ID cards yes, mobile government no

First published in Computing, February 2006

The government’s enthusiasm for ID cards is in stark contrast to its lukewarm attitude to mobile IT

I thought I’d heard the last of it – that dreadful 1980s word, “technophobia “. But it’s back. The masses, and especially old people, won’t be able to handle chip and PIN cards. On London’s public transport, they still prefer pricey paper tickets to Oyster cards. “When it comes to plastic,” the Financial Times says, “the British are a nation of technophobes.” We should opt for WW2-style identity papers, not ID cards.

Well, not quite. Start with Transformational government – enabled by technology, last November’s report from Ian Watmore, who was in charge of e-government and is now running Tony Blair’s Delivery Unit. It says, ” Technologies have emerged into widespread use – for instance the mobile phone and other mobile technologies – which government services have yet properly to exploit.” Mobiles here merit a “for instance”, in an era when Nokia’s N6136 handset makes free mobile calls over VoIP a reality. Still, Watmore does call for a “step-change” in government’s acceptance of mobile channels.

I look forward to such a step change; but it will not be made much easier by the likes of the Institute of Directors and the Institution of Electrical Engineers. Much of their jointly-ventured criticism of the report consists of the idea that, in IT projects, spending on “people and process” runs at between 100 and 300 percent of spending on IT.

And what does that cover? For the IoD and IEE, it means “determination of end-user requirements, satisfaction surveys, business process re-engineering; operating costs, personnel selection and security, job and team redesign; organisation restructuring; interoperab- ility; overcoming cultural resistance; locums; training; rebuilding performance measurement and pay structures; challenging disincentives in old business models, creating champions, etc, etc…”

In Whitehall, only local government minister Jim Fitzpatrick has really come out in favour of mobile government. So how do we square this with the government’s confidence that it can get a national scheme for portable, chip-based ID cards for only £500m?

The answer is ID cards aren’t really about beating terrorism by tracking us. They are about drawing people into what Gordon Brown calls a modern, patriotic community. That’s why Fitzpatrick praises an SMS information service for youth in Kirklees: disadvantaged youngsters, he notes, may lack houses, so mobile has “much to offer” in giving them “the right support at the right time”.

Second, ID cards are more about controlling movement (especially in and out of the country) than they are about continuous surveillance. Thus Fitzpatrick eulogises Norwich, whose city council has brought in mobiles for that ultra-progressive force… uniformed attendants giving out fines for parking.

As congestion charges spread, and campaigns against air travel grow, nobody can accuse the government of encouraging people to be mobile, even in IT.