In October 2005, Government published its strategy ‘Transformational Government enabled by IT’, which set the agenda for the next five years. The strategy focused on three broad themes to enable better service delivery through the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT): putting the citizen at the heart of what we do; shared services and professionalising IT enabled business change.
The newly appointed Government Chief Information Officer drove implementation of the strategy through the Chief Information Officers Council (CIOc). Successful delivery of this strategy has been highlighted in the Transformational Government Annual Reports and the original strategy (and subsequent extensions) is now widely copied around the world. Since publication of the original strategy, substantial progress has been made in its implementation and onward development. Notably, the CIO Council has developed an ICT Strategy for Government that builds on previous policy announcements and will deliver a high quality ICT infrastructure. The ICT Strategy is aligned with the Digital Britain Strategy, the Cyber Security Strategy, Building Britain’s Future, Excellence and Fairness, the Operational Efficiency Programme (OEP), and the recommendations of the Power of Information taskforce. Furthermore, the Office of the Government CIO has taken a proactive role in developing many of the recommendations in these strategies.
The need to continue to transform public services and to use ICT to enable transformation of the way the public sector runs and operates is accelerating. To meet increased and increasing demand within this complex technology arena, the UK public sector has built an ICT infrastructure that in many instances duplicates solutions across different areas of Government. The ICT strategy will ensure that the public sector ICT infrastructure will now go through a process of standardisation and simplification based on the premise of a common infrastructure designed to enable local delivery suited to local needs. Delivery will increasingly be through partnerships between public, private and third sectors and this strategy enables greater interoperability to underpin this model. The strategy provides high level detail on the fourteen key elements – at points it may appear technical, but this is necessary for a technology strategy.
Through implementation of this strategy, the public sector will reuse assets to maximise return on investment, deliver secure and efficient services in a consistent manner and take account of evolving risks from global threats such as climate change, economic instability and cyber-security. Only by taking a strategic, long term approach can public sector ICT begin to meet the many demands placed upon it (including delivery of the required £3.2bn savings called for by OEP from more efficient use and procurement of ICT).
It’s like Groundhog Day – I am pretty sure I have seen this stuff several times in the past decade. It’s also unbelievable that it will take two more General Elections before we see “efficiency savings” let alone any cashable ones.
I like the idea that Government IT will be powered by G-AS, though. It seems entirely appropriate when you read this tosh.
More constructive comments to follow.
Using all this official language and government jargon is not helpful in explaining exactly what the purpose of this Report is and what their plan for IT services will entail.
Nice! Kudos to the Conservatives – the medium is the message
Ummm, from what I’ve read (dozen pages or so) it’s like something out of any organisation’s IT strategy.
Cross skill, rationalise suppliers etc etc. None of this is rocket science.
I’ve never worked in the public sector, but I can imagine that systems have been built over the years with the appropriate technology at the time. What this means is there’s a shedload of legacy stuff that may need to be integrated or replaced.
My impression (and it is only that) is that the public sector try and satisfy every single requirement with an IT solution.
Sometimes either IT solutions are inappropriate, or there ought to be more application of Pareto’s principle.
Why do government projects nearly always massively overrun both time & budget? There are private organisations which are fairly sizeable, with legacy applications and so on, and they do not seem to suffer these problems.
Often the projects are delivered by the private sector so what is the fundamental difference between delivering a project in the private sector and one in the public sector?
The only thing I can think of is People (i.e. civil servants) and Processes (Governance).
As I said, this is only my perception and would happy if I was proved wrong.
All said and done however, the more recent developments (customer facing) I think have been pretty good from a user experience perspective. DVLA, HMRC and so on seem to have stepped up a gear in delivering efficient, IT enabled processes.
(Whether there are armies of staff at the other end printing things off & re-keying them I don’t know; but from a user perspective, good steps in the right direction)
Could we have a PDF of this please
The trouble with this report is it basically boils down to a bunch of civil servants who have little understanding of the technologies they advocate, being led on by expensive consultancy firms on passing fads.
There is nothing to address existing extreme waste, the fact that IT buyers in the civil service often do not really understand anything about IT past basic computer use, and that there is far too much focus on proprietary software as opposed to open source.
In other words – a typical government report.
Techwatch – if you have a read they are looking at opensource….
@Ian S
The PDF used to be here (http://idealgovernment.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/GOV_ICT_Strat1.pdf) but strangely it seems to have disappeared…
Interestingly enough, the private sector doesn’t even use the term ‘ICT’, just ‘IT’. That the government even uses different language than the rest of the industry illustrates the gap in thinking between largely successful private IT and large unsuccessful public ICT.
Plain English…please! The reason everyone is so disenageged and distrustful of politics is (apart from the obvious) that no one can just write simple stuff in plain english. anyone in business knows that the only way to get a big initiative off the ground is to reduce all this micro detail into 2-3 pages of really meaningful, plain english communication. Not spin, just plain english. If the authors can’t do that, do they really understand the core issues? By the looks of this report, no. They are lost in the detail.
@Don
“Often the projects are delivered by the private sector so what is the fundamental difference between delivering a project in the private sector and one in the public sector?”
When a public sector project runs over budget, it is to the benefit of the private sector partner. Running overbudget in an internal private sector project directly affects their profits.
Thats why projects run overbudget far more frequesntly when the taxpayer pays, rather than the shareholder.
The public/private partnership model encourages overspend. No matter how many contractual penalties and targets are set, the money always flows in the direction of the private companies.
Hi
As an IT consultant working within the NHS (NPFiT) Program for the last 5 years, I have seen a large change within in the way Healthcare is now being delivered to all aspects to the public. Facts – The Government has spent around £20 billion upwards on the LARGEST IT civilian project in the world – and don’t forget, no other country has a nationally connected health system like ours (Germany, USA, France and every other western country is looking very hard ) – So when this system is completed and successfully installed. Our families, children, loved ones and everyone who uses the NHS will be able to access instant medical records within seconds – they will not need to wait days for our old manual records to be delivered. The biggest problem with the Baby P case was that old obsolete systems do not talk to one another – so crucial information cannot be accessed and shared. I am not saying this would have been avoided, however you just never know.
Being on the front line – Labour has made mistakes, however we are always learning, evolving and becoming better at delivering these projects. This Government has my full support and I am very interested in how we can develop further.
I’ll just say one thing about civil service IT in general. It takes nearly 6 months to even process an permanent job application, so how do they ever expect to employee dedicated and professional British staff? The moment someone gets a job offer, they get out of it. This means more contracted out work to “gold” partners, and thus more gravey train expenses and waste.
Personally, I prefer the acronym “CIT&T” — Computing, Information Technologies plus Telematics.
Sadly there are too many with interests vested in maintaining the status quo. Some radical game changing leadership is required.
Software as a service (or the Cloud) may provide an engagement model that will enable the Public Sector to procure value based solutions, as opposed to White Elephants.
Like every other Government or official paper it is written in the form of 100 to 1. That means why write one word when you can use 100 words.
Short, sharp and to the point – save time and money.
The main problem (as ever) is the absence of the customer, or of any acknowledgement that government IT is developing in a world where people’s own IT and ability to participate in life supported by IT is changing far faster than government is.
To paraphrase Shirkey: Where’s everybody?
I have voted Lib Dem and Labour in the past but am taking an open minded approach to the next election -hence checking Tory website out. My main thoughts are as below:
1. I do not like the smug attitude you are demonstrating about publishing a leaked “draft” report – does this mean it has not been formally approved for release. How would your party feel if the tables turned?
2. Like all reports it could be heavily precised and for non IT literate people like me it is largely incomprehensible – however it appears to suggest we are performing significantly better than other EU countries.
3. the amount spent on IT does seem excessive but were we behind other EU countries in 1997 and how much further forward are we compared to other EU countries now? What cost savings have the IT initiatives made.
4. Some of the government initiatives make sense – online filing of tax returns and the technical information that can be obtained from the Revenue and Customs website is very good. – there have been some “glitches” but from my own work experiance most new IT systems have problems that are only discovered once the systems/software is put to use. I have also used NHS direct site, driving licence/theory booking site and benefits agency site and they all compare favourable to private company sites and must have resulted in greater efficiencies.
Prof. Marcus Xaesar says:
December 1, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Personally, I prefer the acronym “CIT&T” — Computing, Information Technologies plus Telematics.
In fact, the shift from “Computing” to “IT” was perhaps the biggest scam and conceptual disaster since the day people forgot that Pythagorus was a mystic and a mathematician.
“Computing” involves relating “meaning” to “context” -in the classic sense of “information is the difference that makes a difference”. So when computing one has to sort out where the various “differences” are -and what exactly they mean or imply.
Hopwever, the “IT” paradigm isolates “meaning” (now called “content”) from structrual “context” by pretending that “information” is univerasal and objective and thus can be stored, retrieved and disseminated accordingly without further thought or understanding.
The result is that the “Age of Information” actually becomes the “Age of Propaganda” -so perhaps PIT (Propaganda and Indocrination Technology) would be a more honest term.
Basically any strategy for PIT systems (in the private or public sector) is (by definition) extremely suspect and liable to generate a nasty case of “garbage as input gives garbage as output”.
this says that thanks to the “successful delivery of [the Transformational Government] strategy .. [this] strategy will ensure that the public sector ICT infrastructure will now go through a process of standardisation and simplification based on the premise of a common infrastructure”. unbelievable.
so, there are no significant issues with government IT that needed to be addressed then? the government must have learnt all possible lessons from its data losses, failed, overspent, late and, as yet still undelivered, projects – HMRC, NPfIT, ContactPoint, the IdM scheme, etc, etc. really? an honest – and significantly more useful – starting point would have been an open, independent and expert appraisal of the policy and strategy failures inherent in the 2005 strategy and the difficulties in progress since then. that, rather than arrogant political spin, would have provided a better informed foundation for this new strategy which now seems fundamentally flawed from its very beginning…
I think it is good to heed Maria’s warning:
> I do not like the smug attitude you are demonstrating about publishing a leaked “draft” report – does this mean it has not been formally approved for release. How would your party feel if the tables turned?
I’m comfortable with this if its an exercise in showing that a government policy that one might have thought obscure and unexciting is in fact important, that people care about it, and that there’s no harm at all in bathing it in sunshine and adding a touch of common sense. But we dont believe it to be their final document.
So: if the final document has taken heed of comments here and is improved by that are we:
a) disappointed they havent made fools of themselves so we cant attack it any more or
b) pleased to have shown that some constructive crowdsourcing can improve even such a geeky policy area.
Correct answer: (b)
One of the major reasons for so many government IT projects overrunning, and ending up costing far more than the budget, is because the government was unrealistic when they set out the requirements, and unrealistic in their expectations of cost when they chose their suppliers.
Thus the massive NHS database project has all but fallen apart because some of the suppliers decided they were better off making a loss than trying to meet the government’s utterly unrealistic demands, and so backed out of the project. It’s cost them huge amounts of money, but the alternative was worse.
Another common problem with large-scale government IT projects is the failure to think through all the practical, day-to-day implications of implementing a new system – i.e. all the training that is required for staff to use the new system properly, all the time that has to be spent adjusting to using the new system, how other nearby systems may also need to be adjusted to fit in with the new system, etc.
So even when the suppliers have delivered the product, and it works, it does not get used properly because all the other necessary changes have not been made – and thus all the cost of purchasing it is wasted.
I’m sure that an honest and constructive on-line discussion regarding almost anything can produce useful insights -provided they are not cherry picked too dishonestly.
However, the use of childish hype terms such as “crowdsourcing” really does make me suspect that it is already too late. That Propaganda and Indoctrination Technology has already reached a level of acceptence by both politicians and public that renders all hope for intelligent solutions to pressing problems as good as impossible. I guess the one lesson that computing specialists should have learned by now is that when hype prevails intelligent solutions become impossible.
PS: what happened to the thread started by Rory Cellan-Jones? It seems to have dissapeared and I so wanted to comment on the poor quality and irresponsible attitudes of BBC Technology journalists who are so uninvolved that their articles generally end up being uncritical advertorials for consumer products. No doubt it is ultimately journalists who spread the hype that kills any real understanding of that which is thus obscured by their popularised myths.
Wow – so you have a leaked a document a week before it will be published – how exciting
What a pointless excercise, any strategy at this level is going to be largley ‘mom & apple pie’ the important aspect is the implimentation.
How about being brave and actually making some propsals of your own for discussion?
Oh and why so coy about party branding?
The whole approach seems unlikely to succeed in my view. The IT strategy deals largely with IT and attempts to describe an environment which allows all of Government to arrive at common standards of technology and architecture – different from today. What is missing is the stability and unified standards of requirements across the many strands of ‘government’ over many years.
In one sense , unless a government does nothing, it is constantly requiring changes to computerised processes. Each change costs considerable effort and in many cases, changes to the applications dealing with data.
Current ‘best value’ legislation requires competitive tendering by Government agencies purchasing IT. As different histories of IT infrastructure are established at different times in different agencies ( or authorities, or centres) the evolution paths over time which appear to offer the best value at the point of decision , promulgate the differences.
Some style of Big Bang standardisation always looks attractive , but the seeds of self destruction are built into the decision making processes imposed by government on its various agencies. To really standardise and gain economies of scale, one would need a process whereby only one version of any application used in government was in use at one time. That is a degree of central control that is probably unachievable. Even having common architecture across government has seemed to date impossible to achieve, let alone common data standards. Common applications ? Can’t see it, myself.
There is another facet to government IT which is well worth considering. Whilst Government is a huge employer and a frenetic regulator of all it surveys , it can only purchase technology that is viable in the commercial world on a planetary scale. And that can change independently of national Government strategies. ( I won’t even discuss the stupidity of national governments inventing their own IT technologies )
This implies a risk that no Government IT strategy which defines technology into the future is robust; and that any robustness decreases with time.
To reduce the cost of Government collecting and processing data, it is not enough to rely on IT strategies: it would have to significantly reduce the volume and complexity of its use of data over time. (I.e. simplify, standardise and control most of the jobs involved) This is of course an anathema to most central governments, which is why ultimately IT projects never deliver savings over time – and I would also venture the same applies to IT strategies.
“. . .a process of standardisation and simplification based on the premise of a common infrastructure designed to enable local delivery suited to local needs . . .”
What contradictory nonsense.
In IT, standardisation is the very antithesis of simplification as the complexity of a system that attempts to serve more than one function increases exponentially with the number of diverse applications.
A common infrastructure (whatever they mean by that) implies a centrally imposed framework that can’t possibly be suited to local needs.
Standardisation should be replaced by diversity, constrained only by the need for connectivity with others. Get rid of the “evaluation committees” who have been responsible for the costly disasters for which we have paid dearly, and let local managers use local companies to fulfil their needs. Web-based solutions ensure a degree of standardisation and they combine widespread access with high levels of security – and it’s a discipline in which small businesses excel and come up with really innovative and productive solutions.
And if a mistake is made, it will affect only a small part of the operation for which the local decision-maker will be held accountable. A far cry from the widespread squandering of huge sums of taxpayers’ money that creates havoc for vast numbers of folk and for which no-one seems to accept responsibility.
As above
Could we have a PDF of this please?
DO IT NOW !!
Maria lists the government initiatives she thinks make sense – it is worth noting that ALL of these were actually created when the Conservatives were still in power – it has just taken this long to get them up and running and making a difference to us, the citizen/customer.
And THAT’s the point. Major IT-based infrastructure projects take a long time to make a difference to the customer experience. Most of the initiatives that are set running will only deliver real bottom line one or two general elections later! So it almost doesn’t matter who is in government when they start.
Having said that, the politicians still all expect instant results. The NHS project is a case in point. Blair gave them 4 years to achieve something that everyone knew was going to take at least 15 years to achieve. But with a lifecycle that long, its unlikely to deliver all the planned benefits – the technology, the NHS and the world will all have changed too much!
The alternative, to create a lot of small, local, short-term, ‘building blocks’ projects, using the technology available at the time, doesn’t make attractive headlines for the politicians but it definitely is the way forward. David Cameron please take note!
I am the managing director & co-founder of Memset (a managed hosting / utility computing company), and I am also a main board member of Intellect UK, the UK’s high tech trade association.
It is a real shame to see so many skeptics out there, since the reality is that government has learned from the mistakes of the past, and is not going to avoid repeating them. Further, this is a bold strategy which, in short, is trying to bring the benefits of the Cloud Computing revolution into the public sector, which ultimately will save public money, reduce carbon emissions and improve services.
Also, a lot of the outlined plans are very practical and grounded in common sense – aiming to take advantage of Moore’s Law related improvements in computer efficiency, and make good use of available technologies to share software solutions across government.
To the critics:
To those saying “it is behind closed doors” – government has engaged with the ICT industry via Intellect UK, and it is not some big conspiracy among a select few. To attempt to address the challenges of public sector ICT without broad engagement across suppliers (both old and new) and the people using the tools (public sector folk mainly) would be foolish, and is not something that is being done.
To those saying “It is too technical” – the report has been leaked! It is not a version designed for public consumption, but rather certain individuals have chosen to make public something still being worked upon.
I would encourage you all not be too quick to cast aspersions on what I think has the potential to be the best thing to happen to government IT in a long while.
Kate.
*and is not going to avoid repeating them (I need glasses! :p)
I made the same mistake again! I meant:
“…and IS going to avoid repeating them”
Kate says
> To those saying “it is behind closed doors” – government has engaged with the ICT industry via Intellect UK, and it is not some big conspiracy among a select few. To attempt to address the challenges of public sector ICT without broad engagement across suppliers (both old and new) and the people using the tools (public sector folk mainly)
Whether you care to see it or not, there is a problem here. The missing voice is the people these tools are supposed to benefit. See today’s report from Consumer Focus on DirectGov for example. It suits Intellect members to have, as well as the massive central databases in CfH, childrens’ work and ID, some £multim web sites like DirectGov, TransportDirect or NHS Choices. But tell me: does any of these have the ease of use and effectiveness of Fixmystreet? And just how much did that cost the taxpayer?
The Whitehall-Intellect axis has stifled real discussion about what the direction of government IT should be. It does happen behind closed doors, and bears all the signs and symptoms of groupthink. You use the word “conspiracy”: that would be overegging it. But to call it narrow, self-serving and a bit lazy would be fair comment.
“The ICT Strategy is aligned with the Digital Britain Strategy, the Cyber Security Strategy, Building Britain’s Future, Excellence and Fairness, the Operational Efficiency Programme (OEP), and the recommendations of the Power of Information taskforce”
This nicely illustrates the problem. No-one owns the all-up vision and strategy for the role of IT in Whitehall. In particular, the role it needs to play in the delivery of public services. Each of the above reports is weak in its own right. Put together, they are fragmentary, incomplete and contradictory.
If just one change were to be made, it would be to have clear ownership across the breadth and depth of IT vision and strategy. And to have it engaged at Ministerial level in the Cabinet. That would ensure it was better joined-up and better integrated with the day to day concerns of public service delivery.
The current CIO seems focused only on technical issues, driving his Transformational Govt agenda of a series of centralised databases and a handful of chosen super-suppliers who get all govt business, based on proprietary software. The central team are going around making clear they want to drive this programme as quickly as possible and to make it “irreversible”. It is clear the current system, roles and personalities are not working. Change is needed in the governance of IT in Whitehall.
Where is the vision? Where is the delivery? What are the outcomes being sought? What capabilities does the public sector need and how does the IT planning help provide those capabilities? And, where is the strategy? For one thing this is not, is a strategy.
There is a saying in the services. Sometimes referred to as the 5 P’s sometimes the 6 P’s depending on how colourful your language.
Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance
(I’ll leave the reader to work out the 6P’s)
Any ethos that purports that practice (trial and error) is going to finally get it right is always going to cost someone (taxpayer normally) a great deal more than morally it ought to.
Business, public or private, is designed to make money.
In terms of overspend the problem is the ideas that underpin the final product are evolving therefore causing the project to evolve with it.
Fact; Life evolves. Technology evolves. We (our daily lives) evolve with it.
Time equals money so, since time is not finite nor are the costs.
Crowdsourcing will not help, neither will it reduce or save money
If we want a bunch of bananas we go out and buy a bunch of bananas. A packet of tea. A box of biscuits etc.
ICT or IT, call it what you will, just needs the 5 P’s.
Specify what you need, source it, install it, switch it on – then for gods-sake stop fiddling with it and leave it alone. We might just see some output for our money (agreed price)- or is that too much to ask?
This government works on the premise – get the result at any cost – that’s why we are bankrupt.
You are going to have to do better than this David if you want my vote. I am intelligent enough not to make decisions (unlike Mr Brown) based on class. But neither am I a fool to be bought by just any alternative view.
Show me a credible 5 P’s. Then I’ll vote for you.
I work in IT systems.
Give me 10% of the budget and I’ll return 10x the performance. The Government go about this kind of project backwards, they put the contract out to tender then try (and fail) to fit the specification to the budget. When will they learn to manage projects (not only IT ones) properly, looking at demand and existing resources before writing blank cheques for inefficient, inadequate and future-doomed systems.
Major inefficiencies arose when, instead of establishing and managing a market, Cabinet Office took control of IT innovation. The major efficiencies that arise from a competitive market were lost.
Jerry Jarvis, of edexcel, together with other awarding bodies lobbied to create the Personal Learner Record (PLR) of each individual’s qualifications at a much lower cost than a massive Cabinet Office database. Awarding Bodies are experts with intimate knowledge of the stakeholders.
Despite the Government’s rhetoric about the importance of the frontline, it is precisely these people who have not been consulted.
The Government PLR is potentially useful costs could be significantly reduced if the PLR was re-factored.
To complicate matters learner records were developed by both QCA and MIAP. A single integrated service is to be launched in September 2010. This is one example of where a new administration could establish a distributed model where information is integrated from different providers as and when it is needed rather than being held within a single massive database: the new healthcare model in fact.
By politicising IT major stakeholders were able to obstruct potentially useful initiatives. For example, employers increasingly want information about skills both when they recruit staff and for their development by the company. Some HE sector bodies saw this as a threat.
The QCF will “provide information, advice and guidance to learners and employers on achieving credit and qualifications from the QCF” but not skills”. Yet QCF is a primary means of providing advice and guidance.
The number of students completing vocational qualifications who apply for HE is disappointing, perhaps because the skills that were central to the qualification and demanded by the employer are not explicit in the QCF or HE.
Making skills explicit in the QCF would allow me to compare my profile with job advertisments. With this facility a university making the skills they add explicit would gain competitive advantage.
The market would address the problem.
By providing an IT based service I could also harvest anonymised information about the match between individuals’ profile and employers job profile and identify the attributes associated with success.
This information will track the changing market, facilitating Government’s role to monitor and manage the market.
This could address another key problem, the inefficiency and cost of current advice and guidance.
Key issues were not addressed because government replaced the market with the Cabinet Office. But where is the evidence that this approach would work? And how would this market take account of the small scale innovation that is required in addition to shared services provided through Government or HEFCE?
The HEFCE Lifelong Learning Network initiative was flawed, but in some areas has produced sustainable webservices that are now being paid for by the organisations that originally received them free.
Local initiatives leverage the trust between people who already know each other, can produce useful bespoke webservices addressing needs not covered through central provision. The work of the University of Nottingham in the East Midlands is a good example of how this could work more generally. The ESRC centre for skills, SKOPE is developing new proposals for sustainable skills eco-systems involving employers and educators that could provide a methodological framework for taking this work forward.
A lot of waffle/padding – needs to actually state what its trying to achieve as a strategy.
Something like; our strategy is to :
Reduce costs by eliminating duplication of service provision.
Increase quality and predictability of delivery through increasing professionalism of staff
Rationalisation of the delivery platform, standardisation and simplification
Move to a shared service type infrastructure delivery model
Don’t they need to review what has/hasn’t worked from the previous version of the strategy … no lessons learnt.
Valid point that they want to use IT as an enabler to deliver public services.
“The strategy provides high level detail on the fourteen key elements – at points it may appear technical, but this is necessary for a technology strategy.” Trust me; on the grand scheme of things this is not a very technical strategy ..they get a lot deeper than this …
The report misses out at least one prior question – a rigid analysis of of the do-nothing option.
One commentator points to DVLA as a good example. It may well be well implemented but was it necessary?
All the information required to get a tax disc has already been provided to an insurance company – and in order to get a tax disc the DVLA on-line system interrogates the motor insurance database.
A simpler solution offering better customer focus and joined up services would have been to hand the online insurance companies a stack of tax discs.
Similarly to get a student load the first thing you need is a bank account and by the time you’ve got one of those and a college place you are pretty well authenticated
..oh yes, authentication…
remind me, what the government gateway does again?
Problems are plenty… not enough emphasis on skilling up the public sector workforce and reliance on contractors (who can do a good job to be fair to them), so no retained in house skills, scepticism within the workforce of govt IT depts and a reluctance to have to go through the pain barrier to transform when their current process works fine (CFH NPFIT vs doctors surgeries as an example), uncertainty about the industry in general and what will happen to quangos, meaning other orgainisations are not keen to engage (NPIA vs police forces) etc.
Technology is the easy bit, its the people, processes and attitudes that are dysfunctional, no sense of common goal whatsoever, each department is out for themselves ONLY!!
I read on one of the news e-bulletins that directgov is about to be relaunched.
This is yet another example of the sort of thing that has to looked at. Is “directgov” any better that “open” was? Probably as many opinions as users
Does “www.directionlessgov.com” give better results?
Try it and see
However, why is there a (yet another) “relaunch” planned and what is the cost associated with it?
If it is because they are “failing to get the message across”?
May be it’s because they need to spend more time on the message and less time on the envelope it comes in.
I was involved (from a major infrastructure supplier’s viewpoint) in goverment IT between 2004 and 2006 and was appalled at what I saw. As an experienced project and programme manager with grey hair and scars on my back – the result of successful delivery of several international programmes – the one observation which cried out loud and clear above all others was the almost total inability of government departments to define requirements. It seemed no-one was prepared to stand up and accept responsibility for signing requiremenmts off. Once some form of requiremenmts statement was eventually defined the concept of configuration management and change control allied with assessment of proposed change in terms of scope, schedule and cost seemed an alien concept; the result as every project manager knows is requirements creep and hence cost and schedule overrun.
The other point as many observations have been made on this website is the lack of simple English – jargon is used where plain words would do. Sir Ernest Gowers book “The Complete Plain Words” should be mandatory reading for all involved in drafting policy documents.