Blame game

 

So, the Government has screwed up again. We're told that 16,000 records of Covid cases were "lost" due to an IT "glitch", the second wave is clearly much further advanced than we were being told it was. It's interesting how the spin doctors position this kind of schoolboy error when it involves technology. There is an implied undercurrent that because it's "technology" that errors like this are unavoidable, hence the word "glitch" rather than "mismanagement" but it's just not true. Even the most junior IT practitioner with half a brain would tell you that any organization shouldn't be using CSV files and Microsoft Excel for critical data work, that's what DATABASES were invented to do over 50 years ago! Not only were this team using the wrong technology for the job but they were even using an out of date version of that technology, one that was current in the 1980's i.e. 30+ years old! Excel is a personal productivity tool aimed at small scale ad-hoc projects, not industrial-scale and mission critical data-aggregation tasks.

Having worked on many public sector projects over the years I used to be appalled at the mismanagement often on display there, the endless false economies and bad decisions driven by short-termism, politics and inertia. Tellingly though, I seldom found that the troops at the coal face were to blame, more often than not it was the management layer that was at fault and the most fierce criticism came from below; but unfortunately was invariably ignored and/or discouraged. Mind you, I have to say that often large corporates are just as bad, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen departments holding their most precious data in flimsy, poorly designed and insecure spreadsheets! Including sensitive data on you and I! I hope that the inquiry into this fiasco will uncover the true faults and not simply find someone junior to "blame", for something as important as this, something that really does affect the lives (and deaths) of people, a rich and advanced country such as ours can surely do better than this?