E-directive

December 11, 2011

According to CivicSource the Commonweath of Virginia, in cooperation with Microsoft, have created an Advanced Health Care Directive Registry This appears to me to be an additional use for Mydex in the UK. Having discussed with William Heath on and offline for around two and a half years the case for a secure nest for personal data, away from the clutches of the state, this appears to be a perfect way of replicating what is happening in Virginia and providing a very useful social function. The Virginian database also holds records regarding organ donation wishes, which would put all such information in one place for the health professionals.

Too often people put their personal wishes regarding death and dying in their wills (which aren’t read until they’re dead and buried). If someone has no wish to end their life in a round of resucitation, who is to tell the doctors? If a simple way can be provided, and the health professionals can be made aware of it, why not hold it securely online?

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In these hard times

September 16, 2009

A recent Computer Weekly (8 – 14 September 2009) contains a piece entitled “Hard Times for local government IT” written by Dr Simon Moores a Conservative district councillor and former advisor to Tony Blair! Strangely, it’s largely the content of an earlier posting from his blog. I tend to agree with his conclusions to the state we are likely to be in, but as one of advisors behind the e-government race, I think he should consider his role in bringing us to the current situation we’re in.

The rush to 100% targets with little process improvement brought us to a place where, in order to share services, we are trying to rationalise a vast range of systems without any standard architecture. He bemoans his own council’s situation for being on Groupwise and “fat” desktops – I moved my own towards “thin” some six years ago against some resistance and avoided Novell at the outset, however many neighbours still use Novell and still employ “fat” desktops, which can limit some of the “quick wins”.

Many authorities and government are forced down the Microsoft path by interfaces and joining up, open source won’t make things easier, if anything it will possibly make them harder.

IT is just the glue of service delivery, e-government is just a group of channels to deliver information and services. What is needed is standards for applications to enable them to be shared across boundaries.

Will a change in government bring that?

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Posted by greatemancipator