WRITTEN ON November 27th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Across the Board, Design: user-oriented, Foundation of Trust, Political engagement, Save Time and Money, Transformational Government, What do we want?

@NTOUK and @williamheath are heartily fed up with half-baked government IT strategies.

Having to read the current proposal is the last straw. Modernising Govt promised the same in 1999. The 2009 draft Government ICT Strategy – New world, new challenges, new opportunities seems oddly detached from the pressing discussions under way about public services renewal. It barely acknowledges the current economic environment. It talks of possible savings by 2020, but we need them now. It has assertions that are unsupported by any sort of evidence. It’s as if IT can potter on in a world of its own outside the mainstream realities of politics.

The thought of actually delivering fit-for-purpose contemporary IT fit against this sort of background, of relying on public services underpinned by them, or of paying the taxes that will support them is gravely disturbing.

People, we can do better than this.

The new Centre for Technology Policy Research and we here at Ideal Government are therefore chipping in £500 each for the creation on-line of a popular, enlightened, contemporary, good-value government infotech strategy. There will be judges and stuff, all TBA in due course. But the main idea is we spend most of the prize fund on a party end Jan 2010 for everyone who participates, with a bit reserved for special contributions under special headings.

To get you going, we’ll ask you to check out the draft ICT strategy from the Cabinet Office, passed to us by Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom’s office (pdf) (update – commentable version put on line by HM Loyal Oppo here). It’s dated October 09, but that may be a typo for 1999, or indeed earlier. We can safely rule out 1909: Sir Bonar wasn’t born then.

We’ll try to get other interim versions for comparison. Now we’d like to see an informed and constructive critique of the proposed/draft ICT Strategy, and the construction of the ideal government infotech strategy.

WIBBI: Wouldn’t it be better if we had a government IT strategy that faced up honestly to the shortcomings in security and the erosion of trust, not to mention the staggering cost of public sector IT in recent years (£100bn+) and the current state of the economy? That acknowledged the sea-change in empowerment of individuals that we talked about yesterday at MyPublicServices? Let’s get thinking! And let’s focus on evidence-based policies and on implementation, so there’s no risk of confusion with the current official version.

Twitter hashtag: #idealGITS

2 Responses to “preannouncement: CTPR/IdealGov ICT strategy competition”

 
uberVU - social comments wrote on November 27th, 2009 4:06 pm :

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the Centre for Technology Policy Research | CTPR wrote on December 1st, 2009 10:09 am :

[…] is currently in discussion with Ideal Government to see what we can do with the joint competition we recently announced. There is no shortage of work to be done here on helping provide a vision and […]