Obama grasps IT; his vice president clearly doesn’t grasp it. Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, doesn’t either; his ministerial colleague, Tom Watson, does.
Like the public, many politicians seem to be very unfamiliar and uncomfortable with computers. They see computers as some evil, corrupting force, despite the fact they should be using them for a significant amount of their time.
It always scares me when I hear politicians, or senior civil servants, make idiotic remarks about computers or the series of tubes. Why does it scare me? These people are responsible for formulating governmental IT policy, yet they clearly have no knowledge about them. There is a general fear, amongst politicians and the public, of learning new skills. Why else has it taken until 2009 for the UK government to give its blessing to OSS?
In the UK, our National Health Service’s IT programme is years behind deadlines and costs taxpayers billions. I suspect many of the civil servants involved have minimal technical knowledge. In my opinion, governments need to use true technical experts. Not expensive consultants from organisations which just puppet Microsoft!
On the other hand, politicians are beginning to capitalise on the Internet. All major British political parties, for example, have Twitter and Facebook accounts and Twitter and Facebook arguably played an essential role in Obama’s campaign. Some politicians maintain their own website, but I suspect many simply use ghostwriters.
I hope politicians and civil servants become more tech literate. With any luck, billions of pounds of taxpayers money will be saved.
What is public sector IT like for you?
At least something of some note is the the Spine of the NHS infrastructure runs on open source, Linux apparently but no idea what variety.
Oh, I have the perfect Joe Biden example when he’s asked what is the website adress of some institution he was mubmling about, he sais: “I’m sorry, I don’t remember the “site’s number”, I’ll get back to you on that one”
Computers are their nightmare. Did you know that in the White House they still have typing machines????!!!!!
@nelle: Follow the Joe Biden link.
I’m torn between thinking it’s important that politicians et al engage with whatever current e-fad is distracting everyone, and being glad that they mostly float above such trivialities. In the same way that the UK Blair government reacted constantly to the ebb & flow of news headlines, making policy on the hoof, I suspect there’s an equal danger for those in power to be exposed to the most granular of granular opinions. While it is, of course, important to listen to people, we all know how affecting it can be to read things about yourself and your actions, especially negative material.
It’s the responsibility of leaders to lead, not to pander.