Gartner: Governments want to be digital, but just can't scale it up Government digital initiatives are limping behind other industries – and the public sector is more likely to outsource for help, according to analyst firm Gartner. Although government bods in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, India and Singapore polled by the firm claimed that digital was high on their agendas, their ability …
The traditional problem faced by the UK Ministry of Defence has always been the deeply traditional hatred between the Army, Navy and Air Force bureaucracies. Royal they may be but their first allegiance is always to the way they do things differently from the others. It has taken half a century to get even this small bit of business change moving and without it, a unified ICT system for the MoD had always been an impossible dream.
Err, how many assorted Departments, Offices and other miscellaneous stones with creatures underneath does UK Gov currently have? Even Wikipedia seems to have lost track.
With all those other democracies apparently in a similar bind, what hope is there for positive, coordinated action?
The deeply traditional hatred between the Army, Navy and Air Force is very deliberately maintained as it is.
The basic idea is that if any one service decided to stage a coup then you could reasonably expect the other two services to be willing to put it down, with using lethal force if required. This requires a certain level of slightly beyond healthy rivalry between the services. One of the side effects of this is that they are going to generate substantially more opposition to adopting a crap system foisted on them to replace a perfectly working system than many other organisations would do.
Government agencies are faced with compliance issues private companies don't need to worry about. The freedom of information means governments need to deploy solutions that are designed for government. If they don't they end up in this mess where they have the best intentions but can't deliver because of the limitations within generic software.
We've got big legacy systems run by the likes of Capita, Civica and NGA. These just aren't suitable to be 'digitised' without massive redevelopment which those suppliers won't do without a big ol heap of gold.
As for other things and new things we have senior managers and politicians demanding 'digital' whilst at the same time signing off on cutting IT beyond the bone or outsourcing everything. I'm not sure who they thing will run these digital initiatives if it's not IT? You can recruit all the 'Digital Evangelists' and 'solutions architects' you like but they're not going to plug fuck all together.
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Ask them to actually implement anything they talk about and I'm guessing you'll have yourself a full-blown FUBAR situation on your hands and Gartner will be leaving you to pick up the pieces.
Most workers don't want to be IT techs. It is not what they get paid for and importantly, judged on at review time. If the boss is not an IT geek looking for IT skill your performance grade can head southwards at speed for time wasting or being a slow worker. Workers also get very fed up with constant upgrades and system changes. I know most of that is for security etc. but? Civil services the world over are an out of world experience when compared to normal business. When I started working in R&D the techs there were only allowed to have computers with less power than a manager had for his email.
Glad I am retired. I had more than enough of being used as an IT support guy when I had a massive amount of work to do with large image files. The concept was beyond the company managers.
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