The Business Techie

This weekend Gordon Brown launched his key election pledges. One of these pledges shouted out to me – “to build a high-tech economy”.

Now,  I got quite interested in this  as I work in the IT industry.  But let’s stop and think about this for a minute.

What does he mean when he says build a high-tech economy and how is this to be measured? After all this is a pledge. Are we talking about creating our own silicon valley or are we talking about using technology for business in our everyday lives? It is a bit vague to say the least. So I hopped over to the labour website to see what this is all about.

OK, I’ve read the detail of the pledge and I am now completely confused. Here it is verbatim:

Build a high tech economy, supporting businesses and industry to create 1 million more skilled jobs and modernising our infrastructure with High-Speed Rail, a Green Investment  Bank and broadband  access for all.

We are committed to a greener, smarter, even more skilled Britain: one that generates more  knowledge and is better than anyone else at turning that  knowledge into  innovation and economic growth. That means putting in place the right  targeted support to help the industries of the future to invest and grow –   with an industrial activism agenda for advanced manufacturing, more graduates than ever before, high quality apprenticeships and a Green  Investment Bank to  unlock billions of finance from the private sector and  invest in projects like  offshore wind power, where Britain is already the  world-leader.   We  have set out a goal of  delivering for Britain a north to south high speed  rail network which will  result in far quicker journey times, benefiting  both passengers and business.  High Speed Rail will have a huge impact on  the economic landscape of Britain,  putting major cities within easier and  quicker reach of each other than ever  before, creating opportunities for  growth across the country and with it many  thousands of jobs will And our  digital infrastructure will also speed up, with  nationwide, next  generation high-speed broadband coverage.

I’m not sure that this is really about technology at all – apart from the “high-speed” broadband coverage. If you dig around for a bit more detail on this – and you really do need to dig around – it’s sketchy at best. The high speed broadband that Labour are talking about is not all that high speed actually, when you look at the technology available globally. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I had heard something about high speed broadband from the Conservatives – so I decided to check out their website.

A few clicks and I found the Conservative Technology Manifesto – published on 11th March 2010. I read the headlines on the website and downloaded a copy of the Manifesto itself (this from a party that is supposed to not have any policies). I won’t copy in the text on this page or the document as there is so much more detail. You can get to the launch news item here or the “where we stand” item here. The conservatives are talking about super-fast 100 mbps broadband across the country, use of open source and amongst many other things, an in house team to produce some projects and provide expertise available for all other projects.

Now this is much more like it. Any party that is willing to take technology seriously rather than using it as a headline grabber means business. Here in my opinion is why:

Super-Fast Broadband

If our economy is going to stay competitive then we need use every tool available to us – provided that the country can afford it! Well here is the good news – the state does not provide our broadband services – businesses do. The Labour plan seems to be relying on a 50p tax on all our phone lines for this. I can’t really see how this going to work for two reasons. First of all, a 50p tax on phone lines is not going to yield enough money to pay for the roll-out of broadband across the country. To illustrate this a 10 mbps broadband connection into a business can cost around £7,000+ per year and that’s not counting the installation costs which can be huge depending on where the nearest bit of fibre optic cable is. This can be anything from £2,000 upwards and this is just for one connection. Multiply this by every household and business and you can see what I mean.

Secondly, how exactly are you going to distribute this extra tax (yes, it is an extra tax). How do you decide  which organisations are to receive it? It just seems completely unworkable – unless you are going to re-nationalise the communications industry. I shudder to think.

Alternatively the the Conservative plan is to open up the market to competition and use private sector investment to do this – topping up any shortfall by using some of the licence fee dedicated to digital switchover. I believe this to be the better approach as there are many ways to incentivise the private sector to invest in such projects such as tax breaks etc. I suspect that there will be a long queue.

Open Source

The Conservatives are great supporters of Open Source software. Many true techies will shout from the rafters about this. If you don’t know what Open Source is just google the term and you will get a complete flood of information on the subject. It is essentially freely available software (provided that you follow the terms of use). This includes the source code (the programming) for the software. This means that you and many others on the internet can get involved in improving the software for everyone. The benefits for government are immediately obvious – it costs much, much less than software purchased off the shelf or written specifically for you. The cost of the upkeep of open software is also much less than any other form of software.

My company uses off the shelf, bespoke (as we write software) and open source software. Our customer relationship management (CRM) software is open source and has essentially cost us nothing. We have modified it to suit our use. As you can imagine this gives us an advantage over our competitors in that it allows us to keep our costs down. The same can equally apply to our government on the world stage.

Effective Use of Technology

This is a major soap box subject for me. Technology is a tool like any other and should be used effectively and not just for technologies sake. Unless of course you get a kick out of gadgets (OK, a little guilty there). The Conservatives are planning to use technology as a platform to provide more transparency  in government. Allowing us, the tax payers, to hold government and ministers to account. This is a welcome relief to the current status quo where the incumbent government seems not to like releasing data unless it gives them a political advantage or they are forced to under a freedom of information request.

Oversight of IT Projects

The Conservatives are proposing that government has an in-house team to work on small projects and provide some technology oversight on other projects to keep them in check. If you read the IT trade press it has been littered with stories about IT projects run by the government that are ill thought out, badly run and greatly over budget. Any oversight has got to be a good thing. With absolutely zero money left in the bank, literally (and seriously don’t get me started on that), we need to make sure that every penny spent is spent wisely.

The Last Word…..

I’ll say one last thing about Labours pledge. It could be said that it looks like lines have been lifted from the Conservative Technology Manifesto and dropped into the pledge. The result of this would be a pledge that may not quite make sense. So, go back and read it for yourself and make your own mind up – I know I have.

Before anyone asks – I did look at the Liberal Democrats website for any specific information on technology. I’m afraid I could find no specific references.