So, my very unsexy opinion about both the A Levels algorithm and the months’ long digital contact tracing farrago is that deploying technology without proper supporting structures and governance is by no means faster and leaner. It is slower, messier and much more dangerous.

Sure, it might be faster to get out the door, but oh boy, that long tail of tidying up after the initial heroic leap is … well, long.

. @Samfr makes the point here, for instance, that there was preparatory work that could have been done around appeals for students https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1293980353397497861?s=20

But we’re going to see more of this. Deploy at speed, repent at leisure. Cummings’ mania for dismantling bureaucracy and working at speed, Gove’s disparagement of the bean counters in the Ditchley speech, dashboard govt, single source of truth. Brexit is going to be *interesting*

Governance for complex systems is hard and probably a bit boring if you like the white hot thrill of launching apps that don’t work, but without it the UK is going to have a lot of tidying up to do, for many years, and that is not going to be innovative or exciting.