Opinion: What good has technology done?

Looking back 20 years or so, it's hard to see just what benefits have come from the introduction of new technologies in the workplace, says Simon Moores.

Who remembers the 80s? It was the best of times for those of us working in technology and a time when columnists like me predicted a future, driven by the march of progress, that would make doing business cheaper and more efficient and would give each of us more leisure time and less stress as a consequence.

How wrong could I be? Yesterday's future is today's present and technology, much like the world of The Matrix, consumes budgets with an insatiable appetite that has quite the opposite effect to that we imagined 20 years ago.

Can you still recall what the world was like before the arrival of the call centre, the speed camera and the BlackBerry? Do you remember when a holiday meant nobody could find you for two weeks, and the public sector still relied on the typewriter and the telephone?

This week we heard that council tax bills are to increase by more than twice the level of inflation this year, marking a doubling of the property tax in just 10 years.

At a central government level, billions of pounds of public money will be thrown at the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) and the up-and-coming national ID cards project. The latter prompted the London School of Economic's professor Ian Angell to tell silicon.com sister site ZDNet.co.uk: "Any companies involved in IT should stick their snout in the trough now, because it's going to be a gravy train. This is a huge opportunity for IT companies, as there are no downsides."

An observer from another planet might think that by introducing the benefits of new technology and the internet to private business and the public sector over the last 20 years, both sectors would become smaller and more cost efficient. Instead the opposite appears to have happened. Visit a supermarket and you'll see that clothes and food are now much cheaper than they were 20 years ago, with more choice on offer but consumers and taxpayers are increasingly the unhappy victims of the arrival of new technology in the workplace.

In theory, the introduction of electronic government and business process re-engineering concepts should have led to a more streamlined public sector, calling on equally slim public/private partnerships to deliver cost-effective and competitive services to the population.

Instead, many of us see the evidence of an expensive shambles and an exercise in self justification by local and central government. We have higher taxes to pay for local and central services, which in the case of the Child Support Agency or the Tax Credits system, squander huge amounts of public money on wasteful, ill-conceived projects, dreamt up by a handful of very large IT suppliers in collusion with our very naive political leaders.

As Karl Marx said: "Bureaucracy is the ultimate purpose of the state." And business is suffocated by red tape and squeezed by compliance and expensive IT costs. Government continues to expand and uses IT as an instrument of control and taxation on a population which no longer believes in the value of the democratic process.

Last week, I chaired an electronic government conference with papers delivered from countries as close as Scotland and as far afield as Singapore and Taiwan. What I concluded from the event was that while the arrival of new technology can add value and speed up some processes, it can make others worse and lead to the appearance of a single point of failure which has a knock-on effect downstream.

In reality, chasing technology - like seeking the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - has become the new purpose of government. While the public sector talks bravely of efficiencies and shared services, it becomes ever more expensive and people-intensive to run - leaving me to ask if what we have today is really any better than what we paid much less for in our taxes 20 years ago.