But best of all, according to aficionados of the British government's forays into computing (of whom there are many: One of the country's IT magazines, Computer Weekly, even has an annual award for the biggest government computer foul-up—competition is reportedly fierce), was the 1999 House of Commons report that acted as the obituary on a top-secret defense system buried deep in a war bunker beneath London's Whitehall.

Apparently code-named Trawlerman (government officials aren't exactly forthcoming with details), the system first began to run into difficulties when officials realized that the only access to the underground bunker was through a small hatch. Everything—even mainframes—had to be built, tested, dismantled, taken through the hatch, rebuilt and tested again. And the problems didn't end there. A combination of security and compatibility problems meant that by the time the plug was pulled, says one long-standing critic of the British government's approach to IT, the computers were operating to a specification so loose that it did not include a requirement that they do the job for which they were installed.

Nor were recent breakdowns isolated incidents. "[Although] 1999 was a bumper crop of IT failures in the U.K. government," says the University of Manchester's Richard Heeks, author of Reinventing Government in the Information Age, "a number of those turkeys were eggs laid by the previous Conservative administration and which merely happened to hatch under the [present] Labor government."

Indeed, consider the following damning indictment from The Independent newspaper: "Problems with the Department of Social Security's multimillion-pound computer project is the latest in a string of similar disasters. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been wasted on computers in the public sector, and the mismanagement appears to continue. Two months ago, it was revealed that the department had wasted about £35 million ($52.5 million) on rework—dealing with mistakes. Sources within the department put the latest losses as high as £125 million ($187.5 million). The National Audit Office and the House of Commons' Public Accounts Committee have been frequent critics of computer management by civil servants."

The problem is those words were written in 1994, and the Department of Social Security's computer system referred to was the system that the current bug-ridden one replaced. In other words, these problems with government IT in the United Kingdom are not new, and they aren't getting any less frequent. As The Independent article went on to observe, the fact is that the U.K. public sector's history of flawed IT implementations stretches back many, many years.