Government IT is a "serious disappointment" despite the
billions spent on technology and services every year, says an
expert commentator on the public sector.
William Heath spoke at the recent
Government 2010
conference in London of the "gap between the rhetoric and the
results".
Heath founded Kable, a public-sector IT research business. He
also chairs the Open Rights Group and is on the advisory council of
the Foundation for Information
Policy Research.
More than £12bn is spent each year on public sector IT. Heath
gave examples of some successes, such as
Martha Lane Fox's work on
getting millions of disadvantaged people online.
But he added, "Government IT up to 2009 contains serious
disappointments. One is the cost of IT and the manner in which the
money is spent but much bigger than that is the cost of public
services and the extent to which IT has or has not been able to
modernise.
"Productivity in the public services this year is lower than it
was in 1998. Furthermore, it has been lower than it was in 1998 for
every year since 1998, despite the massive spend on public sector
IT."
In November 2005 the then prime minister Tony Blair announced
"Transformational Government - enabled by technology" which set
out plans to use IT to improve access by the public to government
services.
But Heath suggested transformational government has had so
little effect that he had "forgotten what it had promised".
One of the government's promises was that
"100% of [public] services should be available online by 31
December 2005" - a promise which was withdrawn in 2004.
Heath added that the Department for Work and Pensions is the
largest provider of public services in Whitehall, but only 0.002%
of its transactions were carried out online.
He cited several important developments. Heath lauded
Gordon Brown's decision to ask Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of
the World Wide Web, to advise on how to make more government
information accessible to the public. He also praised Wikileaks,
Young Rewired State, and
Mysociety, which he said
were "reasons to be cheerful".
He proposed that government data on citizens be made more
accurate and useful by allowing people to own their own records and
keep them up to date.
"We need to let go of organisation-centric hubris. We need to
let go our fear of chaos which is ill-founded and counter
productive. We need to add this person-centric model of personal
data management to the existing organisation-centric model In the
longer term it could deliver spectacular value, much bigger than
half of the government IT spend."
There would be a large saving on data administration because of
the DIY-approach of citizens adding and checking information.
Government data would thus be better reconciled, more accurate,
better refreshed, de-duplicated, and up to date.
He accepted though that there are limitations. "You don't want
people maintaining their own criminal records," he added.
A
video of Heath's talk is on the G2010 website.