After my weekend sweep of emerging technology news, it’s time to go back to a major point–and to get comments on it.

If you scroll down and look at the last half dozen or so posts, you can easily see that in areas like healthcare, robotics, wearable computing, etc., change and innovation is happening at a fast and furious pace, and must surely lead to both new services and new methods of delivery that the British people will want from UK government, ranging from healthcare to location-based services, but really much more.

We also see that standard information security approaches, such as embodied by national programmes for identification or transmission of healthcare records, are not only expensive and difficult to build right the first time, are also a threat to information assurance by way of being a honey pot that increases the rewards of successful hacking or intrusion. They also stand a chance of being more or less obsolete by the time they are finished. Societal needs and changes, EU legislation or court rulings, further advances in technology, or some combination thereof may make NPfIT or the national identity scheme unworkable the day they unwrap the package.

We also see at every level of UK government an inability to get the simple rules of hygiene right, leaving valuable and sensitive information exposed by error or criminal practice.

Paradoxically, we see very useful services being implemented at a smaller scale, using Web 2.0 tactics such as mashing easily obtainable data from disparate sources together and presenting them in a useful manner.

So, let’s put forward some assumptions, see if they lead to a useful point, and ask for comment:

1. This is the golden age for funding of information assurance schemes. Demography will compel large transfers of government resources to pensions and healthcare and perhaps other programmes (Olympics and CrossRail). Information Assurance efforts are taking place now within a window of opportunity that may soon close.

2. Large scale programmes that are the raison d’etre for large scale information assurance schemes are both contentious and expensive, and there are few reference cases that point to a model for successful design, construction and implementation.

3. Relevant technologies are in the middle of an explosion of innovation, combination and recombination that is going to completely rewrite the rules of the game for information assurance, making it almost inevitable that systems designed in the present or recent past will not be fit for purpose absent considerable and expensive modification.

If those assumptions are true, (please, please tell me where and why my assumptions are wrong–challenge these!), then it seems clear to me that,

a) data should be held and guarded in lots that are as small as possible, and should be combined and recombined at destination using innovative procedures to add value

b) responsibility for data integrity, instead of migrating upwards to national level, should migrate downwards to user level

c) key decisions and initial actions should be taken within the next 5 years, or the concept of information assurance as used today will move towards irrelevance, pushed aside by spending constraints and technological progress

I would love to see comments on any or all of this.