We all know the UK government is chucking money at IT. But a market research firm last week put the spending in a scary context. According to Gartner, the government plans to spend $22bn (£13.1bn) a year on IT by 2005. That is twice as much as the next biggest spending European government, Germany, and 14 times the average for other European governments.
Let's assume that the differential is real and not a result of some anomaly in definition or transparency. What does it mean? A positive spin is that the investment is a sign that the UK is serious about reforming public services, in marked contrast to eurosclerotics such as France and Germany.
The negative side is that this vote of confidence in IT doesn't seem to be accompanied by any evidence of efficiency savings. In fact, the latest figures on civil service numbers, also released last week, suggest they are rising at almost the same rate as IT spending (4.5% and 4% a year, respectively).
The correlation is embarrassing. Twenty-two billion dollars is a lot of money. Gartner warns that, as time passes and scrutiny grows, the government will come under pressure to prove its IT budget would not be better spent on hospitals, schools or railway track.
Governments find this difficult. Conventionally, they justify IT investments as ways of running public services more efficiently, therefore providing the equivalent of extra wards, police officers or teachers. For example, one benefit of the NHS's new £68m e-booking system should be that fewer people fail to turn up for appointments, so clinics run to full capacity and waiting lists fall. Of course, it's more complicated than that. Like airlines, some clinics already compensate for no-shows by over-booking. Others use the "wasted" time to catch up with odd jobs that can't be timetabled. And others have found that a friendly phone call from a low-paid hospital clerk can reduce the number of no shows more cheaply than a fancy IT system.
But, according to Gartner, attempts to justify government IT projects by return on investment are doomed. By 2007, it claims, more than half of government IT initiatives that have been cost- justified by traditional economic and financial return methods will not achieve their targets.
The result, says Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio, will be a public backlash, with the government accused of wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers' money on unnecessary technology.
Gartner's solution is that rather than justifying IT spending on economic returns, governments determine success by "quality of life" measures such as stakeholder satisfaction, the use of new electronic channels and the extent to which processes are simplified.
All are worthy objectives. The problem is that these soft outcomes need to be paid for with hard money. As the chancellor does his sums for his next public spending review, he may decide that other parts of the national infrastructure have a greater claim to the hard stuff.
