Have you noticed how often lawyers write articles for Computing these days? Legal issues are encroaching on the IT department more than ever as bad publicity from data protection disasters affects more and more organisations.

Regulatory compliance, privacy and legislation are an increasing fact of life for IT leaders ­ but they will never be your area of expertise. There will rarely be a better time than this to make friends with your in-house legal team.

What does your long-term internet strategy look like? Do you even have one? If you don’t, it is hardly surprising, when the online world remains in such a state of constant and unpredictable change.

The one thing you can say with any confidence about the web and its future impact on business is that nobody really knows what is going to happen ­ and there are few reliable sources that you can count on for predictions worthy enough to build your company strategy around.

Just look at the debates and battles that are going on at the moment.

In one corner, Microsoft is slugging it out with Yahoo. The search firm is trying to play tag, looking for partners to prevent it falling into the clutches of the software giant. But so far, few are willing to take as big a financial bet as Redmond.

In another corner, the online advertising firms are trying to carve out a way to use our personal surfing habits to make more money without infringing our privacy ­ and often making a complete hash of it.

Elsewhere in the ring are ISPs and content providers arguing about who pays for the rise in bandwidth-hungry services such as video ­- the success of the BBC iPlayer leading to the latest round of finger-pointing.

And then there is the software industry, agonising over the growing popularity of hosted business applications such as Salesforce.com or Google Apps, and how the rise of these low-cost ­ or even free ­ online services will affect their lucrative licensing models.

Then you run out of corners, and stuck in the middle find the poor internet user ­ - both individual and corporate -­ not sure which way to turn.

For IT leaders, the only certainty is that the internet will, of course, be central to your plans. But the companies that want to make the most of the oppo rtunities online need to stay innovative, agile, and ready to respond rapidly ­as the often-conflicting forces determining the future play out their costly games.

Rumblings of discontent about new child welfare IT systems are becoming public, in a depressingly familiar process that threatens to turn into another problem for government technology.

An independent report last May provided the first warning ­ – expressing “serious reservations” and questioning the fitness for purpose of the Integrated Children’s System (ICS).

We have now learned that the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) chose not to publish the criticisms, instead releasing a watered-­down summary of the findings. Alarm bells should surely have started ringing then.

Last month, nearly two thirds ­ – 95 out of 150 ­ – councils failed to meet a key ICS implementation deadline.

There have already been widespread calls to scrap ContactPoint, the national children’s database that, along with ICS, sits at the heart of the government’s Every Child Matters policy to improve social care for vulnerable children ­ – a plan put in place in 2003 in response to the murder of eight-year old Victoria Climbie (Calls to scrap youth database).

Another independent report earlier this year questioned the security of the database, yet once again the government has refused to publish its findings in full.

Social workers are concerned about the delays, and the implications of failing to introduce the vital information sharing systems are all too apparent in such a sensitive area.

We have seen this mix of political intransigence, independent doubts, and professional discontent all too often in past public sector IT failures.

In most of those cases, such concerns came too late. But with ICS, many councils are progressing well and can offer best practice to help those lagging behind. This is a complex project, but enough has been achieved for DCSF to get the rollout back on track.

Delays to technology projects are a fact of life in IT, and are not necessarily cause for criticism. But when such a sense of déjà vu pervades, government needs to prove it has learned the painful lessons of the past.