The government’s Common Technology Services and the Cabinet Office have created a dashboard to record IT contracts, technology and capabilities across government.

In a blog post, CTS director Iain Patterson said that the dashboard was in beta form at the moment, focusing on IT contracts.

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He added that it would then expand to record other aspects of technology use and capabilities – and how this is changing – across government.

“These will help us understand why departments are requesting money to spend on their IT, the impact of the changes they want to make, and to help prevent them building or buying something which is available elsewhere in government,” Patterson wrote.

The CTS, which is part of the Government Digital Service, aims to help government departments work more efficiently while ensuring common standards across government.

Patterson said that it has made “huge strides” in the past few years, but that there is still a long way to go to improve government technology.

He sets out areas that the CTS will work on, which include helping government move away from on-site legacy software systems and towards using cloud-based tools, and partnering better with the IT industry.

Patterson says that the CTS will aim to understand what departments want and help them find the right IT tools for the job. However he adds that the team “don’t want to prescribe outcomes” for departments.

“What we want to do is create an approach so compelling that departments will want use it by choice,” he writes.

A major focus of Patterson’s blog is on collaboration and joined-up thinking in government. He also emphasises the need to break down organisational silos and encourage communications from the bottom up, for instance through community groups for specific technology areas such as Office 365.