I’ve just been compiling Computing’s news reviews of 2007 for our web site, looking back at the big stories that made the headlines during the year. With such an overload of articles, how can the past 12 months be best summarised?

Well, to be honest, it’s been something of a case of same old, same old. What have we learned this year? 

The government continues to embarrass itself where technology is concerned, sadly negating all the good work that is increasingly taking place in public sector technology. 

Green issues have leaped to the top of IT managers’ agenda, and rightly so. But really, most of the current advice available is simply common sense, good practice IT operational management. We are still painfully short of genuine vendor-free best practice green computing – although there are a few leading companies that are starting to write the rulebooks. 

IT security is just as much of a pain as it has been, but the law enforcement community seems to be drifting further away from being able to address the concerns of business leaders. The great fear is that e-crime will only be tackled once something really bad takes place to make the authorities act. 

What else? 

There are still skills gaps; the profile of the IT leader continues to change; more work is being outsourced; and offshoring is expanding faster than ever. 

Web 2.0 has become the new internet and e-commerce buzzword; stock market valuations for online companies are becoming very silly again; and broadband is an increasingly important economic driver (so let’s hope we get moving on the next-generation infrastructure). 

All in all, it sounds very much like how you would summarise any other mature, business-critical sector of the

UK

economy. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the French would say if they translated into English. 

In that light, perhaps the most important story of the year came just this month, with news that the UK IT sector is now the second biggest industry in the country, after financial services, contributing 6.4 per cent of the economy – some £66.5bn. 

Maybe in years to come, we will look back at 2007 as a pivotal time, one when IT continued to grow up and establish itself as central to the UK's international success. Technology is increasingly just a part of business, it flows with and influences our lives every day, and perhaps it is a good thing that as the year ends, we are not looking back on any one trend as a defining influence. 

Just another year for a vital part of the way we live, work and play. 

Merry Christmas from everyone at Computing, and best wishes for a prosperous and incident-free technology new year.

 

The ongoing scandal of lost government data containing our personal records is in reality not an outbreak of security problems but an outbreak of honesty.

Would we have been told about the three million missing learner drivers’ records if HM Revenue and Customs had not confessed to losing CDs containing 25 million child benefits records?

Would the Northern Ireland Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency have admitted to mislaying CDs containing 6,000 drivers’ details?

Or would Leeds Building Society have made public the missing salary and banking details of 1,000 employees – especially since they were simply ‘unaccounted for’ after an office move from one floor of its building to another? 

The real scandal, if you want to use that word, is that we will never know how many similar instances have taken place in the public and private sectors for years without ever being revealed. 

I was told recently of a major global financial services firm that used to post a CD containing 300,000 people’s personal information inside a jiffy bag, using ordinary post – not even registered post – until the head of IT in the UK found out about the practice and stopped it immediately. 

These sort of incidents happen all the time. 

There will be more calls for a data breach notification law of the kind used in the US, where firms are legally responsible for informing people affected by a security breach. The government’s data sharing review will look for other measures – not least the obvious ones such as encryption and electronic, instead of postal, file transfer. And the debate over identity cards and NHS medical records databases will be cranked up as a result. These are all good things, of course, and recent events have served only to raise the profile of a discussion that would have taken place anyway. 

But what will no doubt also happen is yet more questions about the use of databases – it has almost become a taboo word. 

In all this lost data debate, there is one fact that seems to be overlooked: No database has ever “lost” anything. No IT system has allowed information to be retrieved unless it thought the person doing so was meant to be there. No network ever randomly decided to publish the content of its systems. 

Technology is not the villain here – it is the solution. The problem is human error. The HMRC data would not have gone missing were it not for a human being making a very bad decision. 

Simple, everyday technology exists to make data secure, unreadable and inaccessible. We should not be worried about the government creating a database containing the details of 60 million citizens – we should be worried about the fact that human beings are operating it. (Not that the government is creating a single central ID cards database, nor a single, central NHS medical records database, but the complexity of distributed data management is beyond most national news commentators). 

Some newspaper columnists (well, one in particular) have even suggested a return to remembering data or writing it down on paper and not using IT at all. Great idea – after all, nobody ever forgot information they were told, and nobody ever stole or mislaid a piece of paper, did they? 

So the honesty we are seeing now is welcome, if belated and sadly causing many people a lot of worry about the potential for identity theft. 

But let’s not allow the debate to be dragged down to a simplistic and headline-grabbing “all databases are bad.” Like all IT, it is about people, process and technology – and the technology is the easiest part to get right.

[Thanks to a in-depth conversation with my good friend and Computing features editor Mark Samuels for the inspiration behind this blog entry. Happy now, Mark?]

IT leaders are becoming more aware of the importance of a green IT strategy ­ but many are struggling to find the right advice and best practice to put into action.

There are plenty of vendors whose products can help improve users’ energy efficiency ­ but there are few sources of independent advice on how to put in place a meaningful technology programme to improve your environmental credentials.

Building the business case for green IT is essential ­ and the best place to find out what to do is from peers.

To help make this happen ­ for a few of our readers at least ­ Computing last week hosted a roundtable debate in association with VMware and Intel, appropriately enough at Kew Gardens, to discuss the experiences of a number of leading organisations.

Several common concerns quickly appeared, but two in particular seemed to resonate around the table.

Everyone knows that IT has a green problem. Trewin Restorick, director of environmental charity Global Action Plan, was on the panel and presented recent research that said 86 per cent of IT departments do not measure their carbon footprint.

The response of the IT leaders present was that there are no recognised ways to measure the environmental credentials of their operations ­ and even if there were, how do they know if they are good or bad?

Until measurement becomes standardised, it will be impossible to benchmark your organisation ­ which should be a key factor in determining a green strategy.

The second concern is the difficulty in finding best practice. Every vendor, it seems, now tells us it is a green supplier, when in reality they have simply realised that their products can help you to reduce your energy use. That is not a green strategy ­ environmentally-friendly products should plug into a wider plan, determined by best practice, but there is so little best practice available.

There is still much to do. One delegate, from a major global financial services firm, said that users in his organisation are told to leave their PCs on overnight and at weekends in case its outsourcing supplier needs to update software patches. Others nodded in agreement.

Awareness of the impact of technology on the environment is growing. If IT leaders do not embrace green computing, we will all be under fire before long.