Spending from the public purse
Do government offices too easily to spend our money? At a time when everyone has to find cost savings, HMRC has, over the last two years, miraculously cut its annual IT spending by half, from £1.4 billion to £700 million.
Keep in mind that this is not the total cost of running the HMRC. It is only the money it spends on IT. Despite the huge buying power of government, and the economies of scale it should be able to achieve, £700m is still around £20 per taxpayer per year which is not insignificant. And that is just one branch of government. To put these figures into perspective, HMRC has undercharged 1.4 million people a total of £2 billion in tax and will be claiming it back. At the same time, it has agreed to waive a long-disputed £6 billion tax bill for Vodafone.
Does government spending help the UK's small and medium sized enterprises? Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude recently said "Governments might be able to print money but it is SMEs who make it successful. SMEs are crucial to the future of this country and can save taxpayers' money with innovative new ideas." He then said that central government procurement spend going to SMEs would double from £3 billion in 2010 to £6 billion in 2012. Out of context that sounds impressive, but it is only a tiny percentage of Whitehall spending.
Where computing is concerned, government (both national and local) does not have a stellar record and continues to underwhelm me. There has been much fanfare about making the UK "online" with expensive initiatives such as MyGov, but in my experience they are just not getting the basics right. Have you tried contacting local authorities by email? I emailed one local authority to inform them about a case of fly tipping I'd spotted in a nature reserve. The only reply I received was an automated mail assigning me a case number. I emailed the county highways department to tell them about a damaged roadside safety barrier and received an automated reply telling me they would endeavour to reply to my email in 10 working days. Yes, TEN. It is now seventeen working days and I have heard nothing more.
Worst of all though has been the Information Commissioner's Office. I tried to contact them with a data protection complaint but the website seems designed to put you off at every turn. If you can find the right page you have to download a Word document and edit it, (which means if you don't have MS Word you cannot file a complaint), and then email it back to them. When I emailed it back I received a reply which said "The recipient's mailbox is full and can't accept messages".
These cases illustrate an important point. An autoreply does not count as "communicating" with your customer. Technology can help you do your job better but it can't do your job for you. There is no point giving technological solutions to people if you don't combine it with training in how to use them effectively.
27th March 2012
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.