Cultural change is a critical success factor for the delivery of the ICT strategy. People and their skills are the key element of delivery of an ICT infrastructure that meets the requirements of users, customers and stakeholders. The ICT strategy incorporates building capability as well as capacity in ICT.
- Professionalising IT enabled change: The Government IT Profession focuses on driving public sector organisations to strive for IT excellence. At the heart of this work is the Government IT Profession skills and competency framework which is now being used for recruitment, training and performance management of IT professionals. The launch of the Technology In Business Fast-stream has been extremely successful and is now the preferred route for graduate recruitment into Government IT. Increasing the capability of our staff will not only improve the performance of our IT, it will also reduce the amount the public sector spends on ICT consultants and contractors by some 50% by 2020.
- Reliable Project Delivery: Reliable project delivery was introduced in response to perceptions of significant IT failure in the public sector. Cabinet Office work closely with the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) to focus reporting and effort on those major programmes and projects that have a high complexity and associated high delivery risk. Taking a more structured approach to skills matching, reporting and management of portfolios will be a key enabler for consistent high delivery of public sector ICT programme and projects.
- Supply Management: Approximately 65% of Government ICT is outsourced to the private sector. Whilst this brings capable resources and efficiency, Government has not always managed these relationships effectively. The Supply Management work-stream will build on the work already undertaken by the CIO Council, OGC and our Industry partners to deliver a step change in the efficiency and effectiveness of outsourced Government ICT. This will incorporate delivery of the ICT Procurement strategy for Government which will provide the procurement vehicles to enable implementation of this ICT strategy.
- International Alignment: ICT does not stop at international borders and the UK public sector operates in over 145 countries. A key element of this strategy therefore, is to ensure alignment and compliance with EU agreements, decisions and treaties. Cabinet Office also has regular interaction with peers from the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The UK is recognised as a world leader in the use of ICT in delivering public services. Sharing best practice and solving common problems will ensure that we continue to exploit technology to its full effect in our efforts to deliver constantly improving services.
I worked for a while on IT systems in the NHS. One of the major problems with IT systems by users was the arrogant attitude of the IT staff. Here are some of examples.
Working in a Foundation Trust Hospital, the IT manager did not want to put PCs provided for the Choose and Book project out in the hospital because “they might not be used enough”. The fact that they were not used at all when sitting in the store was not a relevant argument.
Working in a Primary Care Trust (PCT), the IT staff saw their careers as dependent on what happened the head office. GPs did not matter at all and were ignored as far a possible. One consequence was poor adoption of new systems by GPs, even if they were interested in computers.
On one occasion in the PCT the main server in the head office broke down. All the backups were on the same computer and they were lost as well. It took a week to get the systems restored. The directors in the PCT expressed thanks to the IT staff for the long hours they had spent recovering the system. Nobody mentioned that the problem was largely caused by the failure of the IT staff to have an effective backup policy.
IT services in the public sector will not improve without a change in attitude amongst the staff. Users (both inside and outside the public sector) are their customers and the most critical thing is provision of service to users. Unfortunately “service” is a dirty word now in most areas of life; the only thing which matters is “me”. Instead of rushing off to hire lots of new graduates, Government IT might be better served by looking at older IT Professionals who are rejected by both public and private sector simply because of age.
Professionalising change cannot occur when ministers ignore the evidence and advice of professionals. Every professional said the NHS IT redesign was doomed from day one.
Good IT strategy is almost always organic and evolutionary – “big bang” changes are headlines and ministerial tv minute grabbers but rarely the right approach. This is coupled with a failure to recognize and report good IT to the public in part because good IT upgrading and process isn’t visible because it doesn’t make Daily Mail grabbing headlines.
“Tax system now handles twice as many citizens without catastrophe” is just not a headline, even though a huge success.
Recognizing this would fix most of the IT delivery problems by delivering small bite sized changes.
Logica.i2
Project Delivery is only possible with Good Project Management.It seems that the Government is missing the point again.
The key thing they haven’t taken on board here is that if you want to do the biggest IT-related programmes in the world you need the best people and the best governance. Instead of which we can’t get the biggest Programme Managers because they are typically earning more than the Prime Minister and we can’t get clear decisions on, for example, requirements made in a reasonable time-frame to enable the projects to progress properly.
So projects overrun and often fail.
Successful programme delivery is an organisational capability which goes way beyond the professional capability of IT folks.
Senior Civil Servants and Ministers need education on how to support large programmes effectively and shouldn’t be allowed to start big programmes until they can show they can handle them.
Either that or let’s stick to doing smaller, more manageable things because that’s all the UK Govt programme delivery capability is good for.
Professionalising IT is a very good idea, but it is tragically late for the UK government. Many government IT projects are fantastically expensive and poorly designed by private sector standards and it is going to take a bit more than graduate recruitment to resolve this. The UK government needs a professional IT Architecture function to the same standards as FTSE 100 companies, and it needs it now, not in 2020. Such a function would make for better technical solutions and also a much more equal relationship with vendors and consultancies. Many of which regard pubic-sector work as a reliable cash cow because government has no IT professionals who can present any kind of a challenge to their work.