Everything we know about IT ought to make us extremely cautious. While it may be true that it is impossible to run a service operation without some sort of IT, it is certainly possible, and advisable, to run it with a great deal less.

Take, for example, the ‘cloud’. There is no ‘cloud’ as such; it is merely a new way to share computing power and storage online. The ‘new’ feature is that users pay only for the resources they use — but ‘cloud’ sounds sexier. The unwary should be cautious about the sales patter and, ultimately, the deal. Before chasing clouds we should be asking how much we really need large-scale processing power.

IT industry spokespeople are in no doubt: we need as much as we can get. IT is the present and future. Local authorities are being showered with propaganda. Some examples include statements like this: ‘Citizens’ interactions with local authorities are increasingly conducted online; every one of those contacts generates new data about the person using the service’. Does it?