The Tories like technology. They increasingly seem to think IT is going to help them win the General Election due next year. And they might be right – in fact, getting behind the tech sector would not be a bad policy for anyone to pursue, as Labour has already realised with its Digital Britain plan.

But, as I have written before, the Conservatives seem to be bring with them the same optimistic naivety that has blighted the Labour government’s IT track record.

The Times today reports that the Tories could bring in a policy that would see NHS patients storing their electronic medical records on web-based private sector systems run by the likes of Microsoft and Google.

The Times claims this as an exclusive, despite the fact David Cameron announced the concept in April and Computing wrote about it at the time, but I digress.

The newspaper quotes a Tory source saying: “We’re thinking about how in government the architecture of technology needs to change, with people ‘owning’ their own data, including their health records.”

The idea of citizens owning their own data is welcomed, it’s a concept that could work, and was first suggested in a different context by former HBOS chief executive James Crosby in a report on ID cards he produced for the Treasury two years ago (which was pretty much ignored by the Home Office at the time, but I digress again).

But to think that simply letting people put their medical records online will be easier or cut costs is disturbingly naïve.

The questions that would need to be addressed pour out:

• Will people have to pay?

• If not, how would Microsoft and Google make money? By charging the NHS? By selling data? By selling contextualized adverts to be viewed alongside your records? (“Over 45? Have you thought about Botox yet?” Honestly, the mind boggles…)
• What about connecting to GPs’ existing systems?
• How would a medical professional know which service hosts a patient’s records – especially if that patient is in a critical condition or unconscious?
• What about security – what guarantees are there that a Microsoft/Google system is more secure than one run by government?
• What if Google suffers a temporary crash, as it did with its Gmail email service earlier this year – thus rendering patient records inaccessible?
• How would private sector online applications be integrated with other NHS systems such as electronic prescriptions?
• How much work would be required to re-develop Microsoft and Google’s online health records systems to conform to NHS practices – a challenge that has proved to be a major problem for the US suppliers of packaged software currently trying to implement the National Programme for IT?
• And who would actually own the data and be legally responsible for its protection?

I could go on.

Labour should have learned by now the downside of technology over-optimism. Tony Blair rightly saw that IT-enabled change was the key to transforming public services and his government set out down that road with enthusiasm. But they soon discovered that delivery was a rather more complex affair.

Politically-driven deadlines for IT projects have inevitably slipped. And where politics over-rode IT, such as the disastrously rushed tax credits system, everyone suffered as projects went live too soon.

I’m sure there are votes – and certainly attractive national newspaper headlines – to be gained by populist ideas such as giving electronic patient records to Google. Come to think about it, while you’re at it, why not make them available through Apple’s iPhone app store?

As the NHS is already finding out to its cost, introducing e-records is a massively complex task, and just by stamping the names Google or Microsoft all over them does not make them any cheaper, easier, or more likely to succeed.

Here is a lesson in openness and transparency for everyone working in UK government IT.

President Barack Obama’s new federal chief information officer (CIO), Vivek Kundra, has launched a web-based IT dashboard, detailing the spending and project progress of government technology initiatives in the US.

The dashboard can be found here: http://it.usaspending.gov .

The web site allows citizens to track the progress of projects over time, and includes information on more than 7,000 initiatives, of which nearly 800 are classified as “major”.

The dashboard shows costs involved and the number of projects classified according to their status and progress - whether they are “normal”, “needs attention” or “significant concerns”. The site is currently a beta version, and there are a few glitches that need to be ironed out.

But what a refreshingly open approach – and how contrasting with the UK.

Come on John Suffolk, UK government CIO, how about something similar for this country?

When culture secretary Ben Bradshaw finished his speech introducing the Digital Britain report to Parliament, his Tory shadow stood up and dismissed the report as a “disappointment”.

Over the next few days you will undoubtedly hear other vested interests proclaiming the faults of the wide-ranging plan, pointing out its deficiencies, omissions and flaws.

My advice would be to keep the well-worn phrase “you can’t please all of the people all of the time” in mind as you assess the responses.

If you put aside the inevitable quibbles about individual proposals and recommendations, this is a hugely ambitious programme and frankly the government deserves congratulation for attempting it. If there is one major criticism I would make, it is to ask why we waited so long for such a report.

If Digital Britain is implemented as planned, it will help the UK take a huge step forward in putting technology at the heart of our economy, our workplaces and our lives – something that Computing has called for more times than I can remember, and which can only benefit the IT profession.

The £6 per year “broadband tax” to fund rollout of next-generation networks will attract a lot of headlines and controversy, but if it helps deliver superfast connectivity, it will be worth it.

There will be cynicism – from me included – about a lot of the proposals, especially relating to skills development, that resemble too many past, failed initiatives.

And there will be those who question the commitment to online public services, universal broadband and digital inclusion after even Ofcom research has shown there is a significant minority of people in the UK who have no interest in going online whatsoever.

But as report author Lord Carter said: “Digital Britain is a statement of intent and ambition, a commitment to infrastructure and access, and an overdue recognition of the industrial importance of the creative industries."

The plan is best viewed as a whole, and indeed this may be judged greater than the sum of its parts, which will be pulled apart and scrutinised and in some cases no doubt discarded. It’s a first step and mistakes will inevitably be made along the way.

But come on – IT industry, digital industry, creative industries, ask yourselves: This is far, far better than the nothing we have been used to.

Click here for more Computing coverage of Digital Britain.

BT has become the latest ISP to complain that content providers should contribute to the cost of their bandwidth-hungry services to broadband customers.

BT Retail managing director John Petter said that content providers could not expect “a free ride” if users are to continue receiving services at an affordable price.

Tiscali has been another high-profile advocate of this so-called two-tier internet in the past (although quite possibly because it was financially screwed).

A debate is rapidly brewing about what web-heads know as “net neutrality” – the concept that all content on the internet is considered equal. ISPs say this is unsustainable – they claim that high-bandwidth services such as YouTube and the BBC iPlayer are so popular they hog too much space in their broadband pipes, which costs them a lot of money to ensure that all users get the service they pay for.

BT is now calling for the BBC and others to pay ISPs for delivering their services, as their share of meeting the needs of broadband users.

It’s a particularly topical debate, with the Digital Britain report due next week expected to introduce universal broadband to anyone who wants it across the UK.

I’ll get back to my personal view – which is that the ISPs should get used to it and stop moaning – later.

What entertains me most about the argument is how everyone tries to find the best analogy to support their point of view.

BT has apparently said that carrying content is like a postman having to carry heavy parcels, so they cost more to post.

Let’s put aside the fact that heavy parcels are carried in vans for now, so as not to disabuse BT too soon.

Let’s look at some alternatives – some of which are bound to feature at some point in the future.

• Do department stores pay extra for the cost of pavements, due to the extra damage caused by so many people walking in and out of their doors?

• Should popular tourist destinations fund the roads and railways that people use to visit them?

• Should companies that rent that top floors of skyscrapers pay extra for the upkeep of the lifts?

Honestly. Roll up, roll up and pick your analogy – there is one to suit every nuance of the argument.

BT says that popular sites with hungry content cost ISPs more to provide the necessary bandwidth. Hogwash. The bandwidth already exists, and broadband users are simply choosing what they want to use it for. If you switch off the iPlayer, precisely the same amount of bandwidth will still be in existence as was before, just not so much of it will be used.

BT has rightly been given credit for helping the spread of Broadband Britain, but it had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the internet age. Before former chief executive Ben Verwaayen came on board, the telco – and most ISPs – were resisting investment in broadband rollout, saying there was no content that justified it.

As has since been proven, broadband networks are very much a case of “if you build it, they will come.”

And ISPs cannot have one law for others and another for them. Strange how they always manage to find a justification for the fact that nobody actually gets to use the advertised bandwidth on their services anyway – don’t they love the words “up to”.

Broadband has been a huge money-spinner for ISPs, BT included (well, perhaps not Tiscali). The only reason they have made so much money is because web sites offer exciting content that consumers want to access, so they have to buy broadband connections.

If the BBC and others come up with great content ideas, more people will want to use the internet, more people will want to rent broadband lines, and ISPs make more money.

Perhaps the BBC should ask BT to help fund the iPlayer, given that so many broadband customers have opted to purchase BT’s services to access the site?

I’ve had a brief play with Bing today, Microsoft’s newly-rebranded homage to Chandler from Friends, and I can’t honestly say I see myself changing my search engine habits.

Already, there is no shortage of reviews of the site that go into far more detail than I have done, and have tested and compared a range of different search terms to see if Bing out-Googles Google.

And perhaps, for some people, reading one of those reviews, or conducting your own personal tests on subjects dear to your online hearts, may cause a personal Damascene conversion from whichever search tool you currently prefer.

But frankly, I doubt it will do so for many people.

Microsoft’s problem is that search is no longer a technical thing – in fact, by definition, it is the exact opposite.

The vast majority of web users are not techies or geeks or even IT hobbyists, they are ordinary people who use a search engine – and primarily that means Google – because it takes all the complexity out of using the internet.

You can explain all the technical and presentational reasons why Bing might be better than Google, as Microsoft no doubt will, and you can try rebranding the whole shebang (shebing?) as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine, as Microsoft has done – but most people just won’t care.

Microsoft is not competing with Google here, it is competing with two mighty foes who have been strong friends of Redmond-developed software for many years – inertia and habit.

Most people who have Google as their home page are about as likely to switch elsewhere as they would change from Coke to Pepsi. Died-in-the-wool Tory voters won’t change to Labour even if their MP personally invoiced them for his duck house. If the only car you have ever driven is a Ford, you won’t be buying Renault any time soon (and certainly not GM).

Google is just too much an easy part of the average – and by “average” I mean “not an IT expert” – user’s web habits, and few will be that bothered. For them, it’s not Bing, but Boring.

There is still only one way Microsoft can seriously challenge Google in search – they tried it once, the rumours won’t go away, and you can bet it’s still on the cards one day – and that is to merge Bing with Yahoo search.

There will be plenty written in the next few weeks about Bing – the re-named, re-developed Microsoft search engine that Redmond hopes might, just, finally, allow it to grab back some of Google’s market share and web advertising clout.

Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but at the end of the day, it’s just a search engine. SO last phase of the internet.

The irony is that while Microsoft is effectively proving to the world that it is playing catch-up – even if there may be a few technological innovations in Bing – Google, meanwhile, is presenting a convincing vision of the next big thing on the web.

Two big announcements from this week’s Google Developer Conference show that the company appears to be well ahead of Microsoft in its thinking.

First, Google demonstrated how it plans to use HTML 5 – the new version of the ubiquitous web development language that is aimed at allowing the creation of browser-based applications that rival operating-system based software for functionality and usability.

As the web becomes the way that consumers and business use technology, so it makes sense to develop your applications for a browser rather than a complex, hardware-bound environment like, ooh, Windows for example.

Next comes Google Wave, a tool that has been created to answer the question: “What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?" according to Google software engineering manager Lars Rasmussen. 

If you want more technical details, I will happily defer to the excellent Tim O’Reilly in his blog entry here, but in essence Google Wave is about redesigning our everyday communication and collaboration tools, such as email and instant messaging, for a future in the cloud.

Wave allows developers to build applications for real-time collaboration and interaction. It claims to try to mimic the way we interact face to face. And it brings together every major internet and technology trend, from cloud to social media to wikis to email and more, into a coherent, managed, human-oriented concept.

Let’s face it, at no time in the history of IT has software been developed with the way people naturally interact in mind – we have had to learn the ways to interact with software based upon the technological constraints of the time.

I can’t honestly say I’ve been excited about the emergence of a new search engine, and particularly a new search brand, at any time in my IT career.

But the vision that Google is this week presenting of a new model of software applications oriented around the web and around real-time real life, is the first time I’ve been vaguely excited by a new technology for a while.

It’s also a vision that doesn’t need PCs or bloated operating systems, doesn’t need hefty software development environments, and bypasses the need for complex PC-based applications. In short, a vision that doesn’t need what Microsoft has been so good at for the past 30 years.

Microsoft is going Bing, but if it doesn’t open its eyes it might one day soon be going bang.

* Obscure blog title reference explained here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036912/

You go on holiday for two weeks, and what happens.

The UK political system erupts into crisis over dodgy expense claims. Chancellor Alistair Darling releases his latest attempt to reform the dodgy banking system. And then today, a press release arrives about some Ernst & Young research that claims half of Europe’s company employees think some forms of unethical business behaviour are acceptable practice.

One way or another, trust and ethics in business and politics have taken a battering like never before over the past few months.

And of course, you know that for IT leaders, it’s all going to lead to more work.

Trust is going to be one of the most critical issues in the public relationship with government and companies in the coming years, as bruised and battered MPs and chief executives look to rebuild relationships with citizens and customers.

The inevitable reaction will initially be to impose new controls to monitor, identify and report on unethical or untrustworthy behaviour – think of real-time business intelligence on MPs’ expenses or banks’ credit lines and you get the drift.

It won’t be the first time this has happened, of course. In the US, the much-criticised Sarbanes-Oxley Act was brought in to prevent another Enron. Not only was it widely blamed for pushing international firms out of the US and in to London and other stock exchanges, it was seen as a massive bureaucratic overhead.

There’s every chance that you ain’t seen nothing yet, as the slow pull out of recession continues.

IT leaders today face a choice: Sit back and wait for new controls to be brought in, then reactively try to shoehorn them in to your plans; or act now, and champion the sort of IT-enabled governance in private and public sectors that would allow your employer to prove its trustworthy credentials ahead of the game.

It’s an opportune time for IT to show yet another way it can help to lead organisations out of the downturn, and back to a position of trust.

For the umpteenth time today, I have just sat and watched a blank screen on my browser, waiting – usually in vain – for the web site of the Digital Britain Forum to load.

Not for the first time, it came back with a timeout connection error.

Mind you, earlier today it was working, and I tried to watch the live video stream of prime minister Gordon Brown’s speech to the high-profile event, to hear what he had to say about our digital future.

From what I could tell, he said this: “I clck zxxc Britzx digital economingft is futurppptthh an pk globlll spthzx.”

Insightful stuff, eh?

You know those comedians who pretend their microphone is not working, and talk in garbled bursts of intermittent word parts? It was rather the same experience. Add to that the stream being seemingly broadcast at about three frames per second, and you’ll understand why the government has managed to royally shoot itself in its digital foot. (Even if they acknowledged the problems and eventually put them right).

The Digital Britain Summit brought together a fantastic line up of speakers from ministers to business leaders across the creative, digital, technology and communications industries. It is undoubtedly the best line up of speakers and experts you will find at such an event for some time. It should have been a showcase for the UK’s ambitious digital plans. Yet they couldn’t even get the web site right.

Why didn’t I go to the event, just in case, you might well ask. That’s because the government didn’t actually tell anybody in the IT press about the event until yesterday. And then, when we asked for a press pass, we were told we didn’t need one. Because it would all be available live online. Ahem.

Of course, the government is being all trendy and social media about it, with a “live blog” on the web site (when it’s available), which is useful, but is clearly one poor bloke desperately trying to type while the speakers talk.

There’s also the obligatory Twitter feed from the event, which includes startling nuggets of information such as: “Large round of applause as the panel exists the stage” and “Johannes B. larcher explains what Hulu is” (sic).

Although my personal favourite Twitter update today was when Gordon Brown reportedly said: "We are I'm a new global age" (sic). After he saved the world earlier this year, it's good to see that Gordon now plans to beat that by personally becoming a new global age.

Of course, because Twitter is involved, Stephen Fry was also invited along as an expert panelist.

And to add a final insult to online injury, apparently Tom Watson, the minister for digital engagement - someone who, with that job title, you would have thought to be an essential contributor to the event - was unable to attend because his invitation arrived too late.

I wish I didn’t feel the need to be so critical. The mere existence of this event, and of the Digital Britain report and strategy it is discussing, is such a huge step forward and the government deserves congratulations for putting “digital” at the heart of the UK’s economic future.

But it inspires so little confidence when they cannot even get the basics of a half decent web site right for such an important summit. It leaves the impression of a digital elite discussing the most social and democratic of technologies in exclusivity in web-darkened rooms.

It’s ham-fisted, divisive and slightly depressing.

Digital Britain is not just the future for the UK IT industry, it is the future for the UK economy. The government needs to inspire confidence to see it through. Getting the most basic of basics right would be a start.

Sun Microsystems has always been a favourite of journalists for its wonderfully headline-friendly name. “Sun rises…”, “Sun sets…”, “Sun shines a light on…” – maybe it doesn’t exactly challenge the skills of a subeditor, but you have to have something to cling on to.

Much like the company itself, which seems unsure whether to cling on to its independence or submit to the reality that the stock markets – and apparently IBM – do not think it is worth as much as Sun’s executives would like to think.

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Sun – and not only for the chance it gives to recycle an old Nik Kershaw song into the headline for this blog post.

While Sun has in many ways typified the Silicon Valley culture – especially since Jonathan Schwartz and his ponytail took over as chief executive - there has always been something rather British about its recent progress.

Like many British firms, Sun has always had great technical skills, top-notch engineers, and excellent products – but has never quite managed to get the marketing right.

Like many British firms, Sun has seen the trends and innovations before others – its longstanding strapline of “the network is the computer” might just as well have said “it’s the internet, stupid”– but has never quite managed to make the most of such insights.

And like many British firms, its quirkiness and spikiness has made it a thorn in the side of bigger, more successful competitors – founder Scott McNealy’s constant chiding of Microsoft, for example – but has ended up being little more than an irritation to them.

Besides, you have to like a company that for many years was led by a man – McNealy – who names his children after cars: Maverick, Dakota, Colt, and Scout. It was never going to be the same after the ponytail.

But the sad truth is that for the past eight years Sun has thrashed around trying to make itself relevant again, as losses continued and its rivals strode ahead.

At its peak in the heyday of the dot com boom, Sun servers were de rigueur for every online startup. It was said at the time that as long as your business plan showed Sun servers at the heart of any new web business, the venture capital cash would roll in.

Sun was wrapped up in the excitement and hype of the time, flying journalists from all around the world to New York launches of even the most incremental of technical developments. I was lucky enough to be taken on one such event in 2000, and even in a time of such excess, it defined the phrase “no expense spared”.

Then the dot coms collapsed, and all those thousands of barely-used Sun servers flooded the second-hand market, and the supplier has never fully recovered. It has always retained a strong foothold in financial services and telecoms, but the credit crunch will have only put another nail into that particular market coffin.

Along the way, Sun has constantly tried to move with the times and remain relevant. It became an enthusiastic promoter of open source – but failed to work out how to make money out of it. It offered virtualisation years ahead of VMware, but not on Intel-based servers. It stuck rigidly to the mantra of Sparc processors and its Solaris operating system, but then started selling Intel and AMD and Linux.

Having said that, Sun has established one of the most successful industry standards around – Java. But somehow, yet again, it hasn’t really managed to capitalise fully on that success. If IBM were to eventually succeed in a takeover, it is highly likely Java would be made open source, a move many in the industry have already called for.

So now the firm is effectively “in play” – although neither Sun nor IBM has officially commented on the firms’ widely reported buyout talks. 

Sun has gone from a server powerhouse to a niche player, one that is seen as a solid complement to another vendor’s product range.

It is a shame, in many ways, to see its light go dim. Cue the headlines…

At last, a bunch of politicians have accepted the obvious – that one of the biggest causes of government IT disasters is, erm, politics.

A committee of MPs investigating the dearth of engineers in the UK has highlighted the fact that too many Whitehall IT projects are determined by political pressures, and don’t take enough input from experts – that is, the IT professionals who have to make it work.

I can’t say this represents is a Damascene revelation – Computing has been saying exactly this for years – but at least the turkeys have accepted that maybe Christmas has something to do with so many of them being eaten.

As is so often the case, IT is both the problem and the solution.

To its credit, the government is well aware that IT is central to public service reform and modernisation. Without new technology, it will simply be impossible to make the public sector more efficient, cheaper to run, more responsive to citizens’ needs, less bureaucratic or more productive.

But the days of simply automating the everyday “churn” processes of government are long gone. All the basic back-office functions are computerised – tax collection, benefits payments and so on – and they chug along in the background without many problems, barely noticed by anyone because they work.

But for several years, the focus of government IT has been on the front-line functions and on delivering change. You cannot criticise Labour for a lack of ambition with IT – it has enthusiastically tried to revolutionise service delivery, to change organisations, to re-engineer processes and all the other good things that are considered best practice by IT leaders in the private sector. These are the things that IT people should be doing, this is where they can excel.

But where the government has let itself down nearly every time is its inability to detach the reality of project delivery from the imperatives of political necessity. If Gordon Brown says a new policy will be introduced from such-and-such a date, the political implications of missing that date are too damaging to allow. So, IT has been expected to squeeze into whatever timescale it has been tasked with, often regardless of its achievability.

The best example of this was tax credits, Brown’s flagship policy when he was chancellor. The legislation was enacted on the day planned, then disaster followed as claimants were overpaid, underpaid or unable to complete the process. It later transpired that the immovable go-live date forced the system developer, EDS, to cut corners and reduce the amount of testing undertaken. Result: another government IT disaster, and in this case a long-running dispute over compensation from the supplier.

Whitehall has tried to mitigate this problem in several ways. The Gateway review process is meant to flag up such issues – but does it really have the power to force ministers to review policy if a project is in difficulty? The recruitment of CIOs from the private sector, the creation of the CIO Council, and the establishing of IT as a recognised profession for civil servants have and will continue to help. And through the IT trade body Intellect, there is now a process for government to market test its plans and the feasibility of projects (although of course few suppliers are going to say they cannot do it). But none of these measures has yet got to the root of the problem.

In business, a chief executive may not be happy to delay a new initiative because of IT problems, but he or she can do so without fear of rivals across the boardroom telling the newspapers how they have failed the country. Pragmatism is a good quality to have in a senior business executive – but pragmatism is, ultimately, the enemy of dogmatic politicians.

So is there an answer to this seemingly intractable position? There is, but the chances of it coming to fruition are remote.

Whitehall IT leaders have to be involved in the policy-making process at an early stage, in exactly the same way as a private sector IT manager would (or should!) be consulted on business strategy and planning. If IT is to be the great enabler of public service reform as it can and should be, then IT has to have a seat at the table and an influential voice alongside the reformers.

It’s an obvious thing to say. But I can’t ever see it happening, not when there are votes at stake.