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.

How well do you think you would cope with an overnight cut of 30 per cent in your IT budget?

That’s the reality facing British Airways (BA), as Computing revealed this week, and a stark reminder of the difficulties facing IT leaders in the companies most affected by the recession.

Banks and other financial services firms will no doubt have suffered similar or even greater cutbacks, but BA is the first blue-chip firm to be open about the dramatic effect the slump is having on its technology plans.

IT professionals across the UK are being disproportionately hit by the downturn. According to research by the Keep Britain Working campaign, 30 per cent of UK IT staff have had to accept pay cuts ­ – above the national average of 27 per cent of employees.

And with a further 5,700 jobs to go at HP’s European operations, there is bound to be further strife for UK workers.

For all the optimistic talk of green shoots from some quarters, there is little hard evidence among the IT community that the prolonged economic woes are coming to an end.

There may be a small rise in house prices; share prices may be up –­ but the effects of the downturn will be felt in IT for some time yet. Trade unions point out that unemployment rarely peaks until some time after a recession has ended ­ – which is a sobering thought for those who have survived so far.

But for enterprising IT leaders, the worst of times can be the opportunity to shine. As Deepak Singh, acting chief information officer at HM Revenue & Customs, says: “Out of the current crisis will be born the next generation of IT leaders,”.

The challenges that IT managers face are unprecedented, but even if you cannot see any green shoots, it is a time to nurture roots and sow seeds.

As Computing has said many times, the organisations that make the best use of IT will be the ones that survive now and thrive in future. It is tough out there, but IT must take the lead.

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.

If you are a close follower of the forecasts of futurologists, you are probably disappointed not to be wearing your robotic exo-skeleton while flying your hover car using only the power of thought via your brain-computer interface implant.

Many who try to predict tomorrow’s innovations tend to come up with some pretty kooky ideas, but at the highest levels of public administration, there appears to be a growing realisation that our technological future will be about more than just whizzy gadgets and sci-fi equipment.

The EU-funded programme to investigate the ethical and social implications of emerging technologies shows just how increasingly radical the influence of our industry is going to become.

The researchers will be evaluating areas that once seemed too wild to comprehend, such as emotional computing ­ systems that can identify our emotions and respond appropriately.

The dilemmas that such developments will bring are even harder to fathom than the technology itself. But the past few years have been full of political and social controversies that would have been barely conceivable were it not for recent innovations.

Think of the debates about young people posting personal information on Facebook, or of government losing huge amounts of our data, or advertisers trying to record our web surfing habits. The pace of change is far beyond what politicians, sociologists and business leaders have been able to deal with.

So it is right that we take a step back and look not only at what the forthcoming output of research and development labs will allow us to do, but also what it means for us as a society and individuals.

One of the great challenges for IT leaders is in managing change. The changes and challenges ahead could be exponentially greater, and the output of the UK-led research project will be fascinating and relevant for us all.

There is one word that is being ever more frequently used when talking about business, government and employment ­- trust.

As customers, we trusted banks and the financial services industry to know what they were doing and to make the right decisions about investing our money. As we now know, in too many cases, we were wrong.

As citizens, we have allowed government to build up vast amounts of information about us on the basis that the data would be secure, and used only for the purposes for which it was originally obtained. After numerous data loss scandals and controversy over information sharing, there are plenty of critics who would say we were wrong.

And as employees, we increasingly expect our employers to be mature enough, and to use secure technology intelligently enough, to allow us a better work/life balance -­ with next week’s flexible working legislation giving a push further down that road. But with surveys suggesting that many companies do not trust their staff sufficiently to work remotely, we have to wonder, were we wrong?

In the post-credit crunch world, trust will be perhaps the biggest issue facing business and government leaders. We used to talk of things as being “as safe as houses”, or “as safe as the Bank of England”. But what can we talk about now? Who do we trust? And how do we know we can trust them?

The answer to that question will lie largely in the hands of IT experts. Technology is central to delivering trust. Whether it is to enforce regulatory compliance, to secure and monitor databases, or to provide communication and collaboration with remote workers, IT will be at the heart of managing the risks faced by organisations of all sizes and sectors.

Companies will need to sell the fact they can be trusted, and the way they use technology will be a high-profile aspect of that.

IT leaders are set to take a key role in establishing those trusted relationships and delivering the systems to prove it.

Seamless integration has long been a Holy Grail for IT managers.

Anybody who has been in the industry for more than 10 years will be able to reel off a long list of failed initiatives aimed at making IT systems more interoperable.

Open standards have long been a mantra for most vendors, but one that remains under the shadow of perhaps the most popular cliché in the book: “The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.”

David Roberts, chief executive of user group The Corporate IT Forum, says it all for IT leaders in our article on Cisco’s new unified datacentre strategy: “We have constantly called for suppliers to work more collaboratively to effect seamless integration and interoperation of infrastructure components.”

The history of IT shows that interoperability is the key to making any technology or trend a success. When the industry failed to agree on networking standards, users just chose one –­ IP ­ that was proving pretty successful outside of vendor control, and so the internet era began.

The success of Microsoft Windows was largely due to the fact that one supplier realised that most users wanted all PCs to look the same when they switched them on (with apologies to the fervent Mac community) and could run any off-the-shelf software they wanted.

More recently, once Apple turned downloading into a seamlessly integrated art, the music and video industry changed forever.

These days, we have a whole class of software ­ categorised by the awful name “middleware” ­ that owes is existence to the fact that technology products do not work together. Is IT the only sector able to make money out of its own inability?

Spurious costs on integration are an unwanted irritation for IT managers. If vendors want to help their customers through the recession ­ – and so survive themselves –­ they need a new approach to working together.

There is a certain irony in Microsoft putting the man that runs its Windows business up for interview with Computing in the same week that the government announced a new commitment to open source.

Bill Veghte faces the daunting task of convincing IT leaders that Windows 7 is the real thing – a stable, ready-to-go system that is ideal for businesses stuttering through a recession to invest in. It would be hard enough were it not for the bad feeling that persists around the disappointment of Vista.

But the challenge for Veghte and his employer is now broader than ever. In the past, new versions of Windows have competed primarily with their predecessors. Thanks to the hiccup of Vista, in the years since the last seriously business-ready operating system, Windows XP, the world has moved on significantly.

No longer is there such a long-term desire for the energy-hungry, feature-rich, high-powered desktop PCs that have fuelled the success of previous Windows incarnations.

Just about the only area of the PC market that is growing at the moment is netbooks ­ – cut-down, low-cost laptops used primarily for internet access that run quite happily under Linux. Even Nokia is talking about moving into the netbook market as it converges with high-end smartphones.

Microsoft will face a new set of decision criteria from IT leaders – ­ not just when or if to upgrade, but what type of device is most appropriate, and which of a wider range of operating systems and applications to choose.

Meanwhile, the old cash cow of the public sector is increasingly opening up to new application ideas ­ – and in particular, open-source software. A new strategy announced last week aims to encourage equal status for open-source and commercial applications.

Admittedly, it is hardly the first time government has tried to make such a move, but Whitehall and council IT managers will now be asking themselves the same question as their corporate peers ­ – for how much longer will we really need Windows?