In the last few General Elections, Computing has not been alone in hoping that the leading political parties give technology a pivotal role in their manifestos.

Next year ­- assuming Gordon Brown doesn’t surprise everyone with an autumn poll ­- we might finally get our wish.

Labour’s Digital Britain strategy is central to the party’s plans for economic recovery, job creation, and digital infrastructure, as minister Pat McFadden explains in the latest issue of Computing.

Meanwhile, the Tories seem to be positively all over technology. The party said last week it plans to use IT to make government more open, transparent and accessible to the public.

“For all politicians, the question now is, do they understand how technology is changing people’s expectations?” said shadow science and innovation minister Adam Afriyie.

And this week we heard again that the Conservatives want to look at how electronic patient records can be hosted online by the likes of Google and Microsoft, a concept first touted by David Cameron in April.

It is good to hear the benefits of IT being so widely debated, but still the concerns linger -­ and in particular, how naive politicians’ expectations for technology seem to be.

Tony Blair rightly saw that IT-enabled change was the key to transforming public services and his government set out down that road with enthusiasm. But it soon discovered that delivery was a rather more complex affair.

There are sure to be votes ­ and certainly attractive national newspaper headlines ­ to be gained by populist ideas such as giving electronic patient records to Google.

But as the NHS is finding, introducing electronic records is a massively complex task, and just by stamping the names Google or Microsoft all over them does not make them any cheaper, easier, or more likely to succeed.

We look forward to IT taking its rightful place as a policy battleground, but let’s hope the UK’s IT professionals are offered a chance to keep the promises grounded in reality.

“Divide and conquer” is a battle plan that probably goes back further than the Romans, and it is one on which e-criminals and cyber saboteurs have been all too happy to rely in the UK.

The government’s new Cyber Security Strategy not only sets up two new organisations to help protect the country against the growing digital threats we face, but identifies 16 other bodies that already have responsibility for dealing with such attacks.

Nobody is trying to pretend that cyber defence is easy, and perhaps there is a very good reason why we need 18 different organisations working together –­ or at least, trying to.

But as most IT security experts know, it is human factors that the best hackers target, and even with the best will in the world, 18 different groups with 18 different priorities and prejudices mean an exponential increase in the potential for gaps through which cyber criminals can attack.

In theory, the new Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) to be set up at GCHQ will be responsible for co-ordinating all these organisations in a coherent way. Good luck with that.

But what this means is that the success or failure of the government’s plan will depend entirely on the authority and accountability vested in CSOC. The centre’s location at the government’s top-secret communications monitoring site rather suggests its focus will be on high-level cyber espionage and terrorism ­ – somehow it seems unlikely it will be that bothered about the sort of low-level, frustrating hacking activity that is the daily bane of most businesses’ life.

It would be churlish to criticise the Cyber Security Strategy because it has so plainly been needed for so long, and its arrival is to be welcomed, even though it is belated. But to counter the increasingly sophisticated threats the UK faces, we need a simple, streamlined, co-ordinated operation that has the real teeth needed to take action.

If one does not emerge, those gaps will loom ever larger for both the casual hacker and the malicious cyber attacker.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”, this column highlighted the importance of managing expectations in major IT projects.

With the release last week of 31 Gateway project reviews covering the progress of the £12.7bn NHS National Programme for IT, it has become apparent that the response there to attempts to manage expectations was more along the lines of: “If at first you don’t succeed, ignore the problems and hope they go away.”

Reading through the documents reveals persistent warnings about a lack of clinical
engagement, poor communications, and concerns over supplier performance. These have been recurring criticisms of the National Programme, and ultimately have led to the serious delays seen in the most critical project, the Care Records System (CRS).

In the London region in particular hit hard by CRS problems that not only affected the NHS trusts involved but this year contributed to a £1.2bn write-off at BT poor supplier performance was first raised as an issue four years ago.

Within the National Programme then, the concerns raised by clinicians and in the press were being recognised ­but it would seem the warnings were not heeded.

This is therefore not an issue about scrutiny or openness ­the project was receiving scrutiny in all the right areas, and internally at least there was openness and honesty about the problems. But it is an issue about listening, accepting criticism, and here we go again, managing expectations.

For whatever reason, too many people involved in the NHS IT programme clearly did not listen to the warnings they received. They ignored official criticism from the Gateway review teams. And they failed to reset perceptions until it was too late.

The NHS project is enormously complex and controversial, and in many ways most of these problems were always likely to happen, and as we now know, they were indeed anticipated. The big question remains why so little seems to have been done about it until so late.

It might seem a little churlish to berate Gordon Brown over the status of a few of his junior ministerial posts, given that he has had rather more critical issues with senior ministers to worry about lately. But you’ll forgive us if we do so anyway.

At the moment, two of the top three government roles relating to the technology industry remain vacant after the latest reshuffle, and the third is soon to be vacated.

We have yet to see a new minister for digital engagement – formerly Tom Watson – or a minister for digital inclusion – previously Paul Murphy. Add to that the impending departure of the man meant to be championing Digital Britain, communications minister Lord Stephen Carter, and you have to wonder just how serious the prime minister really is about the industry.

Instead, we have a couple of Alan Sugar-style “celebrity” appointments, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee advising on opening up government data, and Lastminute.com founder Martha Lane Fox as digital inclusion champion.

Let’s look for a moment at the key words in those job titles – engagement and inclusion. The former is meant to lead the promotion of online public services, the latter to reach out to the digitally excluded. These are two pretty critical tasks if, as Brown has repeatedly promised, technology is central to the future of the UK economy.

This week sees the publication of the final Digital Britain report – a crucial document for UK IT, and one bound to create controversy. So who will see it through? Not Lord Carter, enobled purely to appoint him to a ministerial post so he could drive the plan through, yet off he goes, presumably back to a lucrative private sector role.

If the UK IT industry is not complaining in the loudest terms possible about its apparent downgrading within the government’s ranks, then it should be.

It’s time for Brown to stop messing about with job titles and political appointees. The UK needs a technology czar to oversee the development of digital Britain.

Here is a question that may go right to the heart of major IT initiatives in government and the private sector: should we assume that all technology projects will somehow, and to some degree, go wrong at the first attempt?

How much heartache and vitriol would IT leaders be spared if the answer to that question were “yes”?

Of course, you should scoff at such a suggestion. But look at two high-profile cases in point that Computing features this week.

The Ministry of Justice was forced to halt and scale down a project to join up the criminal justice system, attracting severe criticism from MPs along the way. The revised project is now starting to go live and there is much more optimism for its success.

British Gas bet its future on a new multimillion-pound billing system, whose subsequent failures were blamed for it losing thousands of customers to rivals. Since the initial problems, the situation has markedly improved.

Undaunted by failure, both organisations have opted to try, try again.

A similar process is underway in the NHS, after the task of rolling out electronic patient records proved, at first attempt, to be far more daunting than anticipated.

So, in such huge and complex projects, is it reasonable to assume a degree of initial failure? Clearly not ­ the aim has to be to get it right first time, every time, or else how can anyone in IT justify their critical role in the future of their organisation?

But perhaps such examples suggest that IT leaders are failing in one very important aspect of modern business -­ managing expectations.

In IT, we have all rightly promoted technology as central to corporate success, but how many IT managers can honestly say they have not, on occasion, over promised?

In so many situations in work and life, the cause of conflict is not f ailure, but the failure to manage expectation. When planning technology projects, it is a lesson IT leaders should remember.

It took a long time for the government to assert its purchasing power over IT suppliers.

It was only a few years ago that Whitehall first negotiated public sector-wide software licensing deals with major providers such as Microsoft and Oracle, but the potential has always been there to achieve more than just cost savings.

Government IT policy should be an exemplar to every IT leader in the UK, setting the standards for professionalism and best practice.

So it is very encouraging to see the latest initiative –­ a plan to force vendors to provide staff training to help develop the IT skills of the UK workforce.

Sector skills council e-Skills UK estimates that UK IT will need to recruit an additional 130,000 people into the industry every year for the next 10 years ­ a wildly ambitious figure, and one that it is almost impossible to see being achieved from where we are today.

But that target also shows the scale of the challenge we face. Within the IT community, we have long called for government backing to make the sector central to the economic success of the UK. The recession has made government realise we were right all along. Now, growing UK IT is not simply good for the sector, it is essential for the future of the country –­ and politicians know it.

Those 130,000 jobs will have to be filled somehow ­ – and unless action is taken swiftly, you can bet that a large proportion of them will end up sitting at a desk in India. That’s not meant to be anti-Indian or anti-offshoring, simply a statement of the facts about IT employment in the UK.

Many IT suppliers will no doubt privately resent government trying to dictate their training and development plans, but if the skills gap is to be filled, someone has to take a stand.

IT leaders in the private sector would do well, this time, to follow the government’s lead.

Richard Thomas, the outgoing Information Commissioner, can look back at his tenure as the UK’s data watchdog with some satisfaction. During his time in charge, the subject of data protection has garnered hitherto unimaginable levels of attention, and Thomas has sought to take a sensible but firm approach to data protection issues. There has also been the introduction of Freedom of Information rules to add to an already significant workload.

But however well he has set about his task, there has always been the suspicion that his efforts have been somewhat hamstrung. The publication of the Rand review, which Thomas commissioned, confirms those misgivings.

That review is clear in its recommendation that current European data protection legislation needs an overhaul. And so it does.

That Thomas should prepare to leave his post by calling for more business-friendly rules is no surprise. It is a common theme from anyone with an interest in data protection.

The vast majority of business leaders accept and recognise the duty of care they have over the information that they collect and store about their customers and fellow citizens. They are happy to abide by sensible rules governing personal data.

But there is so much in the current European data protection directive ­ – which is the basis for the UK’s Data Protection Act –­ that is not sensible and could cause firms to unintentionally find themselves on the wrong side of the law. That situation needs to be addressed urgently.

The trouble is, calls for more business-friendly data protection rules are nothing new. Indeed, one of Thomas’s first acts as Information Commissioner was to promise such an approach.

There is, however, scant evidence that the regulators within Europe have any appetite for change. For sure, crafting rules that are to govern a technology environment that changes at lightning pace is a thankless task.

If there is to be any prospect of change, it is vital that Christopher Graham,the incoming commissioner, takes up the baton.

Forty-six years ago, Harold Wilson gave a speech that is remembered for what became perhaps the former Labour prime minister’s best-known phrase ­ the “white heat” of technology revolution.

In reality, Wilson was talking more about casting aside restrictive working practices and old class divides than heralding the importance of high-tech innovation. But it was the first time that this country’s leader turned to technology as a potential vote winner.

Last week, Gordon Brown stepped further onto the same platform. “The digital future of the UK is a complete departure from what has gone on before,” he told delegates at the Digital Britain Summit.

For some months now, Brown has placed science and technology at the heart of economic recovery ­ as he should, and so should be praised for. This year, we have seen the draft Digital Britain report published ­ to a somewhat lukewarm reaction ­ and in the past week hints of government cash for next-generation broadband and a “bank” to fund high-tech startups.

By the time you read this, chancellor Alistair Darling will have published the Budget, and some of these proposals may or may not have become clearer.

But whether in the Budget or not, it is time for the rhetoric and promises to stop and the action to start. Putting technology at the centre of the UK’s future is an easy and obvious thing to say; it is much harder to turn it into policy.

When the prime minister said last week: “We can use the downturn to build the necessary technological infrastructure we need for the future,” it is unclear whether “we” refers to the government, or to the country as a whole. Is this an exhortation to business and consumers to spend, spend, spend on technology, or is it a promise for funding and legislation to make this a truly digital Britain?

Wilson gave us white heat. It’s time for Brown to show us the colour of his money.

The principle of Occam’s Razor says that when all of a number of possible solutions are equal, you should always choose the simplest. Clearly nobody told the authorities in charge of tackling the growing problem of e-crime.

As our analysis this week shows, we seem to have gone from the sub-prime to the almost ridiculous.

From having practically nobody tackling e-crime after the demise of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) in 2006, there is now such a confusing mass of organisations that it becomes hard to see how well they can truly address the issue.

Let’s not be entirely critical – there is a clear acceptance that the police have been deficient in the past, and as a result there are now several organisations that, we hope, will lead to a much larger base of the specialist resources needed to beat cyber criminals.

But from the point of view of the victims, whether business or consumer, the lack of clarity over which organisation incidents should be reported to, and who will investigate them – or even if they will be investigated at all – leaves a lot to be desired.

The latest Symantec research illustrates the scale of the problem – a 200 per cent increase in malware last year, much of it designed to steal financial details and other personal information.

The question marks over e-crime policing are such that the National Audit Office is to look into the scale of the challenge and the effectiveness of the government’s response.

But businesses also deserve particular criticism – despite calling for more resources and support to tackle the e-crime threat, not a single penny in private sector funding has materialised for the new Police Central E-crime Unit, a body that was set up specifically to re-establish the links with industry that were lost when the NHTCU disappeared.

Electronic crime is only going to grow at an ever faster pace – that much at least is simple for all to see.