Politicians should think IT
Adam Hewitt • Published 4 May 2010 11:00
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TECHNOLOGY issues are being ignored in the election campaign.
That is the view of Ricky Hudson, chief executive of IT and telephony company Star which has its headquarters at Arlington Business Park, Theale.
He said all three major parties could be doing more to pick up on the importance of the digital economy to Britain's future and how it could improve Government services. Mr Hudson told the Midweek: "The digital economy is not the conventional economy - it opens everything up in terms of networking and has the advantage of having English as the base language.
"I'm actually quite intrigued by the technology manifestos of the major parties. Labour have come out with everyone having 2mb broadband, the Tories have said we need more than that. The Lib Dems, intriguingly, are quite thin on this, but have some very good ideas in other areas.
"If you talk to people in business and ask what can be done with technology, it can both improve the bottom line and the top line by offering better service to customers, for example a 24/7 service instead of nine-to-five. I want to see Government policy doing the same.
"Do we really want to be spending all this money, maybe £3bn, on these gigantic and complex compliance-and-control IT projects and initiatives?
"Could that £3bn not be spent differently? Break it into smaller chunks and get better value out of it.
"I think we could use it to develop new technological capabilities, different kinds of networking, get closer alignment between us all, procure completely new crowd-sourced and open source IT systems, and avoid the problem of mega-failures if one single big project goes wrong."
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