brigade and Communication and IT officer (quite a scapegoat profile) at the UK Border Agency. All fun for job seekers advisers we all pretend to be true, for the sake of the advertising market and the welfare system.
My proposal to the Chairman of TM was carrying the idea of shaping a sort of Learning Chief Advisor role, somebody who could address the lack of policies and actions on vocational training he himself had mentioned as a major issue for infrastructural projects during a public lecture few weeks earlier and I had worked on in former lifelong learning programmes in the past too.
One year later the issue has now become mainstream in the political agenda, linking vocational training, immigration policies and unemployment: I was sure, and I am still sure, that it was a very good proposal. However, TM Chairman declined to discuss it saying he had no budget and no stakeholders demand for such a role.Anyhow, moving forward, the TM’s invitation to tender publicised in June 2014 was for quality assurance of a training programme. Within the scope of a controlled programme (let’s call it simply ...programme), they were looking for somebody who would focus on assurance criteria for health and safety matters, whereas contents (and also trainers) would be provided by a special educational agency (agency).
The ITT requirement was quite vague in many respects when not totally obscure so that I decided to send in some questions that are listed below together with the answers I received straightaway:
So all in all I abandoned this conversation, very frustrated.
Education and training activities can be obviously audited under a compliance perspective and with the scope of purely verifying the alignment of contents and methods taught to health and safety standards and legislation and this is absolutely fine. It is the normal way in which people approaches governance and regulations. In this respect, TM’s programme may really need just mock inspections once in a while.
But adults education and training are activities in which supervision, monitoring and control of quality are based on consensus about methodologies and measurements of learning outcomes, achievements, experiences and reactions. For that, assurance criteria and critical success factors must be always defined including an element of trust that the same idea of mock inspections precludes or undermines, especially in an open data and social media environment where anything we say and share is inevitably, to some extent, trivialised and commoditised.
If you search large repositories of literature and standards about education, training and talent development (for instance, the American ERIC and ASTD or the European ETDF) you do not find a single occurrence for the expression "mock inspections". Nor the subject is considered at all in any discourse or policy or strategy for lifelong learning. Mock inspections are pretty much a very British thing, like the “mass observation” projects, the panopticons, Morris dances or Ken Loach’s films! Are we really sure that these are the methods we need to train or re-train people up to the best standards in a huge variety of fields that are increasingly interconnected at international level, and globalised?
So all in all, if TM wanted to give me a friendly warning about British habits and peculiarities in public procurement, the message reached me very clearly.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that we could have developed a more trustful, creative and useful relationship and with just a round of telephone calls without any public procurement exercises.
Does Golia necessarily need to exclude any David from their supply chain in order to ensure the continuity of their change management best practices?
Is faking a public procurement exercise for a contract covering 7 (seven) hours of mock inspections within a vocational programme the best way to act in a socially responsible way to improve vocational programmes? Will TM and myself ever trust each other again? Is TM aware they may have a problem while using open data and shared data for procurement exercises in such a poor considerate way?
In the next article I will talk about other examples of procurement exercises, when not gambles, that erode trust in your supply chain and expose your unknown unknowns to cybercriminals, leaving unfair and corrupt behaviours unaccountable.