New Spanish eGovernment law

I was a Spanish Civil Servant from 2006 to 2012 (technically I'm still a Spanish Civil Servant on leave). I've worked for different branches of the Spanish Government from September 2000 to November 2012. Civil Service in Spain is reputed to be lazy among Spaniards. But having worked for all kind of employers (startups, multinationals, NGO and Government Agencies), I can say I've found lazy people there but I've also found engaged workers. In fact the laziest people weren't in Government. And many of the most committed were.

That's a pretty long disclaimer.

When I came to London, I knew I had to register at the Spanish Embassy. But apparently the only way to do it is physically or sending your official ID/passport using special delivery mail.

There was a similar issue with changing vehicles documentation (my car). No way to do it online.

Fortunately (I thought), there is a Spanish law that says (s6.1) you have the right to be able to apply for anything using electronic procedures (as in web, digital signature...). There is a grace period (3rd ending disposition, ss2), that ended in 2009. I know the law because I worked on those issues (in particular digital signature, but in general electronic government) from 2008 to 2012.

So I decided to formulate a complaint through Spanish Ombudsman. Initial response was highly satisfactory. They were going to ask for information to the relevant authorities.

Public Administration Department confirmed that all central government procedures (not naming any in particular) should be fully adapted to initiate online and that maybe it was a temporary issue.

Foreign Affairs Ministry replied that forms where on the web page, you can download and that was enough (no pointer to be able to use general registry that would have been at least partial adaptation). I replied that the law is clear. I must be able to do it online (specially when I can do it offline by traditional mail).

Vehicles related agency initially didn't want to reply. And finally replied that it was related to taxes and they couldn't check the proper address and they depended upon municipalities. They expressed that this is a common issue with people living in Spain (as in "hey, we are not law abiding agency, but it is nothing related to people living abroad").

But what I found more disappointing (yes, even more than not enforcing the law) was the reply from the Spanish Ombudsman. After more than year asking information, they decided to close the complain because you can download the forms (again that's not what the law says).

I'm pretty sure all the authorities implicated know what the law says. I'm pretty sure people on the Public Administration Department have tried to change their car address. They all know there should have been the required processes in place for 2010, but now they're ashamed of it and they don't have money to a full adaptation. What I don't really understand is Spanish Ombudsman position, but it doesn't really matter.

These days there is some buzz in Spain around a new law for eGovernment.

We already have a law from 2007 that is violated by the own Public Service.

Google, where are you going?

I've been Google fanboy for a long time. I remember the invitation for Gmail I received around mid-2004. Gmail was a revolution. From 50MB mail space at the time, they offered 1000MB (1GB). But the size wasn't the only thing revolutionary. A great UI interface, faster than anything seen before was shocking.

I remember Google video chat. Being able to talk from the mail. "No installations".

Even Google Wave was revolutionary although the launch was a big failure, and the project was more in Alpha than in Beta.

Android was great, and Chrome too. ChromeOS??. It's lame that the only precompiled images are through a (great) guy.

And then Google plus. I think they had to be social at any price, and they did. Good ideas but nothing revolutionary.

Lately, change in privacy terms, most of us do not read. It's sad,

And now, Google drive? 5 GB? Are you kidding me? Is this the competition to Dropbox? Even Microsoft has a better services. I use Box.net and I'm afraid I'm not going to change.

Maybe next hit from Google is a new Twitter with 150 characters ;D

Civil service: How to improve

A few days ago I promised to explain some of my ideas to improve the civil service in Spain. Of course there is no silver bullet. Instead, as you can see the links, all the bricks are in place:

1. Try to introduce economic incentives. People who work should be rewarded. Of course that could be misused to give more money to friends instead of giving it to the people who work.


2. Proper evaluation of how money is spent, trying to spend the money where it is better used.


3. Encourage initiative in modernization of the Public Service. Good ideas should be praised. Bad ideas should be turned into good ideas. All Ideas should be taken into account for the first point. It doesn't cost money and for some cases it's very useful.

In the end, nothing new. More money, better spent, not only money.

If it's nothing new and is not being applied, somebody could ask what makes some people work harder even if they know they won't succeed. You'll have to wait.

Spring course

I'm attending this week to a Spring Framework course. It's a very small class: the teacher, my boss and me.

I don't consider myself slow, and neither is my boss. No, he doesn't read this blog. But we two were trying to keep up the frenetic pace the teacher is imposing. I had already used Spring, but up to now I didn't suppose who little did I know about Spring, about TDD, or even about Eclipse. Watching the teacher coding, and trying to understand what he was doing, and trying to type as fast as him is a rewarding but extremely demanding experience.

Regarding Spring Framework, I do think it's a very powerful tool, and we probably are going to use it at one of my teams (the architecture group). But I don't think it's something it can be used in other teams. We'll see.

Civil service in Spain: Productivity

I wrote yesterday about why job security is a good mechanism to protect civil service from corruption. But I also explained that it's a mechanism that makes difficult to punish slackers.
That wouldn't be a serious problem if there were mechanism to reward people who do right. And the truth is that there aren't. The salary has a variable part but could be more or less explained as "if you come to work twice a week in the afternoon, you get it". Not very rewarding to productivity.
If you come to work but don't do anything, you get paid. If you come to work in the afternoon, but don't do anything, you get paid more.
Of course money isn't everything. At least in my case, a challenging environment is a great part of the deal. But here again civil service is difficult. It's slow and innovations are difficult to pass through.
It's surprising that people do anything. But, truth to be told, there are lots of people who work. There are all sort of tricks, but in general, people work.
Tomorrow, I'll try to explain additional ideas.

Civil service in Spain: Job security

I'm a civil servant. Civil servants in Spain can't be fired. Well, in fact they can be fired, but only because of extremely serious infringements, and after a complicated procedure.
This protection is intended to give security so that one civil servant can oppose employee's chief orders if the employee thinks that what is being ordered is illegal. Let's imagine I'm asked to delete certain documents in some repository. If I worked in a company and I don't do delete them, I could be fired. As Civil Servants have to do special things concerning laws, they (we) are given special job protection.
But the protection makes nearly impossible to fire lazy employees. And with the term "lazy employees" I mean people that only go to the office to clock in, or people who go to work to play Tetris all day. I've seen them. For me is something mysterious how anyone can go to work to play Tetris day in, day out. But there are people like that.
Anyway, the situation in Spain (with more than 20% unemployment rate) is not quite well. And people start to point at that job security as something wrong. Tomorrow I will write about productivity in the Civil Service in Spain, which is related to job security, but it has more issues. But today I wanted to stress that job security, by itself, is not something wrong.

Some thoughts about Tecnimap 2010

I’ve been a couple of days in Zaragoza (Spain), participating in Tecnimap 2010 last week. Tecnimap is a conference on IT for the Public Administration in Spain. I had presented a paper about one of the applications I manage: DocelWeb.
Overall it has been a nice experience, but I wanted to share some thoughts about it.
On a personal level, I think I was wrong in my planning. I planned to assist to few conferences and talks that I really wanted to assist, and scheduled the rest of the time for relationships and stands. It turns out I was completely wrong. I had too much time wasted on the stands. Some people in the stands didn’t really know what were they talking about. For example, some random commercial was explaining his digital signature product, proudly saying it worked with XAdES-XL (a digital signature format). When I asked if they haven’t planned introducing XAdES-A (long time archival variant of the former: a must for public administrations), he looked at me as if I didn’t know what I was talking about, and said "of course not". And that is just an example. Of course, I don’t blame them. But I’m a technical guy and I was looking for technical answers, or for technical "I don’t know but I’ll look up the answer and contact you". Commercial babbling gets me bored. Next time I’ll dedicate less time to that, and more to the talks.
When talking about the conferences, I wanted to remark two. One about ISA and Interoperability in Europe. And the other about STORK. Both, very interesting: I will comment about them (and my opinion on the new tendencies about eGovernment) in a future post.
With respect to the organization I think it has been a great event and almost everything was perfect. I must congratulate Zaragoza for hosting the meeting, and to the organization for doing such a good job.