A report by Corporate Watch, a Quaker-funded research group in Oxford challenges the feasibility of creating the necessary IT system required for the Identity Card scheme. It will they say based on previous examples of Government IT procurement from the companies involved likely lead to an IT disaster
It blames huge, over-complex schemes that fail to deliver promised benefits. Acknowledging months of controversy over the civil liberty and cost implications of the scheme, due to start in 2008, Corporate Watch says “relatively little attention seems to have been paid to the significant practical problems of implementing ID cards and the National Identity Register”, which will eventually hold data on all 60 million UK biometric identities.
The unprecedented enormity of the scale of this IT project plus the fact that it will be reliant on cutting edge technologies will in my mind almost certainly fail to deliver. Therefore there seems to be even greater reason for extensive oversight and detailed cost analysis than there would for any previous Government IT project.
Failure to create a perfectly functional and secure system will actually create more problems and exacerbate the current problems the scheme is designed to solve.
Tags: ID cards
