Engineers get fringe benefits
05 October 2009
Last time out I touched on the joys of the party conference season and was going to leave it at that, but something caught my eye last week…
It was at the Labour party conference. It wasn’t actually part of the main conference but a fringe event organised by ‘Engineering the Future’ – an alliance of quangos and institutions with a goal of promoting the role of engineering in the UK. The meeting was addressed by the Minister for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, who called for a scientific voice to be heard in every government department.
"It is engineers and technologists that will get this country back on track,” said Lord Drayson. “To achieve this and to implement Government priorities effectively and strategically, we need more technological knowledge within the Government. We need the equivalent of Chief Technology Officers within Government Departments. Science, technology and engineering represent Britain's "Big Three" for the future. They are essential to our economic growth and to maintaining our quality of life as we tackle the major challenges like climate change. We cannot build for the future without world-class engineers."
Unquestionably a laudable sentiment and one that I, and I would have thought most of EPD’s readers, would heartily concur with. Get engineers and scientists up there in terms of status and rewards – a theme I have visited on several occasions in the past and will undoubtedly do again many times in the future, particularly when it comes to education and encouraging the next generation.
But, I wondered, however much we like the sound-bite of having a Chief Technology Officer in every main department – what exactly is he or she going to do? In education the job of stimulating the engineer’s role and embedding it into the curriculum is obvious and in certain departments, like defence, health and again education, they are big users of technology and so there is a role for a CTO to guide and influence both the spending and the areas of future research and development. Come to think of it, if this didn’t happen already it would be a disgrace, but might explain a lot…
Back to my point, the biggest spending departments in the 2007 – 08 year were Work and Pensions and the Treasury, who of the total £620bn budget spent £136bn and £109bn respectively. I am curious what Lord Drayson’s CTOs would be doing in these departments? Maybe the CTO would be a pony-tailed youth with a brief to commission a new IT system for the benefits office, or maybe a software geek for the Treasury develop an algorithm that proves quantitative easing both makes sense and does work.
I make light of something that is clearly a good idea, but maybe Lord Drayson’s fine words would have had more impact if the government had managed to find a slot in its main conference for this critical subject, rather than relying on the good work of an industry body to tack a meeting on to the conference fringe.
Contact Details and Archive...
Most Viewed Articles...
