12 Sep 2008

Absurd call for public sector to embrace web 2.0

Sir Bonar writes:

I see the Society of Local Goverment IT Managers has called for senior public sector managers to embrace Web 2.0. This is quite fallacious in my view.

I should first point out that our own Whitehall IT managers are thoroughly superior to their counterparts in local government. This is simply because any good IT manager would naturally rather come and work in Whitehall, just as the university applicant who could get to Oxbridge would hardly choose Loughborough.

Second, this local government group with its absurd acronym has no mandate to call for the rest of the public-sector IT community to do anything. That’s the job of our own IT manager through the proper channels. I would remind you that our goverment IT profession was set up by people from Accenture. They pretty much invented all this sort of thing, and know what they’re doing. When you pay that sort of money you expect the best and you act on what you’re told.

But above all the delivery priority for the Whitehall IT manager has nothing to do with so-called Web 2.0. My own modest blogging efforts aside this new-fangled, cheap, simple-to-use stuff is really only for students and ne’er-do-wells. Remember: we in government cannot choose our customers. And our processes of Customer Insight tell us that Web 2.0 is not what the public wants from us. What the public wants is more like this - straightforward, reliable Web 1.0 implementations with no fancy trickery.

Yes, it’s expensive when we outsource such projects to our trusted suppliers at Intellect, but as I’ve said already one has to pay for quality. We are undertaking some of the largest Web 1.0 implementations in the world. I do wish the detractors and the news media would take this into account.

Speaking of local government it should now be clear to us all that councils, well-meaning as they are, cannot be trusted with our personal data. Personal data needs serious gold-standard treatment and cannot be left to random chance. The latest proposal from CESG and DCLG is that all personal data held by local authoriities should be at once sent on memory stick by courier to our secure vaults in Cheltenham, to be kept under armed guard. I’ll be pushing this mandatory guidance through the appropriate channels in the next few weeks. We have to be seen to be taking this personal data issue seriously, and leaving it in the hands of local government is hardly the right way forward. I think this daft, iresponsible call from Socitm gives us precisely the opportunity to, well, sock it to Them. More anon.

 
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