Prime Minister Tony Blair, like most heads of state, deals on the highest of intellectual levels. This means that he cannot personally get down far enough into the details beforehand to determine if a policy decision and/or approach is viable. Hence he must rely on the wisdom of his advisors. While his recent sweeping statements concerning wishing to have affordable high-speed Internet access in every home in Britain and be the most eCommerce friendly nation by 2005, are certainly of a visionary nature, to the professional trained in this arena, they do lack a fundamental understanding of some of the obstacles involved that will hinder the best intentions with respect to implementation. Aside from the two major initiatives mentioned above (or perhaps this one is also part of his vision for the "eFuture" of the UK), PM Blair wishes to totally "wire" government services by 2002 (Wakefield, 2000, December).
Information technology initiatives are notorious for incurring large cost and schedule overruns. Many never deliver the expectation presented at the beginning of the planning and/or implementation phase. In the United States, where experience with the Interenet, eBusiness/eCommerce, and the general arena of information technology (IT), leads that of the UK, in some arenas, projects are considered successful when the overruns are contained to within thirty percent or when users have to throw away only one-fourth of the result. This is reality. PM Blair's initiative is already off to a poor start since the government's own accountants accused it of squandering billions of pounds of tax revenue on obsolete and/or ineffective computer equipment. Shortly thereafter the Ministry of Defence, it was revealed, had wasted รบ30million on failed IT projects.
Similarly there are reports of overcharging customers desirous of high-speed Internet access, assignment of email addresses to Members of Parliament being way behind schedul...