It’s been four years since I started writing a column for IT Week, and looking back over the articles, there are several recurrent themes.

The subject of failed systems looms large. Although I am accustomed to systems being screwed up, and have spent a significant part of my career researching the causes of IT failures, I still believe the scale of waste in recent years, particularly in government IT systems, is nothing short of a national scandal.

I strongly suspect that the primary reason for this is that the people driving the projects want to be seen to be doing something really important that will stand as some kind of legacy. But someone with vaulting ambition is the last person you need leading an IT project, wherein real success usually springs from innately conservative engineering, satisfying a relatively small number of easily understood requirements in a hopefully scalable manner.

It’s not rocket science, but this is exactly the opposite of what senior figures like. There are exceptions, I hasten to add. The DVLA system now appears to work quite competently, but this is a relatively rare example.

Reading that Gordon Brown is technophobic does not fill me with any confidence that things will improve, so I expect us to continue to blow £15bn a year on this sort of idiocy. It’s probably best just to consider this waste as a tax – let us call it a Very Asinine Tax – and therefore, like death, inevitable.

Another theme that I have tackled on several occasions is interface design. I cannot possibly say this in strong enough terms but the general quality of system interfaces these days is awful. Designers seem incapable of separating necessary from unnecessary complexity. Windows is an obvious culprit, but there are plenty of packages out there that are bloated with pointless features. And it’s not just software. I’m trained to understand the mathematics of quantum mechanics but I often find I can’t turn a modern car radio off. Maybe such a thing never occurred to the designer?

Another regular topic has been the growing skills gap. I have been warning about this since my earliest articles. The problem has grown and grown, and once again this year university applications are down. All I can say is that the business leaders who complain about the skills crisis are at least partly responsible for causing it in the first place, with their short-term ostrich management techniques, poor career structures and generally poor pay.

The situation is not about to improve. Whatever the government might say, levels of numeracy and literacy have got significantly worse in recent years.

When Blair entered Number 10, they said things could only get better. Surely, with Brown now in residence, they can’t get any worse.