HMG IT spending seems to produce the least amount of bang for the most bucks.

Do you expect these clowns to start seeking value for money? Surely you need to sack them all, because we have had HMG departments doing little more than burning taxes for twenty-five years – do you think they will change? They have form, left to make their own policies they will carry on wasting money.

They need a change of culture. Why not move them on to Ubuntu (my children managed that at age 9) and Open Office? Would the change be any greater than the change from Office 2003 to Office 2007?

+1

Also – can you please publish all your own evidence of “cost per desktop” under the various arrangements in place (eg big outsourcing contracts, SIs, locally bought? This is public money and oyu should be transparent about it.

Although, there does need to be a certain amount of user configurability, a government organisation recently changed permissions for changing the screen saver, despite a small, but important part of the workforce needed the screen saver disabled to enable information to be displayed at all times. Oh no, the IT bods say, this is to improve security. Now, the workforce have to use a hi-tech device called a stapler to rest on the keyboard to stop the PCs from activating the screen saver, I kid you not!

No doubt the govt will pick a single supplier, and no doubt they’ll pick a supplier with a proven track record of failure. It’s impossible to get a govt IT contract unless you’ve previously gone over budget by at least £1million on a previous project and delivered it at least 6 months late.

To summarise, if a monkey puts its hand in a fire, it won’t do it again. This government is not only putting its hand back in the fire after being burnt several times, but it’s trying to pick up the hot coals and juggle them.

e.g Para 4: Ninety-five per cent of departments use Microsoft software (Figure 2) and in
May 2001 it announced new licencing arrangements to operate worldwide
from August 2002. OGC and departments assessed the likely additional costs
they would incur from these changes as being in the region of £40 million to
£60 million per year. In response, OGC with the support of departments
negotiated with Microsoft to secure more favourable terms. In March 2002
OGC announced a Memorandum of Understanding setting out the principles
under which Microsoft will conduct business with the UK public sector for the
three years to March 2005. This includes the pricing arrangements and the
discounts which Microsoft will offer1. At the same time OGC announced
agreements with Sun Microsystems and Lotus/IBM and subsequently secured
agreements with Corel and Oracle.

Para 7. Across the
public sector as a whole, OGC estimated that the Memoranda would save
£36 million on direct price reductions, and using the returns from suppliers
OGC estimates that the Memoranda have saved £31 million on direct price
reductions in the first ten months. Thirty-one departments have so far used the
Memorandum with Microsoft and five departments have used the Memoranda
agreed with other suppliers. Departments have been slower in taking up the
terms offered by Microsoft than OGC anticipated

It also hands the keys to the provider by removing competition options.

Instead government should drive for common standards – common calendaring, open document format, pdf, common spreadsheet interchange etc.

On the hardware sides driving for standards will help keep competition – UK goverment is big enough to influence feature sets and keep competition (especially as most of the feature sets it needs are already demanded by big business for security purposes anyway)

Who cares what system is run (and the variety is managable). Open standards allow every different system to use the web, the same can be done for document exchange, calendaring, you name it, without locking to a single supplier stack.

It can be done, but can the government (any party) achieve it? Not without a heck of a lot more planning.