We still see idealogues and business managers unwittingly making strategic IT decisions, without even realising that they are affecting strategy that, in turn, effects total cost of ownership, and hence, sustainability. There is zero strategic IT governance inside English government because those making the decisions haven’t the slightest idea of the consequences of their ‘business decisions’.

“David, I’ve promised Gordon Brown a solution in eighteen months and I don’t care how brown-field or dirty the solution.” That senior civil servant was committing £100Ms of tax-payers’ money to an unsustainable solution to hit his performance-managed target and earn his next gong…

Those concerned about connections with enterprise / information architectures should have no fear, but be assisted in handling people issues.

Those concerned with the auditing of carefully designed formal work flows will be reassured.

Those that are prepared to recognise officially that the real organisation and its energy is contained in the informal networks that mesh with the formal, will be encouraged to combine the two in creating new IT support to “business” activity.

Think Boeing. They achieved a six fold increase in productivity in two days of effort involving 200 staff in designing a new test flight centres’s processes using value network input.

The future IS here. But goodness knows where to start in the conservative approach to procurement. Safe-fail in testing new methoids is key in our current crisis. Fail – safe is a misnomer.

Issue? A total lack of governance from national government, and the clueless, quango auditors…

“The pervasive use of ICT goes beyond the public sector. In the UK, the ICT Industry employs about 1 in 20 people. There are over 100,000 ICT companies and many sell to the public sector. Half of Europe’s productivity gains in the last few years have been attributed to ICT investment. So much so that the Gross Value Add per ICT job is £81,400, some 2.5 times higher than the UK average – this may be attributed to the high skill set of those employed within ICT – 55% of ICT people are qualified to at least level 4, nearly double that of the UK working population.
It is estimated that there are over 35,000 IT Professionals in the public sector after outsourcing. Research from e-skills indicated that the public sector employs in total over 10% of the entire UK workforce, at some 135,000.”
Irrelevant waffle doesn’t belong in a technology strategy …

“SOA provides a set of governing principles and concepts that define how services will operate with each other and requires a common approach to the detailed information (metadata) associated with services.”

You need to treat each application you have as an asset, SOA, is very good for wrapping and packaging older otherwise date expired applications and giving them a new life as part of a enterprise application set. Previously inaccessible applications can then be integrated into the wider Enterprise. Services provide a façade behind which older systems can be transformed with minimal impact on the downstream/consumer systems. This is a very important concept, when you consider the comments later in the document about reducing the number of applications in play and the duplication of service provision. SOA is mainstream now and has been for a number of years.

“Hosting applications within the Government Cloud (G-Cloud) means that organisations will be able to pay per use for applications.” Pay per use is an interesting concept, they could do interesting things around the number of cpu cycles each department uses per month, a bit like I get an electricity bill for a quarter the Inland Revenue might get a bill for the number of CPU cycles used in a quarter…. The danger is that you add another level of administration that eliminates the costs savings.

You could also introduce a level of unpredictability to the size of you bill at the end of the quarter. Though for an organisation like HM Gov I’d like to think they would have a fairly good handle on the potential customer base and demand levels, eg, Inland Rev should know how many potential tax returns there are to enter, how many email accounts they need etc…

The G-Cloud terminology is confusing, its not really Cloud in the true sense more software as a service or computing on demand… or am I being pedantic ..

There are also issues highlighted by other contributors around the data security and privacy legislation that affects the use of the cloud. There is for example significant data protection legislation that would prevent the effective export of Inland Rev data to a cloud hosted outside the EU. I honestly can’t see HMG hosting its data/services outside the UK.

What isn’t mentioned is virtualisation upon which a lot of the commercial computing power on demand products are based. The flexibility a virtualised server farm can give to a large organisation is huge. If you are looking to reduce costs, your environmental footprint, the number of physical computers you have to maintain and the number of people required to keep them going ….. that’s the way to go.

Bring the duplicate applications from the different government departments in to the virtualised server farm, use the SOA architecture then evolve out the weaker applications, consolidate mail/collaboration services onto a single unified platform. That’s what large companies do when they merge, merging government IT needs to take a similar route.

Working in the Public Sector is like climbing a ladder in a suit of jelly.

Everything is constantly changing. What was true yesterday is no longer necessarily true today.

Inefficient use of resources will continue as long as knee-jerk policies are the norm. The public sector needs time to implement new policies, and it’s not uncommon for the rules to change before the project is finished.

There are efficiencies to be had from “joined up working” (between central and local govt, and between depts). But this needs to be based on fundamentals. Get those in place first, then add bells and whistles. Failure here, IMO, is the cause for the failures in Connecting for Health.

Imagine if some poorly paid government I[C]T worker messed up a database upgrade and wiped out tax returns, car tax renewals, social service payments and ordering supplies for the army for a week or so.

How we would all laugh.

We need:

1. Customer-centric business vision – everything is organisation-centric at the moment

2. An end to civil servants & politicians making tactical decisions on technology without any understanding of the long-term consequences

3. An understanding that there has to be strategic, architectural governance over the use of enabling technologies (completely absent in England – present in Scandinavia & China – where SITFO.org has engaged)

4. Cross party buy-in to a long-term strategy of enabling technologies being supplied as a public utility through regional service centres, on a public, high-speed fibre network.

Video case studies available at: http://www.sitfo.org

But “narrative” suggests not merely policy formulation but also political debate. In other words, they reserve the right to selectively use some of our comments as a stick to attack the present Government.

However, it is good that the BBC is monitoring this crowdsourcing experiment, and I trust that Rory and his colleagues will catch any overly party-political use of this material.

The report by Tanya Byron regarding the protection and education of young people in a ‘digital world’ could be further enhanced by a government taking note of the American “Broadband Data Improvement Act” / “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act”. This would mean for schools having internet access a requirement to certify that there internet safety policy includes internet safety education. The slowness of schools/ local authorities to implement the ‘harnessing Technology’ strategy (see above ofsted report) suggests that esafety is likely to be delivered in a piece meal, ‘cottage industry’ like manner to paraphrase ofsted. Could the Conservatives ensure that all our young people experience a safe, 21st Century education?