Bosses hit out
Government IT chiefs have attacked computer suppliers for contributing to IT disasters by making "lies" and "exorbitant claims".
Peter Gershon, head of the Treasury's Office of Government Commerce and Andrew Pinder, the e-envoy, were speaking on Tuesday at a conference on public-private partnerships.
Gershon, charged with cutting procurement bills across the public sector, said: "Every day we are faced with suppliers who make exorbitant claims about the performance of their products and we are bitterly disappointed."
Pinder was blunter.
Government IT projects had failed because of "incompetent workmanship" from "crap suppliers", he said. "Let's be honest about this: they [failures] have also been about suppliers who have lied to us."
Senior officials feel that after fiascoes at the Passport Agency, air traffic control and the courts service, the government has done a great deal of breast-beating. It is now time for industry to do the same.
Paradox lost?
Spending money on IT really does improve your bottom line. That's the conclusion of a economic study published this week which claims to disprove the "productivity paradox" associated with computers. The study, by a private research consultancy, London Economics, claims that investment in IT accounted for 47% of the UK's growth in productivity between 1992 and 2000.
Of 12 sectors studied, manufacturing gained the most from buying computers. In public administration, where productivity declined during the years studied, the decline would have been worse without IT.
The study suggests that the infamous "productivity paradox" - the discovery in the early 1990s that computers were not increasing productivity - may be a thing of the past. That is good news for the report's sponsor, the network equipment company Cisco Systems.
Cuba camp link
A division of the services firm that runs Camp X-Ray, the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is to run the new NHS programme management office. Richard Granger, the director general of NHS IT, confirmed that consultancy Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) has won the contract to run the office, overseeing IT providers to the health service. KBR is part of Halliburton, the oil services firm formerly run by US vice-president Dick Cheney, which has a $33m contract in the running of the controversial detention centre. Here, KBR will oversee five NHS local service providers. The first of these, covering London, will be chosen by October.
Mail to go
RIM, or Research In Motion, the Canadian company best known for its BlackBerry handheld organiser, now wants to make the same kind of facilities available to other devices. It has launched a BlackBerry Connect scheme to provide access to its existing wireless infrastructure and BlackBerry Enterprise Server software, and has started signing up hardware manufacturers and carriers. By the end of the year, "BlackBerry email" should be available on Nokia 6800 mobile phones and other Symbian devices, Microsoft Pocket PCs and Smartphones from HTC.
New ear
Dragon Systems led the way in speech recognition until its $600m takeover by rival L&H, which went bust and sold the technology to ScanSoft. Dragon's founder and former chief executive, Jim Baker, set up a new business called Novauris, or "new ear", which is demonstrating its next-generation system at the Voice World-Europe Conference at Olympia, London, this week. Most of the company's researchers are based in Bishop's Cleeve, Cheltenham, and used to be Dragon Systems' UK R&D team. They also developed the SpeechWorks speech recognition technology used in Jaguar cars. The first Novauris demo shows speaker-independent voice access to a database of 245 million US names and addresses. Baker's aim is to develop "speech recognition technology that can make a significant practical difference to the world".
Server launch
Microsoft has finally finished Windows Server 2003, and released the code for a launch in San Francisco on April 24. More than 5,000 of Microsoft's software developers have been working on the code for at least three years, only taking time out for retraining in "new security-focused development techniques" following Microsoft's belated Trustworthy Computing initiative.
While in development, the program was also renamed Windows.Net Server, before being renamed back. There will be seven versions of Server 2003, including the datacentre and enterprise editions for Intel Pentium-compatible and 64-bit Titanium 2 processors. The Windows Small Business Server 2003 edition will not be available until the autumn.
Microsoft has been running its own website on Windows Server 2003 since last July, and claims it runs "twice as fast across all workloads" with a 20% reduction in costs. But companies are notoriously slow to upgrade server software, so don't expect a sudden boom in sales.
