Leader: The customer must come first

How does a government policy designed to pull struggling families out from under a mountain of debt manage to end up loading more on top of them?

How does an IT system designed to make applications more efficient end up making the whole process more complicated and painful for those involved?

These are two of the questions that - we hope - the government will be pondering following some more fierce criticism of the technology behind its flagship tax credits system.

Charity Citizens Advice came up with some terrible cases of families in despair because they had been given the run-around by a system designed to help them.

The tax credits project has featured all the technology problems that we have come to expect from big government IT programmes, with the system hit by a number of problems following its launch - and more glitches since.

Interestingly, according to the Parliamentary Ombudsman, one of the major problems wasn't the implementation but the original design, which it might be argued placed too much emphasis on efficiency of the service and not enough on the delivery of it.

The entire system from start to finish was automated, and while this may have cut costs, when things went wrong it was hard for families who had applied to understand what had gone wrong. IT glitches and human error just made these problems even worse.

The answer is blatantly obvious - but something people in charge of government tech projects evidently find hard to grasp.

The customer comes first.

Making information available through good communication, and having processes in place to deal with problems when they occur should not be afterthoughts but central and built into the system design.

Of course cost saving is part of the e-government agenda - but that agenda should be re-examined if it results in lower quality services, especially in areas such as the social welfare system.

Building a system that strips out all the cost but leaves your customers unhappy completely misses the point of what IT can accomplish.