John Hudson

The UK e-government National Awards Winners 2004 have been announced on PublicTechnology.net.

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An interesting social policy making development in the USA: a judge has ordered a $5.6bn annual increase in school spending in New York and ordered an additional $9.6bn be provided to improve school facilities in the state after a pressure group claimed rights to a decent education were being undermined by a lack of funding.

A potentially useful illustration of the unintended impacts of institutions on policy outcomes perhaps?

The E-Government Unit says that 75% of government services are now online and forecasts that 96% will be by the end of 2005. Full details in the Cabinet Office’s Autumn Performance Report and accompanying press release.

Over the years I have often wanted to read SOCITM publications - especially their annual survey - but they almost always have crazy prices… £300 for 66 pages this one! Even the summary isn’t available to non-members..
This is a shame, as it looks like there is some interesting stuff in there judging by the press release.
It reckons Local Authority IT spending has increased by 25% to nearly £2.5 billion p.a., due mainly to e-government roll out. This, they argue, ‘is in complete contrast with other non-government sectors where spending is at best flat’.

A bit quiet recently due to combined forces of comment spammers killing my blog and the extra hours I’ve been putting in to pull together the launch issue of the Social Policy Association’s revamped newsletter - Policy World - which I have taken over editing. The launch issue is now online.

In a thoughtful piece by Richard Sennett in the Guardian a couple of weeks back he argued:

It’s become a journalistic cliche to divide America into red and blue states. The red states: southern and western, Republican, godly, abortion, gay and feminist unfriendly, militaristic. The blue states: eastern or coastal, Democratic, secular, identity-friendly, diplomatic. The country thus appears divided exactly in half. What these clichés don’t get at is something red and blue share, America’s confused, fear-inducing experience of class.

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Following the recent savaging of the government’s record in delivering IT related change by the Commons Work and Pensions Committee, the chairman of its Public Accounts Committee, Edward Leigh MP, yesterday told the press (story via Public Technology):

New information technology has the potential to make public services more efficient, effective, and accessible. Unfortunately we have seen too many disasters in public sector IT – projects that were late, over budget, or abandoned because they simply did not work. In light of the past, it is encouraging that the arrangements for scrutiny and oversight developed by the Office of Government Commerce appear to be paying off. Gateway Reviews, for example, are popular with departments and are leading to better control over projects and earlier warning of problems when they are properly used. However, there are still too many projects that enter the Gateway process too late and leave it too early. There is also a continuing lack of programme management skills in Departments, representing a major obstacle to successful delivery. And while a good start has been made by OGC, Departments need to further build their relationships with suppliers. Almost certainly there will be incidents of future projects where systems and processes are not properly applied. But with huge sums of taxpayers’ money and the quality of public services at stake it is essential that Departments embrace good practice and have the commitment to make IT programme and project failure a thing of the past.

All this was prompted by the release of a new NAO report Improving IT procurement: The impact of the Office of Government Commerce’s initiatives on departments and suppliers in the delivery of major IT-enabled projects. Head of the NAO, Sir John Bourn said:

Government Departments have a chequered history in the handling of IT-enabled projects and programmes. OGC has made significant strides in identifying reasons for past failure and in establishing structures, such as Gateway Reviews, that allow for increased scrutiny and independent check upon the feasibility and progress of IT-enabled projects and programmes. These remain, however, early days and my report makes recommendations to build on these foundations in order to reduce the likelihood of future failure.

Meanwhile, another of those e-government surveys that seem impossible to track down other than in press release format has warned (story via UKauthorITy.com):

Two thirds of public sector bodies are still a long way off e-government targets [...] With just over a year to go before the end of the 2005 deadline for 80 percent of public service transactions to be delivered electronically, most public sector organisations still have much to do finds a survey undertaken over the summer of 2004. According to the research most public sector organisations (68%) are still only either in the early planning stages or just testing systems. And only three percent of public sector organisations have achieved their 2005 e-government targets thus far, finds the survey commissioned by IT services provider Steria and conducted by Benchmark Research. Worryingly, less than a third of the rest claim to be close to putting everything in place. John Torrie, CEO, Steria in the UK, says, “My concern is that to achieve a tick in the box, organisations will implement systems without foundation, or worse still, implement e-services as a temporary measure that will have to be re-assessed in a very few years, all at the cost of the taxpayer.” The research also finds only 28 percent of private sector workers surveyed are aware of the government’s e-government objectives. This indicates that early successes and results achieved are not being effectively marketed to the citizen.

Computing magazine reports that:

The NHS will shave £330m from its software licensing costs following the signing of a nine-year deal with Microsoft, according to the National Programme for NHS IT (NPfIT).

Jack Schofield, of the Guardian, reckons this works out, roughly speaking, at about £1 per computer per week.

Meanwhile, the BMA have issued fresh warnings about looming IT disasters in the sector, arguing:

We hope that improvements to IT systems will reduce the administrative burden on doctors so they can spend more time treating patients. This goal will only be realised if the national programme can provide systems that are at least as effective as those currently in use. Clinical staff must be consulted. There is no point investing billions of pounds in systems that do not have the confidence of users. [...] Large-scale public IT projects do not have a good track record in the UK and so it is paramount that the NHS learns the lessons of history and engages with the frontline staff who will be using the new systems. So far the level of engagement and consultation with the medical profession has been wholly inadequate.

More about this on The Register.

The result of the North East Assembly referendum came as a disappointment to me - though hardly a surprise given the largely cynical mood I found on my visits back home to the region or on those sometimes uncannily accurate barometers of public opinion that are football message boards on the web.

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Says it all (from: Potlatch)

Some interesting thoughts on the possible impact of the Diebold voting machines on Chris Lightfoot’s site too.