Tuesday, February 14, 2006

And now for something completely different

In the cold light of day, I decided to remove a particularly expletive-filled Cabernet Sauvignon-fuelled rant about ID cards, or to be more accurate, the craven idiots who allowed this law to be passed. Let me just say this - putting aside all my idealogical and practical objections to this awful idea, as an IT professional I don't believe the Government has the expertise or management capability to make a project of such unprecedented scale work, and that administering it without significant errors - human, machine or malicious - will be next to impossible. Make no mistake - this is going to cost a fortune and it will NOT deliver any benefit whatsoever.

2 comments:

Sir Compton Valence said...

don't worry about the ranting. as long as you are ranting off work's premises they can't touch you for it. curiously, i don't have a problem with id cards - as long as they do what they're supposed to. perhaps i'm missing something.

Anonymous said...

Speaking as someone who helps run a massive government database, I (and everyone else at my workplace that I've spoken to about this) don't think this can work. And when the government realise this they'll throw good money after bad to try and fix it.

Eurofighter anyone? We wasted billions developing it but decided that because we'd invested so heavily in it, we had to spend yet more billions to put it into service. The fact that it was 20 years out of date didn't seem to cross anyones mind. The RAF is now the proud owner of a mach 2 white elephant.

There should be an Expensive Projects Minister whose sole role is to say
'We've spent a fortune on crap, lets cut our losses now' They'd save the taxpayer billions.

Has anyone else noticed that Politicians say they'll use 'Technology' as the one stop fix to any problem.