Inbox: Government IT ignoring red lights?

The weekly Inbox column collects the best and most thought-provoking of the reader comments silicon.com receives each week.

Government IT took a beating, with readers getting worked up over a story claiming tech projects in the public sector are "doomed", as a £224m government database hit the skids.

The ever-controversial Naked CIO got readers commenting too - some in agreement, some in opposition - over claims we should all 'buy British' when it comes to IT.

Don't forget to post your own response to any of these stories or comments below.

Westminster insiders on why gov't IT is doomed
Westminster's approach to running large tech projects is akin to "trying to avoid a car crash by looking in the rear view mirror", a panel of chief civil servants and MPs concluded today.

Red light
'A red light does not mean stop, it just means there are things that need addressing'.

So basically a red light doesn't stop the vehicle as it heads towards the chasm it just points out that there is no bridge and everyone inside will hurtle to their death if they continue. The vehicle then continues on its way having taken this information on board trusting it will be addressed by the time the chasm is reached. Well that's alright then, and to think I was worried.
Karen Challinor, UK

Incompetent
The trouble is that the people who make the decisions are invariably not competent to make them because they just don't have the technical understanding of what's involved.

Too often, government projects start off from an ill-defined requirement which then gets modified as it goes along - a certain guarantee for disaster.
Anonymous, East Sussex

Going in the wrong direction
Anonymous is right. The civil servants who specify these projects are not competent technically so they start off in the wrong direction.

As a professional engineer and retired civil servant I suffered from this process. A system to computerise control of consultants' fees essential to the work of project managers was devised by a committee that had no project managers included. The decision was to use PCs (too few of them) and the work of implementing it was given to a team of mainframe programmers. I left 18 months after the project went live but had still not got any usable data out of it.

It appears that the problem continues.
misceng, UK

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Work stops on £224m kids' database after security flaws found
Computer specialists are working to fix security holes that have halted work on a database to protect children.

Waste of our money
They always have an excuse (they should be well versed in excuses by now!) but excuses aren't good enough when you are dealing with this sort of information.

Also, another waste of hard earned taxpayers' money.

Maybe they will have an enquiry later on!

I wonder if you could sue the government for negligence.
Richard Davies, North Yorkshire

Holistic approach
We need a holistic approach to information security that properly encompasses the social/cultural aspects, rather than the prevailing exclusive emphasis on security technology.
Colin Beveridge, UK

Lead balloon
They say "human error" like it's something that you don't have to anticipate and code around.

This is a lead balloon, just an insanely expensive one. Still, I guess it will keep our worse-than-useless public sector in jobs and pensions for a bit longer.
Anonymous, Surrey

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Naked CIO: Buy British
Offshoring IT jobs is bad for the UK, says the Naked CIO. And never has this been more real than in a recession.

Trade in Britain. Spend in Britain
Completely agree, companies that trade in Britain need to ensure that they contribute to Britain's income as well as Britain's spend.
Stuart Fawcett, London

Argument very "unnerving"
It looks like the Naked CIO has jumped on the anti-offshoring-buy-British bandwagon. Most firms with any consumer-facing activities (particularly contact centres) will be reviewing their global sourcing policy now because of the recession. That's a fact, because in a downturn everyone fears for their job, but IT has long been global, because of its very nature, since we became able to connect to each other easily, and IT innovation and automation is a greater destroyer of jobs than offshoring has even been anyway.

The jingoistic buy-British argument is very unnerving. Not because I am not patriotic - I love the UK and I don't want to see jobs vanish from here either. But think for a moment. This 'Buy British' campaign means ignoring innovations such as SaaS... umm, what if your sales team uses Salesforce? What if your marketing team uses Google Apps? Isn't all this offshoring too, because you are buying services without worrying about where they are delivered from? Where does the 'Buy British' argument begin and end?
Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, London

What about EU labour?
"At the very least the UK should tax companies who choose to rely on cheap non-British labour".

Such comments only go to show that we have protectionism ideas in Britain! Are we not a part of the European Union workforce? Shouldn't we be talking about EU labour?
Anonymous, Lewisham

Give jobs to those here first
Excellent article and a lot of sense here. Can we add that the importing of programmers, analysts and even project managers from abroad should also be discouraged on the same basis when we have so many good people of our own who are out of work?
Anonymous, Surrey

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