Digital Britain - not in the Hilton!

Over at MyCustomer.com's sister site BusinessCloud9.com, we've been hugely encouraged by the publication of the Digital Britain report and the decision to look at rolling out a G-Cloud to offer public services via the internet rather than embarking on £12.7 billion NHS IT programmes that don't work, won't work and will end up killing someone before they're finally abandoned.

Of course this is dependent on many factors, not the least of which is ubiquitous, high speed broadband for everyone in the country - hence the so called broadband tax that has caused so much uproar of late. But if it works it's a fantastic opportunity for Citizen Relationship Management to come to the fore again - and a neat way for CRM vendors to carve a nice new market for themselves. The last big government CRM push came a few years ago, but there was no real effort behind it. I mean, they put John Prescott in charge of it and as we all know, you didn't put John Prescott in charge of anything if you really wanted it to achieve anything...

Hopefully G-Cloud will be a better effort all round. Lord knows, there's a dire need of ubiquitous broadband in the UK. I've just been up the NEC for an SAP event and stayed in the Hilton Metropole on site. This is the National Exhibition Centre, you understand, a place frequented by mobile device clutching business people, many of whom stay at the Hilton Metropole. Indeed, I can think of no other reason to stay in a Midlands hotel that makes Crossroads look classy unless you were going to an event in the NEC.

So quite why Hilton thinks it's acceptable in 2009 for there to be no wi fi in the hotel is beyond me. One thing a business person on the move needs is wi fi access. Not to offer it is to miss a substantial trick. To have reception staff who just shrug and say 'no, we don't - you can pay for an internet terminal over there' is to reveal how much is lacking in your customer relations programme.

Digital Britain? A long, long way off....