I’ve recently been thinking about these huge, over-budget and generally useless Government IT projects such as ID cards, facial recognition, the NHS database, etc. Over the last few years there have been huge failures in practically every large IT project that the Government has attempted with lots of money spent and very poor results. This mainly appears to be because the people in Government making decisions don’t have a clue about realistic IT projects, budgets and even who to ask. There’s a nice article over on the BBC about this sort of technical ignorance and government ideas.
It seems to me that there’s a lot of technical ignorance around. For some reason older people seem to assume that anyone young must understand technology and put down their ignorance to their age and not being ‘brought up’ with it. But as anyone who really understands technology or spends any time with young people and computers knows, this simply isn’t true. Young people today may know how to surf the internet and use Office productivity suites and play their MP3’s, but they don’t really understand any of the underlying technology or how to do anything with it, other than these surface activities. So the technical ignorance will continue and isn’t something that’s going to go away. The Government needs to get a clue and do something about it…