IT: harder than you think

We were going to write a long, thoughtful post on government IT, bringing in our own experiences from the land of private technology and web media, and it was going to be really good. But then bloody Dizzy Thinks wrote it instead. His point is this: until government IT is brought back in-house and given proper prominence, there are just going to be more and bigger cock-ups:

A proper technology ministry responsibile for all IT and security. A department which all other departments resource their IT systems through and which is based in the UK. The bottom line is this. Under no circumstances should any personal data be sent out of the country by Government.

Only thing we'd add is this: from what we've seen of government IT, and more importantly from what we've seen of technology understanding amongst people who work in and around government, including very senior people, this is a seriously huge problem. Put Tom Watson in charge, we say: he's got a blog and everything. No wait - so do John Redwood and Jeffrey Archer. *sigh*