1. We will impose a moratorium on existing and upcoming procurements so that the principles set out above can be applied to them. We will strengthen the central CIO role for this purpose.
Over the past decade the government has spent well in excess of £100 billion on ICT. The result is a large number of legacy systems many of which will generate future costs to run and maintain them. Nevertheless, over the period of 2010 to 2012, estimates indicate that between £70 and £100 billion of ICT contracts (both outsourcing and projects) will be renewed or instigated during a two year period. There is therefore a once in a generation opportunity to control spending both on new systems and on legacy systems that are coming up for renewal.
In the near term, there will need to be a period of enhanced central control. The centre of any dispersed and decentralised organisation, especially at a time of financial crisis, must be able to control the biggest projects that carry financial, operational and reputational risk. The office of the Government CIO currently has no effective mandate to exert that control. We will rectify that. We believe that many billions of pounds can be saved by a vigorous approach to the ICT legacy and pipeline. An early step will be the quick building of a register of all ICT-related assets across the government (including Intellectual Property Rights so the government does not pay for material it already owns). In addition we will explore whether the CIO should have a small development team – skunkworks – to explore cheap and cheerful solutions to the government’s requirements. The strengthened CIO Office will also be charged with driving improvements in skills across government, the open data agenda, and the role of digitally enabled transparency that we set out later in this paper.
Who in Government will have responsibility for bringing IT innovation into Whitehall? A strong CIO needs the ability not just to manage existing projects but also take decisions on where alternatives exist and should be pursued.
A return to a remote, centralised Whitehall CIO is not the answer. The existing central role has come up with numerous self-serving strategies, such as “Transformational Govt/database state”, and a procurement policy aimed at keeping power in the hands of a few key big suppliers. There has not been any leadership under this model – where were the CIOs on topics such as ID Cards, ContactPoint and the like: experienced professionals elsewhere pointed out the shortcomings, but they remained silent. Departmental CIOs may need replacing with higher caliber staff, but they are at least working in depts serving real citizen need.
Two failings to fix:
- identifying the roles that are needed across Whitehall to define the *business* needs from IT, informed by IT but not dictated to by it
- putting the right individuals into those roles (maybe from a biz background rather than geek ones)
Otherwise this sounds like more of the same of what has gone wrong – a central CIO role cut off from business needs and pursuing their own narrow, technical agenda remote from the real business of Whitehall.
Why not rotate CIO leadership amongst existing departmental CIOs, rather than impose an additional remote central head? If the latter REALLY is done, an inspiring business focused leader is needed rather than a geek.
Please add rigorous analysis of the need for government to do it in the first place. Once the pass has been sold there it all becomes more difficult to stop the expenditure.
“Tax Discs on line” could have been achieved by letting on-line insurance companies issue them. They are already in the value chain, let them do a bit more.
Look at today’s newspapers – at least £26bn lost in failed IT projects. The current role doesn’t need to be strengthened at the centre – it has actively championed many of these failed projects, criticising those who have said they would fail. What is needed at the centre is a policy-driven approach to IT that brings the IT employees and contractors in Whitehall under control. And which holds them to account.
Whatever you do allocate clear responsibility to a single body / person for procurement to delivery. Somewhere in this there is the need to be active in looking for new technologies that open new ways to be “smarter cheaper greener”. By default those vendors that can not match best of breed need to catch up or be removed from list of acceptable technologies – now that will put the customer back in control? And that applies to industry analysts that feed off both plates and fail to push for a better deal for the long suffering customers.