I.T is it

I think this says a lot about how the US (California, in this case) and UK governments are fundamentally different in their IT processes:

California’s CTO P.K. Agarwal recently responded to TechCrunch contributing columnist Vivek Wadhwa’s disparaging comments about the state’s IT systems by inviting anyone to suggest ideas for its improvement via a crowdsourcing site set up for this purpose. I thought that was a very proactive way of approaching the problem, and was impressed by the initiative taken by a government representative in a wholly transparent manner.

Contrast this with this petition in the UK that Rob Bowley has had to independently set up to focus the public’s attention on the fact that the UK Government has wasted £26 billion of taxpayer money on failed IT projects. So far, the number of signatories is at only 270, but it does include some fairly influential people. I’m hopeful that this will go up, and that at some point soon the UK Government will openly admit the need for a re-vamp of their IT systems.