It's been a big week for standards in the public sector. The EU wants them for Cloud, but many are concerned, the healthcare industry wants them for patient records, but industry is concerned, and finally, the Open Standards Board have made progress by announcing its line up of members.
Much discussion lies around how open these should be - openness being the ethos of the Cabinet Office, while openness in the healthcare discussion only seems to be coming from the industry side. Read more...
cabinet office
16/04/13
The members of the Open Standards Board have been revealed as they get ready to work on defining the open standards to use in government IT.
08/04/13
The Government Digital Service has provided a video update of its progress so far on the Government Digital Strategy, including GOV.UK traffic, migration of services, and the NAO Digital Britain report.
04/04/13
The Cabinet Office has been ramping up its digital focus in recent weeks - specifically, it's digital strategy update. While the announcement didn't focus on connectivity this is something that the NAO raised in a recent report on the government's approach to Assisted Digital. Francis Maude has said that they will make digital services so good that "people will prefer to use them", but is simply making something that people prefer to use likely to be enough to get the disinterested online in the first place?
04/04/13
The Open Source industry have been waiting the best part of ten years for the UK Government to mandate a ‘preference’ for Open Source Software (OSS) over proprietary or closed-source alternatives. I personally think it’s great - one year ago I summed up my view of the government’s stance on Open Source in one word: meaningless. OSS was being ignored, and then opposed. Now it’s finally been accepted, allowing the creation of an environment where we can state the obvious.
02/04/13
Data is high on the agenda for the public sector at the moment - is the market learning what it means to function in an emerging information economy.
28/03/13
The Digital Divide could fell the government's Digital by Default ambitions, according to the National Audit Office
15/03/13
GDS' Mike Bracken has offered up his own thoughts in his latest Cabinet Office blog on the dropping of the central CIO role in government – but also points out, that in GDS, and other departments – they’re hiring.
15/03/13
Today’s update on the Government Digital Strategy all sounded incredibly positive, and the scrapping of a government CIO was a big announcement - but what does this now redundant role mean going forward?
06/03/13
The UK government is set to introduce a Public Cloud First policy across Whitehall departments in what appears to be a major victory for the G-Cloud programme team in the Cabinet Office.