ONE running story last week was the Central Statistics Office report on the scale of fraud among social welfare recipients. Is this report available on the World Wide Web? For that matter, is the CSO itself on the Web?
The Government's Web site does have a Government press statement about the controversy, and a page (http://www.irlgov.ie gis/217e.htm) which gives the prices of paper versions of CSO reports. None of these can be downloaded in digital form.
It's not clear whether the Web pages at the Higher Education Authority's site (http://www.hea.ie/cso) are official ones. Surprisingly, they don't have a single statistic. But the CSO does make digital versions of some reports available to the public - on disk.
Take, for example, last year's Population & Labour Force Projections, 1996-2026. The paper version of the 55 page A4 report costs £25. A more detailed, digital version on a floppy disk costs £50.
Why does the CSO charge twice as much for the digital version as the printed one? Does it really cost twice as much to produce? Why doesn't it give away its information for free, via the Internet, to the taxpayers who have already paid for it to be collected, and to the citizens it is supposed to serve?
It might seem unfair to single out the CSO, but it has plenty of expertise in database management - this, after all, was one of the first State agencies to make extensive use of computers, for census counts back in the days of bulky mainframes and punched cards.
The CSO examples highlight a prevalent attitude among decision makers, who see "going digital" as something which isn't urgent, or as a passing gimmick (cue all those embarrassing publicity shots of suits with surfboards), or which citizens and customers should actually be charged extra for using, rather than be helped and encouraged. THE CSO is not alone. Right across the State and semi state sector, agencies are making strange digital decisions. For example:
. Take Telecom Eireann's restructuring of local phone charges in autumn 1993 - exactly when the World Web began to take off. Overnight it created an extremely hostile climate for users of the Net and bulletin board systems (BBSs).
. Telecom's phone directory is now on a CD Rom. But it's a PC only version, is time disabled (it's useless after next April), costs £22.99 when it should have been free, and should have started off on the Web anyway. For a licence for 21-100 users on a network it's charging £600. Plus VAT.
. Or look at the Arts Council's intervention on the Internet. Check out its seven or eight pages (at http;//www.artscouncil.ie) and decide for yourself whether they reflect a dynamic, exciting and artistic organisation, or a bland, miserable blancmange. I have judged far better Web pages in competitions involving 16 year old school students.
. RTE does have a fairly useful Web site. But it doesn't have a single programme devoted to new digital technologies and networks (unless you count occasional pieces on Soundbyte). As a public service, and as our largest indigenous "content provider", you'd expect it to have at least one dedicated show to educate its audience about computing, and inform its citizens about the policy issues involved in the information revolution.
A Martian observing most of RTE's Internet coverage would probably assume that computer networks consist solely of hackers, pornographers and paedophile rings.
. As for the number of employees per PC in local government, or the Department of Education's attitude towards computers in schools .
THE REAL problem isn't within each of these organisations. It's with the policy makers who control them. Where is their overall policy (let alone their e mail addresses)?
Despite plenty of huffing and puffing by successive Ministers for Science/Technology/Industry/Education, they have no coordinated, overall strategy for the information age.
For most of this State's history, many of its agencies have seen information itself (particularly government and Cabinet information) as something to be wary about. It is something to be controlled, censored, "put a spin on", or stuffed away from public view for 50 years or more. Or, more recently, to be copied onto a 50 pence floppy disk and flogged at 50 quid a shot.
Such an attitude, whether it's Telecom's CD Roms or the CSO's floppies, might seem to make sense at the moment. Perhaps it generates a modest income. Perhaps it saves the State money. But what is the real, long term cost of not having a proper strategy to mange the information revolution?
THE CLOCK on the wall of Chris O'Malley's office has stopped at 2.45. It's ironic, given that the former MEP and British Telecom strategist is explaining how Ireland needs an alarm clock call about the future.
Colleagues in Fine Gael used to talk about him "preferring big ideas to local issues like street lighting or grass verges". Today, he's talking about one of the biggest ideas of our times - the information society, and how Ireland is so unprepared for it.
It's very similar to the problem of trying to get the idea of Europe across to people 10 years ago, he says, recalling his political career. "We have all these foreign high tech firms in the country, so people assume we must be well up in it."
While journalists might single out government agencies which have been reluctant to "go digital", O'Malley is more diplomatic. "It's not about pointing fingers people tend to latch onto the examples and miss the overall picture and the broad implications of what is happening."
Now at Dublin City University, O'Malley is a co author of the discussion paper Is Ireland Prepared for the Information Age? Published last Thursday by a group of academics straddling all six of DCU's faculties, it looks at different possible scenarios.
The report argues that we should look at how other small, open economies such as Denmark and Singapore are "developing concerted national strategies to put themselves in the vanguard of the information age". In Singapore, a fifth of its 750,000 households are already on line. It aims to connect the entire population of three million people by 1999.
"In Ireland, by contrast, we find a situation where 87 per cent of civil servants do not even have an e mail address listed in the Government Directory, let alone being in a position to deliver some services to the public electronically, such as processing tax returns, provision of official information, or processing applications for grants. Nor does any plan exist to increase this to a specific proportion by any specific date in the future." THE DCU paper also criticises several major reports for ignoring key issues:
. the Green Paper on Broadcasting "scarcely addressed" the issue of pay per view technologies;
. last year's Telecommunications Industry Task Force ignored the issue of reskilling;
. last year's White Paper on Education didn't even mention the need for computer related equipment in schools and for large scale training of teachers.
Among its conclusions, the DCU think tank argues that "it is hardly appropriate to draw up some kind of national `master plan'. Instead, we must think in terms of how to rapidly develop the country's capabilities, so that we are better placed to manage change, whatever form it eventually takes."
The group also recommends that:
. public services should "provide a massive stimulus to the advanced use of electronic media in society by proactively providing such services over the network".
. All schools - "not just those in more affluent communities" - should be adequately equipped with information technology. The vast majority of teachers should be trained and equipped to use it.
. The government's relationship with Telecom Eireann should be more clearly defined.
. For broadband services, the State needs a much clearer clear view of what national infrastructure is required, and what pricing structures should prevail.
The cross faculty group is also sowing the seeds for a National Information Society Forum, and is organising a seminar in DCU on October 14th about how Denmark is preparing for the information society. The speakers they are flying in include one of the authors of Denmark's national strategy document, plus Dr Hans Sigaard from the Copenhagen Business School and the chief government policy adviser for education, Ms Lilla Vos.