Local government IT really is a Wonderland all of its own. We're used to hearing bad news from this sector and more was announced last week. Yet some local authorities, such as Cambridgeshire for instance, regularly seem to come up smelling of roses in an environment beset almost monthly by new central government initiatives and constraints, ensuring maximum instability. Who'd want to work in local government IT?

The Local Government Users' Association (LGUA) came out with a report last week on local authorities' general understanding of their IT systems and the challenges that face them. The survey was undertaken by the LGUA strategy group and posed the kind of questions you might expect such a group to pose. Like, "Do you know how your own systems work (or don't work) together?" The not unreasonable idea is that IT Departments should have a configuration map of their systems. As you might expect of local government, about a third of authorities had no idea at all.

That is actually not quite as bad in one way as it might seem. Around five years ago, much the same could be said of most of private industry, even blue-chip organisations. What changed that, or at least provided the opportunity for change, was Y2K. Remember the first edict of Y2K programmes? Create an inventory. Since you also needed to take account of inter-system dependencies, a configuration map was an obvious solution. Of course, with Y2K programmes gone and forgotten, there was no incentive other than common sense to maintain those inventories and maps. And guess who hasn't been doing that?

The point will become pertinent again if and when the UK joins the euro. Know what the first edict of a euro programme is? You got it in one, with the search this time for currency rather than date fields. Once again, the options will be to fix or replace. So how many local authorities know which option would be appropriate for which systems? Around a quarter have no idea.

Sighing at such ineptitude is all very well but few IT Departments have to cope with such a difficult environment as local authorities have. The Government has set targets for eGovernment programmes in local government and we all know how government targets work. eEnvoy Andrew Pinder acknowledged conflicts in Government directives in his speech to local government user group SOCITM earlier this month, stating that bringing significant benefits to citizens should take priority over projects that simply allowed boxes to be ticked and higher numbers to be totalled. But how will the Government measure progress? Got it in one again! To compound the confusion, Local Government Minister Nick Raynsford announced 10 days ago yet another initiative for a white paper to set out a new vision for quality local government services.

The clincher is a finding in the NCC's annual survey. You might hope that, for having to deal with the legislative shambles, IT staff in local government might get a little extra budget support to relieve the stress. Not a bit of it; NCC found that not only was IT spend per user in local government a tenth of that in the financial sector, it was half that per user in central government, which in turn was a third more than the median for all sectors.

I expect those chaps in Government need the extra spend to produce all those new initiatives and white papers.