Nanny loves IT, she loves to boast that she will make the UK the world's leader in respect of the "wired economy"; she also has a special love for the surveillance opportunities afforded by IT systems and the web.In Nanny's view, IT will be the bedrock of her "Brave New World".
Unfortunately there is one small fly in Nanny's oinkment, she is crap at IT projects!
Colin Talbot, Professor of Public Policy at Manchester Business School and a leading adviser to the National Audit Office (NAO), has recently gone public with criticisms of Nanny's IT capabilities.
He says that it will take another 30 years before Whitehall can successfully deliver major IT projects, unless fundamental changes are made.
The Professor believes that endemic problems in the civil service mean that IT delivery failures will not be solved, and that Nanny's eGovernment Unit's Transformational Government (TG) strategy is "hype" (that's polite Professor speak for Bollocks!).
Professor Talbot says:
"The strategy reads like technology is a cure-all,
which is massively over-hyped and doesn't square with the record of large-scale government programmes."
He then lambasts Nanny's preference for the "gifted amateur", which in effect means that senior civil servants lack hands-on experience and are unqualified to do the jobs that they were hired for.
Quote:
"We won't get over these problems until there are root and branch changes.
At the current rate it will take another 30 years for there to be any significant impact."
He should not be so pessimistic, as long as Nanny keeps using the services of high quality firms such as Crapita, there is nothing for us to worry about!
This is a dangerous one to criticise really Ken.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand the tax waste and self laudatory stance that Nanny adopts deserve severe censure and lampooning respectively.
On the other hand if such systems actually worked the potential for real and perpetual Big Brotherism would be even more worrying.
At least in respect of the latter we can rely on there being an adequate chance of failure from the civil servant's opposite numbers in the big IT consultancies as well. I think one has to observe that many big projects, nowhere near as large as a government project would naturally be, are assisted to failure in the commercial world by the very same consultancies.
Sometimes the problems are self contained leaving the management no one to blame.
Now, if they could find a way of helping the projects we don't like to fail whilst making the projects we do like successful we could be on to a winner.
Commercially a successful project seems undesirable. All that would remain would be support and maintenance revenues for a while.
A complete failure offers another chance to eat the cake, especially since previous failures are not seen in a negative light and you can always claim more experience in that particular project area based on your previous (failed) work. (See Crapita, et al., for other examples of the genre spread well beyond just IT.)
Nevertheless I think we should give a vote of thanks to these would-be guardians of personal liberty.
BTW in the state of California (AKA The Cereal State; Land of Flakes, Fruits, and Nuts) they no longer have "master" and "slave" systems because it's insensitive of African-Americans. They are now "supervisor" and "subordinate".
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I rather agree with grant on this one; it is to our very great fortune that the government is so utterly incompetent and useless at designing, building and implementing large IT projects.
ReplyDeleteThe current bunch are turning out to be an authoritarian nightmare, who have recently realised that they can pretty much do whatever they like and nobody'll stop them.
So, from this we get the RIP bill, (which trys to destroy the 'innocent until proven guilty' principle), then ID cards and the Bill to Abolish Parliament.
They'd be scary if they weren't so utterly, completely lacking in understanding of computers, statistics and biometic systems. As it is they're dangerous and frightening in the way a deranged bull is frightening; you know it'll try kill you but as long as you stay out of its way behind a nice big fence you're safe.
The ID cards implementation will, I think, eventually get rammed through, then will turn into the most amazing boondoggle since the USA's SDI projects. Except the ID cards won't be forcing an enemy into an unwinnable arms race, but forcing the populace to learn that socialists are very, very poor rulers.