Say what you like about Andrew Pinder, the UK’s last e-envoy, at least he was
good at showing up at public IT seminars, and telling the world what government
was doing. And good at listening to what people told him it should be doing.
Perhaps that’s why, five years back, the government finally decided to get rid
of him.
Getting rid of a popular, high-profile person must have been a tricky
assignment.
Not only were there a lot of people who thought he was doing a good job, and couldn’t be blamed for the mess he inherited, but there was an additional and serious problem: he knew where all the bodies were buried. Since those days, the story of government IT has been a frequent visitor to the headlines. Coincidence? I wonder.
The job of the e-envoy was to get government online. IT Week reported the official line in 2003, when Sir Peter Turnbull, head of the Home Civil Service, confirmed that the e-envoy’s office was punctured by budget cuts on a massive scale but insisted that “the government remained committed to its 2005 e-services target”.
In any event, in a move worthy of Yes, Minister, the job of getting government online was prioritised, moved into the central strategy of the Cabinet, and out of the fringe, and Pinder, deprived of budget, saw no reason to continue beyond his contract date of 2004.
