The underestimated problem of digitising government.

Why do so many AI strategies in government fail before things really get going? The Guardian just looked into this with a focus on the UK. The culprit is called: legacy IT.

What is it? IT systems from the day before yesterday, some dating back to the 1990s or early 2000s. These data zombies are the true final boss of digitising government. Because they’re just brutally hard to modernise.

The problem: AI, data analysis and digital services need structured, accessible and interoperable data. Legacy systems often deliver the opposite.

The result:

• Data sits in isolated systems
• Interfaces are missing
• Systems are hard to integrate
• Modernisation becomes expensive and risky

This problem obviously doesn’t only exist in the UK. Other OECD states like Japan and Germany also partly rely on ancient IT systems. So before we can even think about Once Only and end-to-end processes, we have to modernise the IT systems first.

Image: This image was created with AI.

Source: https://shorturl.at/2VYNY

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