Hard-hitting IT commentator Simon Moores gives his personal take on
a hot issue of the day.It seems that the Chancellor has also woken
up to the argument I made on CW360.com last week. The argument was
that while an aggressively "wired" public sector seems like a jolly
good idea for some, for others, notably the National Audit Office
and the Treasury, there's growing alarm at the way the money is
being spent.
Apparently, the Probation Service has, according to one revelation,
been paying its support contractor £11,000 every time it called out
an engineer over a weekend.
With costs like these, it's hardly surprising that Gordon Brown is
disturbed and it does rather explain why the IT industry is so very
keen on helping the public sector along its increasingly expensive
path towards its 2005 goal of digital Nirvana.
Observed from abroad, the UK is generally seen as a pillar of
virtue and an example to other nations. We have been busy advising
other countries on their own development of electronic government
processes.
However, not everyone believes that e-government, like socialism,
is necessarily a good thing for developing countries. I was passed
one e-mail, which came from an office very close to Big Ben, which
argued:
"In my view, rushing into e-Gov as a priority for an
impoverished nation or one that has weak democratic processes might
well deliver more, not less power into the hands of a corrupt
administration. The Nazi administration in Germany was one of the
most active early users of the crude pre-computers of its
day."
The author has a valid point. While we agonise over the
introduction of identity cards, other countries have them already
and will without doubt, use smartcard technologies to exercise much
greater control and interference in the lives of their populations
than was ever possible in the past.
So while we worry over the millions that we waste every month on
badly controlled public sector computing projects, perhaps we
should also be a little thankful for the slipshod inefficiencies of
our own system.
After all, and, as a friend from the security services once said to
me: "You've got nothing to worry about from Government until it's
fully joined up."
And that, he added, "might take forever".
What's your view?
Will e-government engender a police
state?
Let us know with an e-mail >>CW360.com
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ZentelligenceSetting the world to rights with the collected thoughts and
opinions of the futurist writer, broadcaster and Computer Weekly
columnist Simon Moores.