Support innovation

Re-use existing assets as the preferred option

The first statement says we should think outside the box! The second statement says we should not try to re-invent the wheel.

It’s not even a very good list of the “what”. Where is the commitment to engage with citizens and enable public services to be designed around them, not Whitehall’s needs? What are the capabilities that Whitehall IT is aspiring to deliver? Where is transparency? Where is developing a more competitive market? (Which you would need to do before being able to exploit it). Where is the need to improve the governance? When are people going to be held accountable (for success or failure?)

Where is the commitment to reforming procurement rules so that SMEs can get a look-in?

“Develop and exploit strong relationships with our suppliers” seems to support the view that the CIO wants merely to have a few companies doing all govt IT rather than a thriving, competitive and diverse marketplace.

In fact, I begin to wonder if their ideal would be to have one single private sector supplier. It’s the way they seem to be driving things (and doesn’t HP now have something like 60% market share alone?)

You might as well just say “we’ll employ better IT managers”. Hey – we might as well say “we’ll employ better and cheaper IT managers who wear thermal underwear and save on the heating bills”.

But what we need to do is to save shedloads of money, provide much better services fast, and to start to restore the basis of people’s trust in the IT-enabled aspects of public services. I think it’s a bigger task, more urgent and more important, than these principles suggest.

There is no coherent direction here, just a load of plausible sounding words that have been dropped on a page.

No no no, basic error. The system must be secure from design (and arguably before since if the original idea is insecure you can’t fix it). It must importantly also be secure to and through shutdown and disposal.

Needs to replace “exploit our suppliers” with “Get more suppliers and competition including small British businesses”

Imagine if the olympic team was selected from a short list of the fifty largeest people in the country – that would be dumb., but it’s exactly the way IT procurement in government works.