Home secretary David Blunkett last week committed the
government to phasing in biometric identity cards over the next
five years and establishing a national identity
database.
He was swift to reassure critics that the government and IT
suppliers had both the technology and systems development
capability to deliver the project on time and to budget.
The government repeatedly says that high-profile public sector IT
disasters are a thing of the past. It is true that the Gateway
Review process has brought some much needed best practice from the
private sector to large-scale IT projects, but the jury is still
out on whether this is enough to deliver success.
This week Computer Weekly reports on problems facing the Child
Support Agency in migrating data to new computer systems.
Last week we reported on the debacle of the Libra IT system for
magistrates courts and on the National Audit Office account of the
collapse of the Ministry of Defence's stores inventory system,
which was cancelled at a cost to the taxpayer of £118m.
The government is embarking on what it admits is a risky £2.3bn
overhaul of health service IT. It is about to begin a £4bn IT
procurement for the Ministry of Defence.
Perhaps we should see some real successes with the NHS and MoD
projects before the Home Office spend billions of pounds on
controversial new schemes.
No call to celebrate virus anniversary
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the first computer virus.
Little could US computing student Fred Cohen have known what a can
of worms he was opening when, in 1983, he wrote the first piece of
malware as a proof-of-concept project, and how prescient his
warnings were about the risk to networked systems.
Today, names such as Melissa, Love Bug, Kournikova, Nimda and SoBig
are etched on the memories of beleaguered IT managers who battled
to stay one step ahead of these attacks.
Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing effort to fix the vulnerabilities
in its software that viruses exploit has proved a bigger challenge
than Bill Gates ever imagined. After 20 years, viruses remain one
of the greatest threats to the networked economy.
As virus writers become more sophisticated, so must the IT
department in its management of patches and deployment of security
technologies.