Information technology and the British government

Government bureaucracy and political expediency impose great strains on the implementation of information technology. In the UK there have been many instances of schemes falling short of implementation times, cost overruns and data mishandling.

Every time the UK government has initiated a major IT reform the cost overrun has been enormous. Incompetence on the part of the corporate contractors seems to have been largely responsible, but their excess charges and costs have always been met by tax revenue. The insertion of private, profit oriented corporations into what should be welfare oriented fields (health, taxation, immigration, social security, pension provision) has never succeeded without financial and personal cost. (Although this sounds rather like an attack on government it's actually intended to show that the privatization of public services is always usually catastrophically bad.)