Inside IT

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Most householders know the syndrome. You get up intending to give the front door a lick of paint. Then the door needs to come off its hinges. You notice the frame's out of kilter. Before you know it, you're rebuilding the whole house.

Britain's e-government programme is in roughly this position. Five years ago, creating electronic channels seemed a painless way of giving public services a facelift. So long as e-services could stand alone, this was true. One reason the NHS Direct project was such a success was that the government let it go its own way, without worrying too much about connecting to other agencies.

Trouble is, government is not a green field site; more a Georgian terrace damaged by bombs in the 1940s, damp in the 1950s and by loft conversions and extensions from the 1960s onwards.

If e-government is worth doing, it has to take in the whole structure, including jerry-built processes and information systems. Getting to grips with these legacies is not for the faint-hearted. Even a simple address database can contain multiple horrors. The government has only just got around to trying to enforce a standard address format (BS 7666, if you're interested) on electoral registers. It will be a long time before it filters through to more complex systems.

In its quest to create electronic health records, the NHS National Programme for IT is shining a torch into some unpleasant crannies. It has ruled that the only way to protect the new "spine" is to accept data from legacy systems only when a senior doctor takes personal responsibility for its quality. The unspoken hope is that not too many will bother.

Another unpleasant discovery is that government often depends on fuzzy unwritten codes of cooperation between professions and agencies, or the fudging of difficult questions.

When you try to wire up these routines, the structure often can't take the strain. (Or the scrutiny: obscure questions of bureaucracy suddenly start getting attention on internet bulletin boards and columns like this one.)

Then there are the anomalies and exceptions: people who have only one name, or ambiguous genders. Private firms can take a commercial decision not to bother with the last few per cent of heartsink transactions. Government has to cater for them, even if it means almost all the code in a system has to be written for a tiny number of exceptional cases.

A hallmark of Britain's e-government programme is its willingness to poke into the timber and damp-course, and not merely to slap on a coat of paint. The soon-to-be-appointed head of e-government is supposed to be responsible for "defining the architecture, requirements and standards for common government infrastructure and services". A big job; and fixing the foundations can be expensive and controversial, as we have seen with the ID card.

We've started the e-government job, so we may as well finish. But there must be a few people in Whitehall who wish they'd stayed in bed instead.

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