By Naked CIO, 14 July 2008 12:39
COMMENT
The bureaucratic bog created by politicians is only part of the problem for IT in this country. Failure to foster innovation and talent is what's really coming home to roost, says the Naked CIO.
Questions about the UK government's role in IT excellence and progress rarely produce a positive response.
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That perception may be inevitable because some of the things government is responsible for are necessary evils with negative connotations on IT and commerce in general.
After all, controls and security are very real concerns of the modern technology age and cannot be dismissed lightly.
Yet the administration of these objectives could be much less painful. We, as IT leaders, are drowning in bureaucratic processes that are unnecessary in many cases.
Governance produces a constant stream of rules that stifle innovation, impede productivity and create barriers between IT and the business. These rules create protocol that is misconstrued by users as attitude.
It is a travesty that the biggest growth area in recent years in IT in terms of cost and resources is governance and compliance - especially given constrained budgets and the need to deliver better and faster for your business to remain competitive.
The governance overhead has no inherent business value and draws resources and spending away from areas that could deliver much greater end value to the organisation.
But that is not the major reason for considering the government an enemy of IT departments everywhere.
The concentration on legislation crippling the IT industry may be partly to blame for growing concerns about UK IT effectiveness but it is not the root cause.
The real problem is the UK government's abandonment of developing talent and its lack of incentive to drive innovation at grassroots level.
We are losing jobs and devaluing talent because of growing offshore initiatives by companies the government is implicitly encouraging through its silence and inaction.
It is blind to the long-term effects of an eroding talent pool that is a direct result of offshoring, which is made easy in the UK. It does nothing to inspire young or old to pursue or develop a career in IT.
The government should provide companies and individuals with incentives to innovate and employ UK workers. They should reward those that choose to stay and penalise companies that decide to offshore IT services.
Politicians need to inspire educational institutions to breed the next generation of inventors and innovators that will shape the UK as a leader in the IT industry.
Only 20 of the top 300 IT companies reside in Europe and even fewer are in the UK. This staggering statistic suggests that we are already dependent on foreign innovations to support our IT needs.
Money being spent on IT is going elsewhere. The talent required to develop next-generation technologies is going elsewhere. Our government refuses to recognise its responsibility to change this situation.
The UK is rapidly becoming a third-world technology community, a decline that the government through its policies and ignorance is supporting.
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. Graeme Teesdale
Agree totally with the naked CIO on this point.
While governance and compliance are necessary evils, is it not the point that we could and should have a telecommunications and information technology industry to be the envy of all?
The government does indeed stifle progress by its inaction, omission and action. Yet I see no concerted effort to change for the better.
2. anonymous
I totally agree with The Naked CIO. The government has always been involved in intellectualising the development of IT in the mistaken belief that this assures both success and prosperity. And despite this, they manage to fail in development work as often as a poorly run development organisation.
What they fail to realise is that they may impose governance on this country, but once the development of any solution goes offshore, the very minimum of effort is attributed to governance which is why it is so much cheaper to develop offshore.
With increasing salaries in offshore communities the costs of developing are rapidly approaching our development costs so something has to give. The trouble is once we offshore and lost the ability to develop onshore we are at the mercy of every foreign development organisation.
The real problem is we are run by a load of incompetents who are only interested in two things - their personal publicity and a golden financial future. For the good of the people? Get real.
3. Karen Challinor
Yep, innovation in the uk 101.
Basically someone, some group or some company develop a process or a thing, I'll call it an item, that proves useful and makes money.
Government notices this, toddles over and quickly imposes legislation that basically says this item will do what it does already with a few bells and whistles in the text for future improvements.
This legislation will be deeply flawed as the people drafting it will not understand the item or its implications but they will need to get something in place for the next step.
The next step will be to impose a level of bureaucracy to enforce the legislation, which incidentally siphons off around 30 per cent of the profit as a running cost, and further slows down the future development of the item by restricting its application and stifling future developments that were not in the original legislation.
4. Cassandra
Comfortable in the total agreement of all the governments fault? This article does not fairly distinguish between governance and government - and misleads by claiming governance has no business value. Prefer unmanaged data of dubious quality, quantity and provenance in all your businesses do you?
Yes there is a paucity of innovation by government that is true across most sectors of the economy - and a focus on big business and large contrator-led projects such as ID cards and other associated biometric Big Brother-type nonsense.
Yes there is a wariness about open source and new technology where the public user drives the controls but please don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
5. Haydn Rees
"contrator-led projects such as ID cards".
Now you're getting nasty.
6. Dick Vinegar
The naked CIO seems to want a nanny state, which protects UK companies, individuals, the educational system etc from their own failures to drive innovation.
Governments of both colours tried to do this from the '60s to the early '80s. The result was even worse failure.
Mrs T tried to disband all that, but too many Brits still hanker after the nanny state.
The Naked CIO will be too young to remember those years. Believe me, they were worse than today.
I do wish that companies, individuals, academics should realise that they can't rely on any government to solve their problems. They have got to raise their own game, not shelter behind blaming others.