Yet another Friday Folks with the weekend fast approaching and yet another IT project has fallen by the way side this time a national crime system for the Police, Anti-terror and SOCA - with £24 million already spent the government have closed the purse on yet another expensive folly. Alan Johnson was in Manchester yesterday promoting the National identity scheme, you know the scheme nobody wants, according to the government however this has been very successful in its take up with the public (they won't release figures though).

Remember a decade ago in the days of "Cool Britannia" and "Things can only get better" we had the National Air traffic system - disaster - how about the much fated Patient booking system - disaster, oh and not forgetting the National junior doctors web portal that gave out personal details of medical staff and failed in improving the recruitment process. Recently Nortel have confirmed that they have pulled out of the contract for the Olympics you can just feel the omens growing there as well. 

Other national systems have been successful but have that many restrictions that further development is scorned on - take the NHS and the Electronic staff system or ESR, the owner of this will not allow any direct connection to their system, this inturn has meant that a large number of NHS trusts had no form of automatic provisioning or de-provisioning for their staff - however since Salford Software have been working with the NHS we have designed a ESR provisioning solution that solves this problem. Maybe this is the answer....all these project have one thing in common they where all owned by huge IT providers who generally when they win these deals farm them out to smaller specialised bespoke providers (like Salford Software)....therefore maybe it's not the Government who are to blame but the "middlemen"...now there's a thought - maybe things "would" be better if more contracts were awarded to smaller organisations - maybe bigger is not better!     
      
Ultimately what I find totally amazing and very frustrating is that in a time of economic down-turn this country should be investing and promoting IT technology - the UK has some fantastic programming talent and the opportunity here to raise our heads over the parapit of international IT should be grasped. The problem is every time we try, we spend millions, and then pull the plug with everybody involved pleading ignorance and blaming the person next to them ( the Dr Kelly effect).

Most people on the street blame the government, and to be honest when you hear our current crop of political "los...sorry leaders" speak out around technology you can really see that they have no idea what IT is. Gordon Brown was comparing security on the  internet with the Royal Navy of the 19th century the other week ....what on earth!  On the other hand in the blue corner "call me Dave" Cameron was at Imperial College last week and I have to say, hearing him talk (on a webcast) about standardising file formats and mash-ups you get the feeling he at least has an inkling what Web 2.0 actually is!

Maybe there is hope........I'm not holding my breath though.

Have a good weekend.

Dave P