We can be proud of many British traits ­ creativity, individualism, tolerance and our weird and wonderful sense of humour.

The UK’s level of inventiveness is also unrivalled. For a small nation, we must outrank any other for our inquisitiveness and innovation.

But there is a flipside. British IT professionals often do not know how to work collectively and collaboratively to an agreed set of objectives, and to arrive at an agreed set of outcomes.

For several years in the higher education sector, there have been discussions between funding council the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) and UK universities to develop an open systems architecture that would allow students to access learning materials. Access would be provided through a system of personal identification and authentication.

However, the outcome has seen a falling out between Jisc, who developed the new authentication system called Shibboleth, and Eduserv, who supply the Athens access management technology.

Chaos now reigns in the higher education sector, with institutions confused about whether they should commit to one system or both technologies.

But why does the UK struggle to plan, organise and implement systems? Take the government initiative Every Child Matters. One of the programme’s recommendations was for health and social care staff to share information to prevent children coming to harm.

In 2003 when the initiative was launched, agreement on the aims appeared shared. In my role as Socitm president, I even discussed the objectives with the minister for e-government.

But five years later, a large number of the required technologies have not been implemented by local authorities.

I also worked with the e-Envoy’s office to promote the Government Gateway central registration service to sceptical local authorities. Organisations had every right to be doubtful, with a range of concerns apparent after £27m of software investment.

Why can we not work together to manage the implementation of systems? How come other European countries can move forward on crucial IT programmes?

There is a great deal of work being undertaken to improve the professionalism of IT staff, but more attention needs to be paid to national leadership.

A number of key issues remain if we accept that identity management for the public sector is a country-wide concern:

• Where is the national IT leadership that will make sense of the increasing range of identification and authentication systems?
• Where is the national IT leadership that will grasp the political nettle concerning sensitivities around identity and privacy?
• Where is the national IT leadership that will overcome the “not invented here” mentality and look at what other countries have achieved?

Professionalism and leadership for public sector IT is not confined to coalface staff and managers.

In some ways, it is even more important that senior IT figures can influence political leaders, negotiate achievable objectives and deliver on outcomes that will take the UK forward.

Fahri Zihni is director of ICT at Aston University and former president of user group Socitm