30/3/11

By Sophie Baker

The coalition government has acknowledged that government ICT has a “really bad name”, but will encourage greater transparency in the coming year, according to its ICT strategy paper, released today.

“Government information and communications technology (ICT) has a really bad name. Much of this is unjustified. All big organisations – whether in the public or private sector – have examples of failure in delivering big ICT projects and programmes,” it read.

The strategy acknowledges that there have been “significant failings”, but this government will enable the delivery of public services with a “different approach to deliver this strategy, characterised by a strong centre and continued commitment to greater transparency through regular and open reporting”.

However, the strategy was labeled a “lapidary” formulation of previous concepts by Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude.

He implied that the strategy contains nothing new, and instead outlines familiar challenges that the government is facing.

Maude said: “For too long, Government has wasted vast amounts of money on ineffective and duplicate IT systems. We need to ensure that frontline services have the tools to do their job to deliver effective public services.

"We will cut out duplication and wastage by sharing more of our assets across government and using common systems.

"We will end the oligopoly of big business supplying government IT by breaking down contracts into smaller, more flexible projects. This will open up the market to SMEs and new providers.”

The government has pledged to reduce the costs of datacentres by 35 per cent over five years; to publish details of government contracts and reduce bureaucracy and costs; to share and reuse ICT solutions and services via a common ICT infrastructure; enable interoperable ICT by using common and open standards, creating cross-government standards on Application Programme Interfaces and developing a quality assurance ‘kite mark’.

The National Outsourcing Association (NOA) said the breakdown of the public sector ICT oligopoly is a welcome one.

“The announcement is further evidence of the government’s determination to open up the procurement process to suppliers of all shapes and sizes, and ensure that the public sector achieves the best possible service from its suppliers,” said Martyn Hart, chairman of the NOA.

“At present, the government is tied into a range of contracts with large suppliers, which could mean that they struggle to get the best possible service as a result. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the coalition government pledging to support SMEs with a broad range of initiatives aimed at ensuring that larger outsourcing suppliers are not the only ones with access to public sector contracts.”

The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) welcomed the strategy but warned that the government must not over promise because of resources and skill.

“The big principles of adopting open standards and agile deployment; consolidating datacentres and leveraging cloud services; and, the inclusion of SME’s in the supply chain are all positive moves that will have impact. It is no easy task to bring about this scale of change and in the process avoid making knee jerk reactions that could cause the real focus of efficient and effective ICT to be lost in pursuit of principles over the true test of fitness for purpose.

“Technology was never the cause of the issues that we believe exist today, rather it was the contracting and supply process was the driver for the design and method of what got implemented. What is vitally important is that there is truly a level playing field with all solutions judged on their merit and not a positive discrimination of one form over another,” he added.

Burton said the CIF is particularly enamoured with the launch of Government Skunkworks, which aims to develop low-cost, fast and agile ICT solutions – providing a new channel for SMEs to participate in government IT.

“But perhaps the most important announcement covered the drive to common technology standards as well as the recognition that Cloud computing delivers infrastructure, platforms and software as a service. It recognises that the cloud can and does deliver the capability to respond to changing operational needs. This really does give teeth to the G-Cloud initiative and we applaud that,” he concluded.