IT Essentials: When ethics meet duty

A refusal wrapped in virtue is still a refusal

The next battle over open data won’t be fought by activists, but by soldiers and scientists.

'We'd love to help, but our policy is...'

If you've ever tried to negotiate with a supplier of a certain size, you've heard a variant of this phrase. While the IT customer/vendor bond can be cordial, maybe even friendly, it's ultimately a business relationship, and too often a one-sided one. The fact is that you need AWS (or Oracle, Microsoft, etc) more than they need you.

Unless, of course, your scale rivals theirs. The public sector is one of the few that can successfully wring significant concessions from suppliers, which is a good thing considering the state of most government budgets.

But even that isn't always enough, especially when your supplier has an attack of ethics - as in the case of Anthropic vs the Pentagon which is now set to go to court. OpenAI's relationship with the US government, by contrast, is starting to look less like a partnership than Stockholm Syndrome.

But what happens when both customer and supplier are part of the same government? The topic came up at a Met Office event I attended this week, in the context of supplying data to the military.

We'll have a full rundown of the discussion soon, but in short, meteorological data is crucial for defence. By its nature this is open data and the Met Office makes it freely available, but that may have to change “if the world changes,” one attendee said.

What, exactly, that means is up in the air for now, but it certainly alarmed the serving officers in the room.

Navigating this issue means picking through a minefield of responsibility, ethics and national duty. As another attendee said to me: “I wouldn’t want to work in government right now.”

The ongoing case of Wayne Johncock, the former Centrica CIO who lost his life savings to a sophisticated scam and is yet to see justice, came back into the spotlight this week. I looked into why the ICO has changed its position on cybersecurity, and what it means for cases like Wayne’s.

In the wake of International Women’s Day, Penny Horwood analyses just how helpful the government’s new push to boost female talent in the tech industry will be.

And because we can’t let a week go by without mentioning the technology, John Leonard has written about how to roll out AI that works – specifically, how to overcome the trust factor – while Kerstin Stief of Computing Deutschland has looked at why Meta’s takeover of Moltbook should make IT leaders nervous.

Finally, we have a guest piece from OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock, who reports on the telco sector’s AI push from MWC 2026.