Though Cowards Flinch

Reading the Economist this afternoon, I came across an article entitled “Government Offline” which briefly attempted to investigate why governments hadn’t been able to reap the same e-benefits as private corporations such as Amazon and Google.

The article finally gets around to (rather inanely) assigning the blame to lack of competition in the public sector, and cites approvingly competitive attempts in India’s “e-seva” where people can do all sorts of things from buy rail tickets online to pay utility bills.

It went on to say,

“shame and beauty contests are still weak forces in the public sector. Failure in bureaucracy means not bankruptcy but writing self-justifying memos…Bureaucrats plead that just a bit more time and money will fix the clunky monsters they have created. That kind of thinking has lead to the botched computerisation in Britain’s National Health Service…”

In an article which is clearly out to laud the private sector’s know-how, you’d think somewhere along the way it would mention that the majority of ICT balls-ups in the UK are down to one of two things. Private companies or downsizing to cut costs.

A string of private companies have overseen the ‘botched computerisation’ but none of these are mentioned in the context of the NHS job. You’d think, in the interests of journalistic integrity the author of the piece might have mentioned that.

I imagine that this comes from a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose mentality. Had the job gone well, no doubt the private sector goons would have claimed credit for it. Now that it has been a categorical catastrophe, it’s the work of bureaucrats, who are implied to be government civil servants.

As Private Eye would say, trebles all round!