Quiz Of The Week: Government IT

The public sector has not always had a great reputation for IT excellence. Our quiz aims to show what governments have done in the field of IT – for better or worse.

The trouble the public sector has, is that we all see it when it goes wrong, because any failures are, well…. public.  For every NHS Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the public sector, there may be a dozen money pits in private companies that are kept out of the spotlight. Equally, when government-backed projects take off in a big way, they don’t usually have a big promotional budget.

You only hear the bad news

So, it seems bad news is amplified, and good news gets lost, in the field of public sector IT. Which we think is a big shame. In our Tech Success awards, presented this week, one of the most exciting categories was the Public Sector one, in which we found government CIOs and IT staff competing to show the most imaginative use of mobile devices, cloud computing, and all the other paraphernalia of modern IT.

This quiz then, aims to bring to your attention the importance, and success of public sector IT – but we couldn’t ignore the times when things have gone wrong. The public sector gets rapped more often by the ICO for careless handling  of personal data – although that may well be partly because the ICO has the power to demand an audit of some public sector organisation – those in central government departments.

The government also gets involved in many kinds of IT promotion activites – persuading citizens to get online, and helping provide the fibre and network connections to enable them to actually do it. Our quiz also looks at the progress of these ideas.

So, what do you know about IT in the public sector?

Try our quiz!

And if you like it, try some of our others.