In the past week important points have been made about the government’s proposals for biometric identity cards.
Trade body Intellect is right to raise the question of industry involvement and the need for expert discussion of the technicalities of the scheme, not merely the structure of the procurement.
And the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee is right to question the government’s largely untested assumptions about biometrics. The proposal for an independent IT assurance panel is also valid.
But there is a far more pressing issue going largely unremarked.
One of the most arresting lessons from past debacles is that public sector IT programmes succeed or fail on their people as much as their technology.
And although some thought is being given to public relations issues and the logistics of enrolment, there is a deafening silence on the capacity of either the government or the industry to deliver another scheme of such sensitivity and scale.
The ID cards plan joins an already formidable list: NHS modernisation, eBorders, joined-up justice, shared services across the entire public sector, and the Defence Information Infrastructure, to name only the largest.
On the industry side, the problem of resourcing concurrent major procurements, let alone implementations, is well-recognised. But suppliers are not the only issue.
It is no criticism of Whitehall to question the government’s access to the kind of highly technically skilled and experienced people that such programmes need. There may be only a handful in the country with the skills and the experience of a major implementation.
Appraisals of the ID card scheme still focus almost exclusively on how much it will cost and if the technology will work. Such concerns are entirely reasonable.
But ultimately it will be rigorous, cross-government demand management – ensuring that limited high-level resources are not stretched to breaking point – that will determine whether ID cards join the list of government IT disasters.
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