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RE: UK vs US
By luseferous on 2/5/2009 10:57:26 AM , Rating: 3
I doubt it will actually happen. For one it is far too unpopular and our current shambolic governing party is also unpopular and needs to try and win the next general Election.
I suspect that it will be queitly dropped sometime in the next couple of years.

Even if the scheme does come into effect the govenment agencies are so inept at IT (especially security) that organised crime will have better access to the info than government. Going on past form some civil servant will just copy the main database to a local laptop then leave it on a bus.

RE: UK vs US
By PrinceGaz on 2/5/2009 7:22:24 PM , Rating: 2
Are you implying that here in Britain, there is a long history of mismanagement of government IT projects, and dreadful security?

Remarks like laptops and things being left on buses are misleading in the extreme and portray Britain in a bad way, because they along with unencrypted memory sticks and top-secret documents are usually left not on buses but on trains. And let's not forget the internal mail system where CDs and DVDs are routinely sent willy-nilly packed with complete database dumps and go missing in transit, so another one then needs to be sent (what happened to the first is of some concern, but not a major problem so long as the discs are delivered in time).

But I am confident that our national ID card scheme will be of some benefit in some way. Obviouslly it is costing billions of pounds and history suggests it may have certain problems, but I'm sure that eventually it will be in a semi-functional state that may be of some use provided additional resources are made available to develop it. Either that or it will be scrapped when it is billions over budget and years behind schedule, which will be beneficial as by scrapping it we will be saving money that would otherwise have to be spent on a project doomed to failure.

Yay for British government IT projects! A lesson the rest of the world can learn from :p

RE: UK vs US
By Dorz on 2/5/2009 8:49:46 PM , Rating: 2
You forgot to mention the London Ambulance Service fiasco of 1992.... .

Studied this at uni as part of my Systems Analysis and Design course. Its shocking how the government cannot make a functional computer system and I am totally unsurprised at the above story. You only have to go onto the Job Centre website to see how badly implemented it is; You search for jobs in say London and half of the jobs shown to you are from a completely unrelated part of the country 100 odd miles away.......Thee government relies FAR too much on SSADM

If the above gets out to the general press which I'm sure it will then it will be just another nail in the coffin of an incompetent government. Trouble is none of the parties seem that competent.

