Today’s COVID testing data snafu shines a helpful light on the missing digital era skills that public service top executives suffer from not just in Britain, but around the world. /1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54422505

The failure appears to have taken place because manual spreadsheets were used, not just in the early days of the crisis (where this would be a reasonable thing to do) but many weeks or months after they should have been replaced by dedicated systems. /2 https://mobile.twitter.com/maxcroser/status/1313046638915706880

Such a failure could only take place if top level public service decision-makers simply didn’t understand enough about real world data systems to worry about whether they were fragile or robust, well built or jerry-rigged. /3

We can’t afford civil service leadership that considers such knowledge to be ‘specialist’ or ‘for the techies’ any more. Virtually every public service leader needs to have a basic minimum of digital era knowledge, a minimum which is higher than that widely held at the moment./4

Which is all a way of explaining why I’m part of the digital era skills project ‘Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age’ - @TPSDigitalAge /5

We are dedicated to improving the skills of these kinds of leaders, in countries around the world. We developed a set of competencies that lay out what ALL public service execs should know now, not just the ‘techy’ ones./6 https://www.teachingpublicservice.digital/competencies 

In this COVID data case it seems at least one person in the leadership was missing the skills covered in this Data competency, which is explained here: /7 https://www.teachingpublicservice.digital/competency-7 

Our goal is not to turn every senior public servant into some kind of elite hacker. Our project is about baseline skills all senior public servants need to have now. If you want to help us succeed, follow us @TPSDigitalAge or sign up for emails https://www.teachingpublicservice.digital/