What’s £6 billion of immediate spending cuts between friends?  In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to scupper the birth of our new ‘ConDem Nation’ as the Liberals opted to overlook the straight-out-of-the-blocks eagerness of the Tory axe as small beer.  A pragmatic outlook…  When the total overall deficit is nudging ever closer to £1 trillion, cuts are going to have to run a lot deeper than that.

So watch out public sector IT.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon…  Sat in the back-room rather than out and about delivering ‘front-line services’, you can mount your defence with talk of community empowerment, green efficiencies and collaborative productivity gains; it won’t wash.  Florence Nightingale you are not.  Dixon of Dock Green you shall never be.  You are a paper clip.  Economise or be destroyed… please.

Except it won’t really play out like that will it?  Not least because public sector IT departments really are working hard to demonstrably support the improvement of services on the front-line while at the same time underwriting the processes that strip out expensive inefficiencies from back-office operations.  “White elephants aside, we are value for money,” comes the retort.  And before the management on high reply, “sorry, I’m going to have to napalm everything here to within an inch of its life anyway”, we beg the question: do these technology ignoramuses really know what they are cutting back on?  “IT is pretty well plugged into to everything nowadays you know.  What if an oojamaflip fails, or an ossilating pamplebum joo-joo went on the blink?  They’d be dead bodies piling up in the street by teatime…”

The truth is that right at the heart of pretty much every public sector IT department, swathed as they are in software sophistication and network complexity, are manual checklists, duplicated spreadsheets and other pre-1980s working practices that would make a Business Transformation & Efficiency Improvement Change Management Consultant blush.  They are what gets used to fight fires with; diverting precious resources away from innovation, development and renewal.  There’s the waste with no argument not to cut.

So either keep it all hidden from the bean-counters that stalk your corridors or, for all our sakes, automate IT so that the budget you have left can be spent on the things that really matter rather than the operating processes that really don’t.

A bit like US presidents pumping trillions into firing pieces of junk at the planet Mars, UK politicians talking big on IT and technology in general are obviously trying to reflect back all the associated positive attributes onto themselves.  What’s not to like about someone painting pretty pictures of a better tomorrow?  A vote winner right there; just wave an iPad around, go on YouTube, get Twitter and Facebook crazy, and promise to shove a big pile of broadband up everyone’s nose.  

Yes, we are a bit cynical.

Passing without comment on this blog at the time, was the sad news that Labour MP David Taylor had died last Boxing Day.  So why mention it now?  Because with many years experience at the sharp end within a sizeable IT department, Mr Taylor was one of the few parliamentarians who understood anything of any substance regarding IT.

Instead, brace yourself.  Not only for the inevitable surfeit of horrifically over-simplified and inaccurate IT-related ramblings from poorly briefing politicos, but also for the ensuing responses from equally ill-at-ease ignoramuses who might in fact have good reason to shout-down their opponent’s tech-drenched manifesto pledge but who will – rather unfortunately – do so really badly.

Right now, somewhere, at the end of some speech-writer’s pen are the words: “After all, we are all IT users now…”

Not ALL of us mate…