IT gurus slam the government's record on technology

Responding to last week's announcement that the Home Office is 125 months late and £50m over budget on its IT projects, they said the government needs to make some radical changes to its IT strategy.

Natalie Calvert, chairwoman of the London First Call Centre Taskforce, argued: "At the end of the day, they're dealing with public money, they're spending our money as taxpayers. It's an appalling situation."

Perri 6, senior research fellow at the University of Strathclyde, agreed. "Unfortunately, it's par for the course for about three or four really major central government departments," he explained. "Government departments spent a lot of money about twenty years ago on major transaction-processing, back-office systems, which they never properly integrated."

All three panellists attacked the government's love of large, long-term projects.
"A series of small projects leaping to quick solutions and successes is a far better way of rapidly going forward and learning as you go," suggested Richard Sykes, chairman of management firm, Morgan Chambers. "A lot of effort in these major projects gets trapped in automating old ways of doing things."

The full Behind the Headlines programme can be viewed in the Call Centre Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a34158 ).