Editor's Blog: Time to take the politicians out of technology?

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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