The government IT club wants you

Government IT may be changing but it still encroaches where it is not needed

Public sector IT has grown more macho. That was the most obvious change apparent at last week’s European Technology Forum on government IT.

Steve Lamey, CIO of HM Revenue & Customs, wants a top-down attack on efficiency, focused on business processes and data cleaning. He wants the consolidation of contact and datacentres, a no-nonsense, portfolio management approach to the dozens of projects, and “killer KPIs” (key-performance indicators) to measure the benefits of each. Admitting that his IT staff hadn’t talked to management for years, and that the UK’s PAYE pension system is “on its last legs”, Lamey says he’s gone from explaining enterprise resource planning (ERP) to colleagues to implementing an ERP system in just eight weeks.

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Times have indeed changed. Since 2000, UK councils and, in England, central government have together spent £3.18bn on IT to give citizens access, but have little to show for it. The focus was on individual projects to put information online ? dubiously referred to as electronic service delivery. Now, opinion has it, the focus should be on rethinking everything from a citizen’s point of view, joined-up and transformed government, efficiency benefits, and more ambitious, less technology-driven IT chiefs.

At the forum, Andrew Budge, from the Office of Government Commerce, also talks tough. He notes that 1,300 public sector bodies have tried to sell shared services to each other, but with no success. What local authorities should do, Budge argues, is follow Britain’s 600 NHS trusts, eschew mutual collaboration and buy shared services on the market ? and only when they’re ready.

In one sense, speeches at the forum mark a welcome, if belated, maturing of public sector IT. Yet, worryingly, IT also looks set to redefine the citizen’s relationship with the state. Budge says ID cards are an opportunity, not a problem. I can’t agree. I don’t think ID cards presage an Orwellian future of surveillance. But I do resist the March 2005 Office of the Deputy Prime Minister report, which suggested that tackling identity management through IT will allow “customers” to join councils, government agencies and intermediaries in a bond of “greater trust and security”.

IT can’t make citizens trust government. Trust is made of sentiment, not electrons. The social critic Dolan Cummings has argued that David Blunkett’s 2003 White Paper, Identity Cards: The Next Steps, tried to “reconstitute the public as a membership organisation”. There might seem to be merits to belonging; but the different levels of membership that IT-based identity and authentication will bring, together with the status of non-member, promise to push the citizen into more obedience and a tighter embrace by the state. What goes for citizens goes for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) too. At the forum, I learnt that a major city council, in awarding IT contracts to SMEs, requires them to have the right policies in matters such as ethnic diversity of workforce, training, health and safety, legal liability and, of course, sustainability.That sounds to me like stroking SMEs into a kind of Blairite submission. And if that’s the kind of brave new world Town Hall IT departments are getting into, we had all better look out.