Isle of Man building for a tech future

The Isle of Man has completed the rollout of an IP network that will form the foundation for a new set of e-government services.

The network is the culmination of several years' work and CIO for the Isle of Man government, Allan Paterson, likened the process to building a house. "Now we're furnishing the rooms," he said of the next wave of initiatives.

The 'Connect Man' project, which was started in 2004, has now been completed with a full Multi-Protocol Label Switching network rolled out across the island.

Since the network has been completed the government says it has saved around £1.4m through a significant increase in efficiency and scrapping the old telephone switches.

The network - which has been jointly developed with Dimension Data and Manx Telecom - now covers 180 offices and agencies (previously just 16 were connected) and links more than 4,500 government employees to the islanders.

A centralised out-of-hours patient record service for GPs is already in the pipeline, along with the possibility of car-park ticket machines operating over the network.

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Paterson said there were concerns from some groups about the network "putting all the eggs in one basket".

Police and healthcare service staff were worried about the security of having their data on a shared network. A big challenge for the IT department was therefore to build trust in the new network, which has received the BS779 worldwide security accreditation, and reduce the resistance to change.

When Paterson first took the CIO role in 2002, the objective of the government was to make joined-up government a reality.

At the time, the government IT infrastructure was very fragmented with different departments using different systems. But with the 'Host Man' programme to install two new data centres to support the network and a complete refresh of the desktop computer infrastructure this began to change.

Connect Man - along with the development of the government website - was the final element in this first stage of the island's IT programme.