Government is not very good at information technology. That’s something many Americans discovered last year with the rollout of healthcare.gov, but that was only the latest of many botched government IT projects, both in this country and abroad. Can government do better?
Yes, says Matt Ridley, distinguished writer on science and technology and also Conservative member of the British House of Lords (he became the 5th Viscount Ridley when his father died in 2012 and in 2013 was chosen by fellow Conservative hereditary lords to be one of the voting members of the House), in The Times of London.
He says that Britain’s Conservative-led government has figured out how to do it: Don’t have government bureaucrats or contractors try to design every feature of an IT project in advance, since the lead time involved will inevitably make earlier specifications obsolete; instead, roll it out a bit at a time, test it and respond to glitches that are identified by users.
In other words, centralized command-and-control doesn’t work. Testing and adaptation, as in the economic marketplace, do. Follow Adam Smith, not Karl Marx.
