By Steve Ranger, 30 April 2008 16:03
COMMENT
It seems that pretty much ever since the invention of the wheel and the abacus, governments have found it hard to get to grips with new technology.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure neither the abacus nor the wheel was invented by the government. If they had been - assuming public sector project management skills haven't changed - the abacus would have taken 10 times as long, cost billions and only managed to count up to four. And the wheel would have been square.
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The pitfalls of mixing IT and the public sector are well known. To list a few: the short-term approach of politicians meddling with policies, which hard-pressed techies then have to deliver; the resistance of the civil service to change; the fast turnover of senior management on projects; the lack of accountability for failure. I could go on.
Recently I had a chance to hear the perspective of some senior government technology chiefs on this. And rather than the usual upbeat assessment of the state of public sector IT, I was surprised to hear them echoing many of these criticisms.
There was a sense of collective wonder that things could take so long to get right in the public sector - and that was from the very people tasked with getting things right.
In most respects, of course, it's wrong to see the public sector as one single entity. Certainly when it comes to IT it's easier to think of the public sector as a series of small businesses - departments, quangos, NGOs, NHS trusts, police forces - that occasionally work together but more often work against each other, cynics would say.
Trying to get all these different competing groups to work together is hard enough, let alone encourage them to choose a common technology infrastructure.
Government IT chiefs have long been waiting for some sign that their political masters care about technology. Too long, I think. Politicians and technology just don't mix.
But the government technology chiefs I met were optimistic. Not about getting guidance from above but about great ideas from below.
Perhaps the key to fixing government IT is to give the people on the ground much more power to get them involved in solving problems. This of course is something very different to coming up with a 'solution', which is what consultants are for.
It's time the public sector paid more attention to the real experts - instead of waiting for politicians to reinvent the wheel or the abacus.
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Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. misceng
Public sector IT will never be successful as long as the administrative civil service is the adviser to politicians.
As a professional engineer and one-time civil servant I experienced the failure of IT due to the built-in idea of administrators that experts should be "On tap not on top".
The result was that the wrong targets were specified so the projects were bound to go astray.
2. Karen Challinor
Nice idea but no chance.
Politicians will not do anything that lessens their power unless they are forced to and no one has the authority to tell a politician to do anything, except perhaps other politicians
Maybe we need an independent body that isn't under government control but is answerable to the electorate, that monitors government activities and can impose censure when government behaves in a manner the electorate doesn not approve of.
OFPOL anyone ?
... and yes I know, a snowflake in the fiery lava pits of hell has more chance.
3. Richard Sarson
Don't shoot the pianists. They are doing their best. Two ministers, Stephen Timms and Tom Watson, are passionate about IT. So was Tony Blair.
He launched 10 years of e-government, the present phase of which, Transformational Government, is changing the shape of government.
Yes, there have been massive cock-ups along the way, but that is because of over-exuberance, not inertia.
There are not enough computent MPs. A short list is: Labour, Alun Michael, Andrew Miller, Derek Wyatt, Margaret Moran, Lord Toby Harris. Conservative, Ian taylor and Tim Boswell. Independent, Earl of Erroll.
Steve Ranger should get out more around Westminster before doing his next rant.
4. Karen Challinor
Mr Sarson - don't shoot the pianists.
Tony Blair pioneered the NIR/ID card scheme that we are being saddled with, and the other ministers have overseen all the IT disasters of the past few years.
So if any pianists want shooting...
Sadly politicians have the same attitude that is prevalent in many managers.
"A good manager/politician can manage anything regardless of their area of expertise."
OK. Take a good IT manager and a good sales manager and swap them. You might get out of the building before it falls down but I doubt it.
Having a relative in the industry, having a 10-year-old qualification but no experience or having switched to a different industry for 10 years, using a computer at home and work to type documents, organise photographs and music, having seen The Matrix or Swordfish do not qualify you to tell the IT industry what to do nor do they grant sufficient technical knowledge to understand why major government IT projects fail.
And yet these are the people who think up and implement these very same projects.
5. Richard Sarson
If Karen looked, she would find that most of the ministers and MPs I mentioned in my previous post have IT backgrounds.
Karen should do some research into the real reasons why things go wrong - and why every now and again things go right.
I won't go into these now, but best of luck if she seriously wants to find out. She may find, as Steve Ranger did with his civil servants, that a lot of the policy-makers are quite impressive people.
6. Cayce Pollard
"Stephen Timms and Tom Watson, are passionate about IT."
Isn't this part of the New Labour problem: passion plus management consultants as a substitute for competence?