A Tory party victory in the general election would radically change the nature of ICT in the UK public sector, reckons one leading analyst firm.
“Should the Conservative Party win, ICT investment will be driven by a very different strategy to that of the current Labour government,” argues Sarah Burnett of research house Ovum. “It would mean smaller public sector ICT projects run on a decentralised and more collaborative basis.”
Burnett cited the seeming fondness of the current Labour government for 'big ticket' projects,such as the £12.7 billion National Programme for IT (NPfIT), the £7.1 billion Defence Information Infrastructure project and the £5 billion National Identity Card scheme. “All of these projects as well as others have hit problems such as scope creep, escalating costs and technical issues,” she suggested.
“Perhaps it is as a result of the lessons learnt from these mega-projects that the Conservative Party has come to believe that small is beautiful.|It remains to be seen whether this strategy will be more successful than Labour's “big bang” approach to ICT and whether it can meet the needs of larger modernisation projects that could become necessary during the next term of office.
Moratorium
Any Tory victory would be followed by an immediate moratorium on new ICT projects - which is one reason why the current rush to sign up new contracts for the NHS programme is causing so much political controversy. But once spending resumes, the Conservative Draft Manifesto 2010 insists that contracts should not exceed £100 million in value while there will also be a requirement to build greater visibility into projects also with performance indicators and other contract-related information.
Burnett also reckons that the IT industry would get more of a hearing if the Tories win Number 10. “The adoption of ideas from the IT industry is a recurring theme in the Conservative manifesto,” she says. “The party is also keen on crowd-sourcing and has already offered a £1 million cash prize for developers that can create a website to capture the wisdom of the crowd for policy-testing objectives. Crowd-sourcing and social web technology lend themselves well to creating communities of best practice or groups that share special interests. The adoption of this type of technology by the Conservative Party fits its plans for local service cooperatives and returning more control to local communities.”
The co-operative approach is a recurring theme, she argues. “The Conservatives are promoting a new approach to service delivery whereby public servants can set up employee-owned cooperatives to take over services,” notes Burnett. “For example, teachers could run schools, and planning officers planning services. It is not yet clear how such schemes would work but it is expected that government departments and local authorities will be contracting out services to the cooperatives.”
While smaller is assumed to be more beautiful by the Tories, Burnett suggests that this philosophy and other changes will bring their own challenges. “This kind of micro-level outsourcing would bring new challenges of its own in management, reporting and monitoring of service delivery. It would increase the need for sharing information between the cooperative and the authorising body, and would change the way that customer relationships are managed.
"Therefore a change in business processes will be necessary, with more emphasis on contract and service management. This could lead to some line-of-business applications being decommissioned in favor of new collaborative software with flexible licensing and delivery options. Change would also be required to cater for current internal users who become external contractors.”
