Organisations across the public sector share a common need to provide their staff with access to computer facilities including common functions (email, word processing, spreadsheets, internet browsing etc) which are regarded as essential, day to day “tools of the trade”. Historically, however, each organisation has independently specified, developed and delivered the hardware, software and networking solutions to meet that need. This has resulted in divergent product choices which impede collaboration, incur repeated procurement and development costs and miss opportunities for economies of scale in delivery.
This situation requires us to:
- Simplify and standardise: Common technology solutions start with common requirements.
- Adopt common models: Technologies developed and proven by one organisation should be available for use by others. The commercial, contractual and cultural barriers to the adoption of existing solutions must be removed
- Commoditise: Desktop computing systems should be available “off-the-shelf”. Bespoke development should be restricted only to facilities genuinely the unique requirement of a single organisation
- Increase capability: By standardising products and sharing the outputs of past investment, spending on repeatedly solving the same problems can be eliminated and resources released to focus on enhancing and adding to system functions
- Lower price: Procurement and delivery costs can be reduced; the re-use of established technology within and between desktop services can enable faster deployments with fewer faults and reduced reworking. If the operating cost of every public sector desktop were to be reduced by just £100 pa it would yield a £400 million saving each year
Our aim is to see desktop computing across government delivered through common models and shared services. While it will be right and appropriate for there to be multiple desktop shared services operating in a competitive environment, each will serve a community sufficient to offer the maximum economy of scale. We envisage that by 2015, 80% of central government desktops will be delivered through a shared utility service with increasing levels of adoption by the wider public sector, including local government.
By 2010, we will have defined the initial set of standard desktop designs which will meet the majority of requirements in central government. New desktop implementations whether developed in-house or externally, will conform to a standard design. Common designs will drive the achievement of economies of scale in purchasing and licensing components. By 2012, confirmed standard designs will be in place and all desktop procurements using proprietary products will require suppliers to contract to deliver them to common designs and through shared services at the lowest price available to any public sector customer.
We envisage that the desktop design will evolve to converge with the cloud strategy between 2012 and 2015. In line with the Green ICT strategy, all shared utility desktop services will be carbon neutral by 2012. Their supply chains will be required to conform to sustainability standards by 2015. We will share across government the lessons learnt from managing shared services so that by 2015, effective intelligent customer models will be replicated across all shared services.
A suite of standard desktop designs is the key to delivering a significant proportion of the £3.2bn savings outlined in the Operational Efficiency Programme. The provision of these designs will provide assurance to procurement experts, Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) of programmes and Accounting Officers that solutions meet minimum Government standards on Information Assurance, Value for Money and utilise mandatory technical standards such as those in the e-Gif. Public servants will not have to think about their desktop services – they will be robust, meet their needs and provide value for money to the tax-payer.
Isn’t the point of standardising protocols that you don’t have to worry about the normalistion of solutions built on top of them? That you ensure consistent communication, but with a flexible end interface configurable to a user’s needs?
Some requirements are common. Others are very specific to the individual.
I agree. In my part of the public sector we have a number of discrete specialist systems that sit on the desktop. Whilst there could be convergence of specialist systems in a particular part of the public sector this would not be an overnight fix and there is a need to ensure a stable desktop environment with the specialist systems, hence local bespoke development. Teachers, Nurses, Police Officers etc might all be able to use common email and web browsing configurations (although even there access levels will differ) but each profession will need it’s own suite of specialist tools.
Only a halfwit would pursue a strategy that creates a market for the implementation of a single vendor’s software stack by a smaller and smaller number of large outsourcers.
One of the things that drives costs of commodity products down is healthy and viable competitors, so why the government would want to create players that are too big to fail and create barriers to market entry is inexplicable.
The organisation I work for have been aiming for one common desktop for ten years. How many did they have at the start? 8. How many do they have now? 30+.
It can be done, but can the government (any party) achieve it? Not without a heck of a lot more planning.
Ugs; not this issue again, [ Desktop | [ Itinerant | eMobility ] ]
Within limits, the simpler the desktop is, the better. Govt should keep an eye on the opportunities to get things like wordprocessing programs and presentation programs (yawn) off people’s desktop and accessed over the net. Ditto for some of the applications that might appear in the govt app store.
Government is in the position to drive towards a single stack, but a single stack fits everyone badly and means every user has the same security hole, goes down with the same bug, dies with the same update.
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.
Here’s a novel suggestion. Rather than inflict a ’standard’ desktop across the entire public service, why not ‘give’ each public servant a small budget to ‘purchase’ their own desktop and associated support services. offer them a bonus of 50% of any budgetary savings they make, and see how long it takes for 25% of the whole service to migrate to a Ubuntu/OpenOffice/Firefox/Thunderbird solution?
How does this relate to the 2003 NAO report “Purchasing and Managing Software Licences”
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
Anyone who’s had to suffer at the hands of the utterly disastrous “DII” initiative at the MoD knows damn well that half baked ideas like this, driven by people who don’t understand the issues at hand, let alone the solutions, don’t work. A bit of background – http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/11/19/228122/MoD39s-1635bn-Defence-Information-Infrastructure-hits-major.htm, and here’s the kicker, that articles was written 2 years yet the problems are still there (and in many ways, getting worse).
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.
Nice idea Feargal regarding Ubuntu, but the costs of IT support would rocket. The aim of a common desktop is to reduce IT support costs, not increase them! I’m not for one minute saying that OpenOffice is not the way to go, but just think of the learning curve for those that have only used Windoze. “Where’s my start button?”
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!
Alan says: common standards – common calendaring, open document format, pdf, common spreadsheet interchange etc
+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.
Look at HMG IT procurement – I challenge you to find any way to make projects over run time or budget any more than they already do.
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?