ORG invited to IT Inquiry

ORG’s submission to the Public Administration Select Committee review of government IT won us an invitation to present evidence on 15 March.

Our submission looked at how government IT affects privacy and rights, but also has tended to be divorced from the real problems it ought to be helping to solve. It has focused on implementing technology, rather than the problem and the people who need the problem solved.

The result has been systems that don’t help people but answer perceived political or bureaucratic needs, and abuse of citizens’ privacy and security into the bargain.

Our evidence was based on three large projects we have run:

E-voting

Our experience of e-voting, we saw that the technology was supposed to answer the problem of voter turn out. There was no reason to assume that e-voting would deliver greater turn out, which is mostly to do with democratic engagement and the perceive importance of voting. Instead, of course, e-voting threatened the integrity of elections, because government departments did not understand the complexity of the technical problem.

Database State Seminars

We ran four seminars last year, where health, transport, crime and child care experts explained some of the problems with the approach different departments had to IT and privacy. Although our focus was privacy, the seminars repeatedly revealed a pattern of government political priorities pushing technology, rather than real need from citizens and service users. The result was massive database systems answering Whitehall priorities that failed real needs and abused fundamental rights.

Open Data and engaging smaller providers

Open Data projects have shown that open collaboration can help bridge the deficiencies in understanding from within government, which cannot expect to know everything. Generally, transparency is needed so that the reasons for choosing particular solutions can be understood. Where possible, the process of choosing a technology should be distinct from tendering processes.

You can read our submission here.