The dream of effective
e-government is looking as unattainable as a transport system that
works. Simon Moores
casts a cynical eye over two cash-starved
infrastructures.
Another day, another local government seminar and
another struggle to reach Marble Arch on an Underground system that
doesn’t go there anymore.
I ask the man in the Southfields station ticket window why the
ticket machine taking credit cards is still dead. Is this, I
wonder, more evidence of the Slammer worm? The answer is much
simpler.
"Because," I’m told, "London Underground won’t spend the money
on machines that work."
"Can I quote you?" I ask.
"Yes," says the face behind the glass. "I’m a union man".
At times, there’s an unhappy contrast between our third-world
transport system and the 2005 vision of joined-up government.
Talking to the people at the seminar, the congestion charge is a
subject of heated conversation and every indication suggests that
it’s going to fail.
I ask for a show of hands from my local government audience. Can
anyone tell me of a large Capita project that has worked from day
one? No hands are raised, but one person reminds me that the
services organisation is still struggling with the much simpler
teacher vetting responsibility, and in his city they have no choice
but to keep the teachers teaching until the results arrive.
"Can anyone, then, give me a successful example of any on-time,
on-budget, large-scale government technology project?" Still no
hands, but several shaking heads and a few grins.
The news that the chancellor is allocating a £1bn as a
"contingency" against this month’s planned league match with
Baghdad stimulates another thought. The huge costs associated with
the expanding e-government agenda must surely be predicated on
continuing "healthy" economy beyond 2005, but the prospect of the
mother of all recessions may yet pose a very real threat to the
government’s spending plans.
Ironically, it’s not just me asking these questions, it’s the
people working at the coalface of local government e-delivery.
They’re telling me that everything that’s not achieved has been
reclassified as an "aspiration", that the big picture is too big,
that they’re underfunded and that the simple day-to-day challenges
- e-mail, encryption, authentication, privacy and business process
integration - have still to be solved before work can really begin
on the much grander vision of public sector transformation.
One public sector IT manager summed it up for me.
"There are foundations and there are applications. Foundations
should come first but they’re invisible and don’t give central
government the results that it’s looking for. Applications are sexy
but they are expensive and what we have to do isn’t found in any
one box in the e-government section of PC World.
"The problem is that you can’t have both without asking for more
money, which you aren’t going to get. So the effort goes into the
applications and you hope the foundations, like authentication,
will be resolved somewhere else …"
If this is a call for a back to basics approach, I wonder if
anyone in central government is listening?
What do
you think?
Is e-government
dead in the water?
Tell us in 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.