While it may be that the Geeks shall inherit the Earth, you will have to forgive me for thinking that government would never be conquered. Arcane IT systems, technophobes as far as the eye can see and one data breach after another, it appeared that there was little hope the government geek looking to rewire the red tape and truly transform government through tech.

But no! The once small and closed community of government techies appears to be growing and opening up with geeks popping up in high places, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style. Driven in no small part by the appointment of “IT enthusiast and blogging pioneer among MPs” Tom Watson to the role of Cabinet Office Minster for Transformational Government in January 2008, the profile and priority of all thing geeky has rocketed in what has been a pretty tech unsavvy government thus far.

As tipping points go, last week seemed like a pretty significant one in the world of UK government and social media. It was the week when Prime Minister Gordon Brown went on the attack looking to rebuff claims by opposition leader David Cameron once and for all that he was nothing more than an “analogue politician in a digital age”.

In what I think is the first move of its kind in UK local government (although please correct me if I’m wrong!), from today I will be taking on the role of Social Media Manager at the London Borough of Barnet. Initially on a two day a week six month basis, I am joining the Communications and Consultation Team to scope out and implement the council’s Social Media Strategy.

So last Tuesday saw the annual e-Government National Awards in London, celebrating those projects that have made government “more accessible and effective” over the past year.

Now call me a cynic, but looking down the list on the Cabinet Office’s website there really doesn’t seem to be too much of anything truly exciting or innovative that you might expect from a technology awards. I’m not questioning whether most if not all of these projects are worthwhile endeavours beacuse they undoubtedly are, but what it does make me wonder is when the power of technology will be used for truly transformational ends in government.

Whether its a new customer ‘portal’ (!) here or an ERP system implementation there, these are all projects that are slowly but surely turning the government tanker round and creating a government that, one day, will be able to say it is run like a business. No more, no less. A solid, efficient use of technology to propel government into the 80s or 90s at a push.

Or at least that would be true were it not for the fact that of the £14bn spent on technology in UK government every year (over 50% of all IT spend in the whole of Britain), around 70% of all projects end in failure (as pointed out at the ‘Gov 2.0: or Truly Transformational Governnment’ event on Tuesday). So a mere £10bn wasted there then, give or take a few hundred million.

And why is this? Well if you are to believe the IT old skool, it is down to a lack of ‘IT engineering’ on the part of government, with IT projects unwilling to invest in the technology architects required to apply perfect scientific principles to the development of a system capable of managing the complexities of government. So scientific and perfect I might add that this very same speaker recommended vast investment in culture change programmes to rewire the brains of all employees to cope with the tortuous nature of some of these ‘perfect’ systems.

Or is this systemic failure in government to get IT right in fact a direct result of IT departments insistence on large-scale projects and systems that can never meet the needs of the business of government, whether the internal business funcitons or the interface with their customers. Systems that no sooner have been scoped and blue printed over a period of a year or more become redundant due to the ever rapidly changing nature of government and demands placed on it.

As covered elsewhere by Stephen Dale, surely it is in fact the more lightweight disruptive technologies that live in a perpetual state of beta able to react to change that represent the ‘big answer’ to this culture of perpetual crisis in government IT (not merely “a sticking plaster over a cancerous sore” as one speaker described these solutions).

There can be no better example of this than the work of Tom Steinberg and colleagues at MySociety. MySociety embraces the concept of social media and applies it to government in a variety of new and exciting ways, whether making the actions of elected members more transparent through theyworkforyou.com, enabling easy online petition direct to the Prime Minister through Number 10s petitioning tool or helping everyone to become more active citizens and report local area problems through fixmystreet.com.

These tools are quick and easy to design and implement, meet real social need untouched by government’s big projects and truly open up government for all to access, making government more effective in its duties in the process. Now if that isn’t ‘truly transformational government’ I don’t know what it. Its just a pity true change is rarely from within government itself.

As Tom Steinberg said at the event “sod culture change and big projects and systems, just get on and do it”.