IT is not magic pixiedust

Apropos of nothing

IT is not magic pixiedust
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But Alex reminded me of a 2006 Daniel Davies article on the dismal fate of British public sector IT projects. Here’s what I think is the money quote:

This would seem like an unbelievably obvious, basic rule of good practice; that you can have major operational projects or major structural changes, but not both at once. It is, in fact, one of the big principles that they teach you in business school. But in the British public sector, this principle appears to be treated with the most monumental and catastrophic contempt. There was simply no chance that the NHS IT project (or the various Home Office projects, or the various education projects) was going to succeed; failure was written into the specification by the fact that the government chose to ignore the existence of the projects when deciding to have a dozen or more attempts at “radical change”.

No comment, but it’s not just British IT projects which could use this insight. Unfortunately, most big, public sector IT projects tend to take years rather than months and there are few sectors in which you can shut down change that long. So every project that goes on long enough and has to deal with any kind of legislation is always going to have to run a Red Queen’s Race just to keep up with its environment. The same goes for any large IT driven organisation, which these days is every organisation.

What makes things worse is that by and large a lot of the decision makers are IT illiterate and think of computers as just fancy typewriters or databases as just a replacement for their filing cabinets. Not to mention that especially in government, the people who ultimately have to make the decisions are not part of the organisation having to implement them and therefore do not understand the consequences of their decisions for these organisations.

Voting computers

Dutch politics, IT is not magic pixiedust
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Somewhat of an old story this, but still important. For some years now there have been doubts about the vulnerability of the voting computers used in Dutch elections which came to a head in last years national elections when several voting districts decided to use the oldfashioned red pencil again. In response a studygroup was set up to look at the whole voting process and recommend ways to make it more transparant. Almost three weeks ago this group gave its recommendation, which the responsible minister followed: to stop using the current voting computers. Instead, the study group recommended using a two stage process. The voter makes their choice using a voting computer which prints their ballot. The ballot is checked by the voter and if everything’s in order, put in the ballot box. Votes are counted electronically using these ballots and Optical Character Recognition technology; if in doubt these ballots can also be handcounted. So for the voter you have the convenience of voting electronically, without the vulnerability that this has, as the computer used by the voter does not record the vote…

Does this sound like something the US can use?

Blogs will not revolutionise the world

IT is not magic pixiedust, Meta
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At least not the way the hypemasters want you to think. Tom Coates is using a small controversy about bloggers trying their hands at viral marketing to spew his gall about the incessentant hype about how the latest New Internet Thing is going to change the world forever:

I’m totally fed up of people standing up and waving a flag for the death of institutions based on sketchy information and a vague belief in the rightness of their cause – and I’m also slightly sick of more moderate voices being drowned out under the revolutionary fervour of people fresh with their first wave of excitement about user-generated content on the web. Weblogs suffer from this enormously. Someone said that every journalist that writes about weblogs thinks that the year they discovered them is the year weblogs went mainstream. I’ve watched this for almost six years now. I now need people to think about what’s more likely to happen – that big media organisations, and governments and businesses will dry up and evaporate, or that some of them will adapt and change to a new ecology, renegotiate their place in the world and have a role in fashioning and supporting whatever it is that’s coming?

Whatever is on the horizon – social software, social media, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, technology everywhere, permanent connectivity, media distribution, mass amateurisation, disintermediation – it’s going to have an enormous impact on our lives. But that impact will probably seem relatively subtle and gradual to those people living through it, and its true effects will probably not be fully recognised for a hell of a long time. So let’s try and be a bit humble about the whole thing, eh? Let’s get excited about possible futures, let’s argue for the changes we think should happen, let’s present ideas and theories and ideas and business models and look to the future and test them and explore them. But please, no more religious wars of us versus them, big versus small, old versus new… We’ve got enough entrenched dogmatic opinions in the world already without creating new ones…

Hear hear. I’ve been on the internet since 1994, not that long compared to some, and I’ve seen so many of these hypes come past. The internet itself, the web, push technology (remember this?) Java, Linux, Open Source, blogs, RSS, etc. etc. None of these things changed the world “forever”, but all of them (except push) changed the world in ways we still barely understand and won’t understand until at
least half a century or more has passed. Just like Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution, it is still “too early to tell” what the impact of the internet is.

Something’s gone horribly wrong

geekdom, IT is not magic pixiedust
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Huh. It seems every second weblog I try to read today is having trouble — and they had all created with Blogger. Seems to me this has been happening a bit more lately. Just shows how important it is to have control of your weblogging sofware, I guess.

Fortunately what I use is Blosxom which is no more then a clever Perl script developed by Rael Dornfest, a researcher at O’Reilly. It’s lightweight, easy to use and adapt and open source. Check it out.