In reply to ‘Politicians need to get digitally literate – and fast’ Martha Lane Fox

Martha Lane Fox, a UK House of Lords’ cross-bencher and founder of doteveryone (a think-tank of sorts), wrote an article published in The Guardian, which basically argued that UK politicians need to “get digitally literate – and fast”.

But, what does that actually mean?

I think we need to have an honest an open discussion about the massive technological deficit created by the vast array of shite and vulnerable internet based applications that have been developed over the last two decades (especially in the last decade).

The internet has been the excuse for a whole raft of dodgy applications, methodologies and half-baked reinventions of technologies – not to mention a surfeit of bullshitters and dodgy ‘offshorers’ and their over-selling of ill-trained, ill-prepared and inexperienced ‘ex-pat’ and ‘offshore’ staff as top seasoned pros. It’s no surprise that overblown nonsense such as Big Data, Hadoop ecosphere, Java, Web browser interfaces (to everything), HTML, BS machine learning/AI, Agile and totally-shite-security, etc. etc. etc. are intrinsically linked to the internet and cowboy IT.

The sooner that business leaders realise that they have allowed their business IT organisations full reign (in collusion with the bottomless money pits created by outsourcers and offshorers) to screw up, the better.

We have created a rod for our own backs. Just as well that these corporate money trees are so large.

The bottom line is this. The sooner that the politicians come up to speed in recognising the massive fuck-ups committed in IT, and then doing something about it, the better.

Thanks for reading.