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MPs blast government ICT strategy [Update]
Posted by Gary Flood on Thu, 26/01/2012 - 13:43
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The government has come under fire for wasting an “obscene amount of public money” because a lack of accurate information about government IT made it impossible to identify potential overcharging.
The influential public administration select committee has said government is failing to procure IT in an “intelligent” way due to a “failed culture of the establishment” and warns that its intended course of action will not be sufficient to address “the scale of behavioural and process change required across government” to achieve its own aims of becoming an “intelligent” customer.
The follow up report on the government’s response to the Committee’s summer 2011 report into IT procurement in Whitehall further criticises government IT strategy for failing to understand the risks of legacy systems, and lacking clarity on how to address the IT skills gap with sufficiently senior and experienced people, and warns it must move faster to implement ‘digital by default’ to design better IT services.
Bernard Jenkin MP, Chair of the Committee said the problems in government IT procurement went deep and required major changes. “This can only be achieved by bringing in IT executives and buyers from large and small companies, who understand what they are buying and the innovations on offer. This expertise cannot be contracted out. It is a people challenge. The few new people brought in so far are having to battle against the failed culture of the establishment.”
The committee has renewed its call for government to launch an independent investigation into allegations of cartel-like behaviour among the major systems integrators after warning that a lack of up-to-date and accurate information about government IT made it impossible for the Government to identify potential overcharging, leading to the waste of an “obscene amount of public money”.
The MPs are also not convinced by the government‘s approach to “legacy systems” – how the transition from existing to new IT systems is handled - properly addresses the underlying issues. At the very least, the Government should produce a long term risk-register identifying where and when investment will be needed to migrate and replace existing legacy systems.
Think tank The Institute for Government said the report highlighted the major challenges facing new Government CIO, Andy Nelson. Programme Director, Tom Gash said: “We particularly support the view that current procurement processes must be urgently reviewed to ensure that they do not exclude ‘Agile’ ICT projects or block SMEs from competing for contracts. We also welcome the recognition from both Government and PASC that implementing the ICT strategy will require a deeper understanding of ICT across the civil service.
“However, the Institute feels that PASC should have highlighted the need to ensure strong cross-government leadership for ICT strategy implementation. In particular, we are concerned that the new Government CIO may not be sufficiently empowered to provide a strong, independent view and to influence the decisions of the wider civil service leadership,” Gash added.
What of Cloud?
The Cloud Industry Forum says that the criticisms highlighted need to be addressed by Whitehall ICT leadership.
“The government appears to have been generally constructive and proactive in its response, but this this report clearly highlights a lack of original thinking and is vague on its intended course of action,” commented Andy Burton, the group’s chair.
“It has attempted to address what it calls the challenge and ‘scale of behavioural and process change required across government’ to achieve its own aims of becoming an ‘intelligent” customer’ - and yet there is not one reference to game-changing technological innovation such as Cloud provisioning.
“The government and indeed the committee has unfortunately failed to give due attention to how purchasing IT on a modern, flexible, pay-as-you-use basis is revolutionising how organisations access and consume IT. Instead, it has focused attention on the large incumbent suppliers, heaping blame on them for past public sector failure,” he added.
Burton points out how at this week’s Cloud Expo Europe Liam Maxwell, Cabinet Office’s director of ICT futures, had told delegates that, “In two or three years' time what we now call IT, the delivery of those disaggregated services like hosting, networking, end user devices, support, all of those, will become core commodity services" and will be bought "like stationery" via such modern provisioning.
“The public sector is under enormous pressure to reduce costs but increase productivity and agility in adapting to changes,” added Burton.
“Cloud computing fundamentally enables and supports integrated cross-government procurement of ICT platforms while the pay-as-you-use approach allows for a far more flexible, innovative and competitive market for applications to meet public sector needs.”
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Comments
It's too soft a touch
Frankly I'm sick of hearing about this IT project going wrong, and that one going over budget. Yes millions are being squandered. I work in ICT. I worked in local Government until last year, so let's just clarify something. This waste is occurring at all levels (I'm not tarring everyone with the same brush here, but it is frightening). There seems to be an attitude of "just expect this, its IT after all". Not good enough.
I was made redundant. One of my errors? All my projects succeeded or exceeded the targets. Came in on or under budget; pleased customers. Strange? Not really, you see I always looked for the best, most trusted solutions (not always the "usual answers").
Oh, one admission. I was seeding Apple solutions in lots of Departments (it just worked) and promoting iOS for mobility and security. That was cited in my redundancy as a "not here".
Could it be that the fact a lot less support was needed from the ICT Department (can you see I was showing we where making savings for this) created fears?
Sad. As iOS and the iPad grow in enterprise deployment, I can only watch from the sidelines.