Demand for public services and expectations of levels of service are ever increasing. Citizens and businesses expect the same levels of access and personalisation that they see from large private sector organisations such as Amazon and Tesco. They expect to be able to access their services from multiple locations and in ways that suit the user, rather than the provider of services. The UK public sector has already made real progress in simplifying access to services and meeting this increased demand.
- In 2007/08, 13m motorists renewed their car tax online (30% of total). This is a 73% increase on last year’s figures
- 5.8 million self-assessment tax returns were completed online – which is a 56% increase on last year’s number
- Directgov now has over 15 million visits a month, and the customer satisfaction rate for Businesslink.gov.uk is over 90% (as reported in its May 2008 survey), which puts it ahead of the best commercial comparators such as Amazon.com
- NHS Choices had 2m visits by the end of the 07/08 financial year
The pervasive use of ICT goes beyond the public sector. In the UK, the ICT Industry employs about 1 in 20 people. There are over 100,000 ICT companies and many sell to the public sector. Half of Europe’s productivity gains in the last few years have been attributed to ICT investment. So much so that the Gross Value Add per ICT job is £81,400, some 2.5 times higher than the UK average – this may be attributed to the high skill set of those employed within ICT – 55% of ICT people are qualified to at least level 4, nearly double that of the UK working population.
It is estimated that there are over 35,000 IT Professionals in the public sector after outsourcing. Research from e-skills indicated that the public sector employs in total over 10% of the entire UK workforce, at some 135,000.
Technology changes offer a real opportunity for the public sector to maximise services and increase efficiency. The Chief Technology Officer Council is responsible for horizon-scanning on behalf of the CIO Council – identifying emerging technologies which could be used to improve the delivery of public services and meet known public sector challenges and business drivers.
There are many transformational technologies that will become mainstream in less than five years. Those of particular interest in a UK government context are: interactive (web 2.0) tools and processes, cloud computing technology and service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA provides a set of governing principles and concepts that define how services will operate with each other and requires a common approach to the detailed information (metadata) associated with services. Longer term there is potential for context based delivery architectures to have an impact.
Emerging technologies, such as cloud computing will have a dramatic effect on how public sector ICT is delivered behind the scenes. From an external perspective, citizens and businesses are likely to notice an increase in use of web 2.0 and social networking tools and methodologies. These will help improve public sector interaction with citizens and businesses, providing opportunity for empowerment and participation, promoting transparency and improving services. Internally, the use of Cloud technology enables different business models to be developed for the procurement, use and re-use of applications. Hosting applications within the Government Cloud (G-Cloud) means that organisations will be able to pay per use for applications. They will be able to access a software licence that is assigned to the crown and transferable across the public sector; organisations will be able to adopt a ‘pay as you go’ model – paying only for the time applications are actually in use. Implementation of a service-oriented architecture will enable delivery of the G-Cloud and Government Application Store, promoting reuse and efficiency in a secure environment.
In the longer term – 2015-2020 – additional emerging technologies will begin to be identified. Semantic technologies, when used in software, will separate data and content files from application code and meanings. This means that changes can be made more quickly, more cheaply and with reduced risk. Semantic technologies can also be applied to the internet (Semantic web) so that computers can find, share and combine information on the web. This means that computers will be able to undertake many of the transactional tasks (such as searching for public services available in your local area) that currently require human intervention. Location-aware services and developing technologies that enable more energy efficient operations are also likely to play a large part in shaping government’s future ICT infrastructure, assets and processes. There are also technology developments that will be more applicable within certain sectors than others. For example, developments in Human-Computer interaction will enable greater penetration of technology in the clinical (health) environment. For instance, removing the need to use a keyboard or a pointing device will bring a step forward in the use of ICT in all healthcare settings. This strategy provides the flexibility for new technology developments and sector specific requirements to be incorporated as they arise.
As well as being the largest employer of IT Professionals in the UK, the public sector is also a significant customer to ICT vendors. The public sector spends approximately £16bn per year on technology which accounts for 4.6% of overall public sector expenditure as detailed in the recent independent benchmarking undertaken by the Operational Efficiency Programme by Dr Martin Read.
I’m a BBC journalist so I have no views whatsoever on what direction policy should take in this area.
But I’m interested in your crowdsourcing experiment. A few questions:
- what is the policy on moderating the comments made here?
- will you publish comments made by your political opponents?
- will comments made here feed directly into Conservative policy?
- would a Conservative government make extensive use of crowdsourcing when it came to framing policy?
Many thanks,
Rory Cellan-Jones
I think it would be great if the answer to all of these questions was “I don’t know”.
“It is estimated that there are over 35,000 IT Professionals in the public sector after outsourcing. Research from e-skills indicated that the public sector employs in total over 10% of the entire UK workforce, at some 135,000.”
I wonder what this is saying. Some possibilities
- There only 1,350,000 people in the UK workforce.
- There 1,350,000 IT workers in the UK workforce (35,000 is well above 10% in that case).
- The public sector employs 135,000 IT people, but only 35,000 are IT professionals.
Now I have no confidence in any of the numbers which appear in the report.
There is no mention of open source software to reduce costs.
Why does Rory Cellan-Jones, who probably lives and pays taxes in the UK have no views on what the government does with his money? Being a journalist does not excuse him from responsibility for his government’s actions. This abdication of responsibility is at least part of the reason why there is such bad government.
Apparently, there are ‘over 35,000 IT Professionals in the public sector after outsourcing’. Really? I am a Chartered Information Technology Professional (CITP) via the British Computer Society. Are they really saying that they have 35000 such in government service? Frankly, I don’t think so, and a distinction should be made between technician-level IT workers and senior IT professionals, because it is the latter who design large-scale systems and architectures. In fact, personal experience suggests a dearth of such in public service, which may explain the poor track record of government IT and the over-dependence on third parties, not just for development but for strategy. Top business tip: never outsource your strategy to a third party because their criteria for success aren’t the same as yours.
One further thing, trying to predict technology beyond 5 years except in very general terms is very foolish given the rate at which the IT state of the art changes.
Hi Rory – thanks for your questions. Answers below:
1) Our policy on this site is no different to how we handle comments on our other sites. For example, lots of people post comments on the Blue Blog that run counter to Party policy, but everyone’s entitled to a fair say provided they’re not being offensive. It’s the only grown-up way of managing the community and encouraging debate.
2) Of course, provided they follow the guidelines above.
3) Yes, comments left here will inform our policy development – but obviously one of the main issues with crowdsourcing is that the members of the crowd often disagree with one another, so there is rarely a single crowd perspective. Once everyone has had their say, it still remains for us to pick out the best ideas that fit with our political narrative.
4) We have carried out similar consultations in the past, and indeed undertook a wide-ranging consultation on our manifesto back in Summer 2007. We would look to use this approach again in the future, where appropriate.
Best wishes,
Craig Elder | Online Communities Editor | Conservative Campaign HQ
“It is estimated that there are over 35,000 IT Professionals in the public sector after outsourcing.”
Could we have a break down of what area of IT these 35,000 people work in?
Like Help Desk, Software Developers, Network, Desktop and Server Technicians, Business Analysts
How many of these are in-house and outsourced?
It is notoriously difficult to see the future in IT. So it is a little unkind to criticise the report here but …
1. I would expect a little more of a critical appraisal of the problems as well as the opportunities of the mentioned technologies. Cloud computing is interesting, but I would have thought the authors should pay some attention to who’s cloud we might use and the security implications
2. I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for ’semantic computing’: it sounds a bit like XML to me. Anyway these sorts of things are always limited by a) willingness of IT professionals to maintain a third set of files b) the need to maintain ‘old fashioned’ unseperated code & data
So we might export Cloud-9 datum via GX.se using the utility vehicle from V2.MCI ; here are some examples of non-biometric sectorization in Financial, Transport, Healthcare and Propaganda, non?
While we are on the subject of the future, a mention of the future of those employed in this field wouldn’t go amiss.
The elephant which should be addressed in this room is outsourcing. Having experienced it I can say that it raises many questions for any organisations IT strategy. But for the government who seems to think there is something productive about employing IT professionals we should ask, How they can prevent the de-skilling of the UK IT workforce and the loss of many better paid jobs overseas?
In outsourcing situations companies end up with organisations which are heavy in management and people at the lowest levels of the IT industry (testers) with almost no software architects and even programmers in between. How can the experience gap caused by outsourcing moving much of the development of software overseas be bridged?
A second Issue I would raise is that IT is separated into many niche skillsets many of which would be transferable except we are lumbered with a private sector recruitment system that seems to be geared towards matching word for word skills on CVs against what they have been told to look for. I personally know several capable people within my speciality out of work and, there are many more doing testing jobs when they could be developing. There are also other good people who went into the contract market and now find themselves (by their own doing partly) priced out of the market.
Perhaps Its me thats wrong to prefer to see people creating (which requires a higher skillset) than merely checking something does what its requirements are.
“They will be able to access a software licence that is assigned to the crown and transferable across the public sector; organisations will be able to adopt a ‘pay as you go’ model – paying only for the time applications are actually in use.”
With something that size and that important, the government should have complete access to and control over the source code.
At the very least, the cloud platform on which these applications will run should be under the control of the government.
By all means, bring in outside expertise, but handing out a huge monopoly like that to a private sector company cannot end well.
I am scared by the thought that the public sector IT bods think that the way forward for software licencing is to have a crown licence for the entire public sector. Not only are they (actually that should read ‘we’ – but you get my drift) going to pay thro the nose for such a licence, but they are going to have to spend nearly as much again in policing such a licence and ensuring ‘unlicenced’ copies don’t leak out.
A much better solution would be require all software to be delivered with its source code and to be licenced under GNU or similar PD licence. That way we tax payers can gain equal benefit for our tax dollars.
> Demand for public services and expectations of levels of service are ever increasing.
Is there really evidence for this? Is it equally true to say “scepticism and disenchtment with public-sector competence in its IT services is ever increasing”?
> Citizens and businesses expect the same levels of access and personalisation that they see from large private sector organisations such as Amazon and Tesco.
I don’t. I dont want loyalty cards and data mining, nor recommendations saying “you paid this tax, perhaps you’d like to pay that tax also”. Leave me alone! Just do the basics and get out of my hair!
What do you mean by personalisation? How are you proposing to deliver it for statutory services without wholesale breach of EU privacy and human rights law? How many government CIOs understand their obligations under data protection and human rights law?
> In 2007/08, 13m motorists renewed their car tax online (30% of total). This is a 73% increase on last year’s figures
Oh wowser. So this previously pointless and clunky transaction is now relatively easy to initiate, but still pointless. Put it in the insurance transaction.
> 5.8 million self-assessment tax returns were completed online – which is a 56% increase on last year’s number
Yes. Did you try one? Was it fun? Would you describe the Gateway as easy to use, or well-designed by contemporary standards?
> NHS Choices had 2m visits by the end of the 07/08 financial year
Na und? There are grumpy little blogs with more than that. Anyway, why did it try to stomp on the existing NGO Patient Opinion, despite years of “channel strategy”?
> Directgov now has over 15 million visits a month, and the customer satisfaction rate for Businesslink.gov.uk is over 90% (as reported in its May 2008 survey), which puts it ahead of the best commercial comparators such as Amazon.com
*Splutter* DirectGov is a monopoly. About Businesslink my lips are sealed. Suffice it to say only someone believing their own 19-month old producer-side metrics would call it better than commerial comparators.
And neither is good value for money. It is incomprehensible to contempory web site providers how either can cost as much as they have.
> The pervasive use of ICT goes beyond the public sector.
This is where I think this “draft strategy” is a spoof.
HERE COMES EVERYBODY!
Social networks? Facebook – 300m users (and 300 engineers). Power of Information? Surely HMG’s IT strategy needs to acknowledge it’s now operating in a connected world of empowered people.
It’s all happening out here without you! Where are you? Why dont you come out and play?
> Technology changes offer a real opportunity for the public sector to maximise services and increase efficiency.
Indeed. But this has been obvious for decades, and much more so since the Internet went mainstream.
The country’s broke. We need better services. We need to restore trust in the state and in public servants.
Why arent you taking the opportunity?
> There are many transformational technologies that will become mainstream in less than five years. Those of particular interest in a UK government context are: interactive (web 2.0) tools and processes, cloud computing technology and service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Web 2.0 arrived five years ago! We did an idealgovernment presentation about it to Ian Watmore, the previous CIO. So what’s all this about it becoming mainstream again in the next five years?
But your biggest problems is how you handle personal data: the huge central databases and poor data-sharing practices.
Perhaps you should insert here: “By 2020 we expect the rollout of our transformative ID Card scheme which will enable access to online services”? Expect that it wont, of course, and Cabinet Office IT strategies have fudged this issue for years.
> the public sector is also a significant customer to ICT vendors.
But is it a GOOD customer?
> The public sector spends approximately £16bn per year on technology
Well, that’s a lot
> which accounts for 4.6% of overall public sector expenditure as detailed in the recent independent benchmarking undertaken by the Operational Efficiency Programme by Dr Martin Read.
Why not use Kable stats? Everyone else does. They’ve been at it for years. And if youve got anything extra to teach them, why not just tell them? It just feels you’re locked in a world of your own here.
Feargal Hogan says: A much better solution would be require all software to be delivered with its source code and to be licenced under GNU or similar PD licence. That way we tax payers can gain equal benefit for our tax dollars
Tax dollars
Wow, this site doesnt handle copy / paste too well does it!
Yes, I’m so convinced the tory party can manage IT better now, not…!
If people would read what was said, the idea is to have software available to users as and when required, rather than having to wait for an app to be installed, or even worse, have every .gov PC have every app pre-installed and pay for licences. Far better to have users using cloud computing and therefore not paying IT support to install apps on certain machines, especially if they hotdesk.?.
So, the comment box doesn’t handle copy / paste but thankfully the text appears almost as it’s typed.
Feargal – Tax dollars? This is the UK, we deal with pounds here…
So, come on then Torys, tell us what your plan is, rather than stick up a leaked report. Oh wait, you haven’t got one, have you… Would you be so willing to allow a leaked report of yours to be put up on another parties website? If you really want to engage people who know about IT, tell us this, how would you have handled the BT / Phorm scandal? What protection are you going to give to UK citizens that information is safe in your hands. What powers are you going to give the information commissioner to deal with companies inspecting our data while it’s in the intertubes?
There is much discussion over the dearth of high level profesionals working within public sector IT but it presupposes that there is political buy-in to the necessity of long-term, cross-party consensus and the use of IT as a strategic enabler.
There isn’t any buy-in and junior ministers don’t have the freedom to contemplate anything that isn’t within the short-term, bean-counting parameters of this accountancy-led, window-dressing charade. There is not just a shortage but a complete absence of long-term strategic vision, without which money will continue to be foisted on unsustainable ‘point-solutions’.
We saw the same asset-stripping focus in British Manufacturing Industry in the Seventies and, whilst it may have tidied up a balance sheet ot two in a way that better remunerated directors, its crude application cost us 35% of our industry.
It’s not for want of trying either. In our attempts to engage with senior civil servants and ministers, SITFO.org has uncovered evidence of deliberate avoidance of long term strategy to protect civil servants’ baronnial empires, supported by suppliers that fully understand that a disjointed approach is ultimately more profitable. The words of one beknighted civil servant still ring in my ears, “I don’t care how dirty and brown-field the solution is, I’ve promised Gordon Brown a solution within 18 months and that’s what he’s going to get…”
“In the longer term – 2015-2020 – additional emerging technologies will begin to be identified”. Thank goodness we have the ever vigilant “horizon-scanning” skills of the CTO council on the case isn’t it?
“Semantic technologies, when used in software, will separate data and content files from application code and meanings. This means that changes can be made more quickly, more cheaply and with reduced risk.” So, and correct me if I’m wrong, this means that in the future software code will be written and maintained separately from the databases? visionary stuff indeed…
Maybe I’ve been drinking too much ’shared services coolaid’, but some of the general themes within this report make sense to me.
License software to the crown, not to each agency, so that government can allocate licences where it sees fit, for example.
Also, making use of shared virtualization and storage infrastructure (I wont use the ‘C’ word) to facilitate lower TCO and better DR.
Not to mention standardising on common standards and interfaces (rather than products)
…and dare I say it, centralized procurement?
All of these things could deliver real benefits if done well – however given the risk that they could be done badly, there is a real chance that you just end up washing away all those little islands of competent capability that have managed to stay hidden amongst the mangroves…
Blah, Blah, Blah… the biggest issue with the strategy on the delivery of IT to the public sector, is that NO ONE ever asks the end user what their job function actually is and what they need from Software, Data and Hardware…
I have worked within the Public Sector patching up the mishmash of poorly designed Databases, chronically under resourced networks and staff with no training on how to use it… glad to be out of it having worked in the NHS at Richmond House, the MOD at Whitehall and the RAF at various locations.
I took over a project for a major hotel chain, spent a month talking with the staff in the national call center and at the hotels, then designed the system in a fortnight with four specific job functions, and tested the system with specific hardware. Setting up a test network, got actual staff to test it in a normal daily working environment to find out HOW they used it, then it was tweaked accordingly and rolled out over a ONE WEEK period… 10yrs later this system is still operational and in use..
Planning 80%, Work 20% Effectiveness 100%
With any IT Strategy, in my opinion it is the only place where you take the LOWEST common demnominator (the end-user) and build from there upwards, otherwise you are guaranteed to waste Billions of tax payers money on a system that will never be used the way you thought it would and one that is normally redundant or outdated before you have even tested it, let alone installed it!
I’m a freelance IT consultant, worked across a number of govt IT projects/ minsitries.
Use of open source will not cut costs noticably. Procurement needs to be beefed up, each area of govt is at a different maturity level.
Business analysis is the achilles heel. Govt IT needs to do better requirements gathering and move away from ‘fix it with Change Request’. Govt needs to have a ‘Right first time’ target IMHO.
r says “So, and correct me if I’m wrong, this means that in the future software code will be written and maintained separately from the databases? visionary stuff indeed…” Not visionary it is here already Bill Gates visioned it in 2008 even called it the holy grail, the dream, the quest… A little company Procession in the UK has pioneered this – and thus deny Microsoft any patent rights. UK innovation at its best but totally ignored by Government they know about it but nobody has bothered to see so what hope of fixing the ICT chaos in government?
They may be experiencing a 56% increase in the submission of Tax Returns on-line, but it is still taking them NINE weeks to get round to answering snail mail!!! That’s disgraceful and when do I get my rebate because THEY are behind with my Tax code??
What are they going to do about that??
Oh dear! There seem to be many low-level opinions on the efficacy of software design, as if dealing with them will cure all ills.
It won’t. The reality of public sector is that change is ever-present, both in terms of process and organisational structures. Yes, it’s important to fully grasp the business by working with those at the pointy-end but its also important to architect a solution that’s capable of responding to changing business need. Ergo: the perfect application doesn’t exist.
Derby’s SOA proved that by separating out Business Process Management, IT could respond very quickly to a change request from the business. In some cases, same day changes were made to process, in response to requests from the business. This included the ability to securely share service requests and information between multiple agencies.
So, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that designing the perfect wheel will cut it when the terrain changes to boggy marshland. If you’re a business manager struggling to undestand this, ask yourself what on earth you’re doing committing public funds to a solution without having access to high-level advice about the sustainability of the enabling technology.
Architecture is key.
The only goal here from which all other goals should be driven from is this:
Make IT Invisible Technology.
IT should only be there to aid public service tasks being performed, digression is out of control.
subgoal 1
Access should be as public, robust and secure as possible.
The rest of the Transformation statement is complete dribble, Jargon littered, political rubbish.
“Make IT Invisible Technology” – all well and good, Stuart, but the issue is how to go about making technology invisible. If you do it the wrong way, it’s unsustainable and your business case will collapse with the later costs of keeping it invisible whilst it joins up.
The lie that is being perpetuated by low-level code monkeys is that data standards will take care of everything. Nonsense!
Simple examples: Why does each organisation in government have a database for name & address data? Why do local government organisations procure the same IT utilities separately? Why would you need more than one customer service request tracking mechanism?
Seems obvious, doesn’t? Until you realise the threat to the civil servants’ empires and the suppliers’ lucrative revenue streams.
Some quotes from Forrester Research Inc may help. Industry Analysts generally are part of the problem being too closely aligned to the large vendors but just occasionally one breaks rank.
A quote I had in an exchange with George Colony the Forrester Research founder and CEO sets the scene “If we don’t get from IT to BT we’re going to have more disasters like our present mortgage meltdown. Why? Because IT creates impenetrable systems that human beings can’t manage. BT is about human beings back in control.”
“The future incarnation of IT, called Business Technology (BT), is not going to be as a utility but as a source of ongoing competitive differentiation.
As a result, in coming years, technology will become invisible and completely embedded into the business. And rather than self-integrating technology, IT buyers will have it assembled and managed by an ecosystem of outside providers.
Software and hardware vendors will need to revamp their outdated per-unit/per-seat pricing model.
Within five years most will realize that this “Business Technology” (BT) is vital to delivering business results. Enterprises will embrace the competitive potential of technology and actively manage its use. BT providers will hone offerings to enhance business results, flexibility, and configurability.”
With views such as this there is hope but the buyer needs to be on top of this to push for such change. Big pain for some vendors to write off their investment in old clunky technologies but it is a natural consequence with an immature product set called “evolution to maturity”?
Government should not in my opinion be at the ‘Bleeding Edge of Technology’ they should only be using tried and tested technology.
Data should be secure and data standards are key – spend time and money designing standard data structures that can be centrally shared and secured.
Communication between departments both verbally and with technology is vitally important true IT professionals listen, understand, translate and produce accurate efficient systems.
I agree with comments above about dont outsource your strategists, consider internal data standards and make sure all data is secure whatever the technology.
Don’t fall in love with the latest gadget and buzzword use tried and tested and open source applications. Might not light any fires on the flashy front but will in the long run save money and provide systems that people can use and want. What is wrong with the saying if its not broke why fix it? But maybe I’m not looking at this from the economy viewpoint!
The January 2009 Ofsted report ‘virtual learning environments: an evaluation of their development in a sample of educational settings’ raises many valid points and compares vle’s to a ‘cottage industry’. Not in keeping with the aspirations of a ‘Digital Britain’.
The report by Tanya Byron regarding the protection and education of young people in a ‘digital world’ could be further enhanced by a government taking note of the American “Broadband Data Improvement Act” / “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act”. This would mean for schools having internet access a requirement to certify that there internet safety policy includes internet safety education. The slowness of schools/ local authorities to implement the ‘harnessing Technology’ strategy (see above ofsted report) suggests that esafety is likely to be delivered in a piece meal, ‘cottage industry’ like manner to paraphrase ofsted. Could the Conservatives ensure that all our young people experience a safe, 21st Century education?
Rory Cellan-Jones asks whether comments made here will feed directly into Conservative policy. Craig Elder is too polite to point out that some future comments might well be too idiotic even for the fringe parties, so it would be unwise to commit in advance to any direct feed into party policy, but he acknowledges that the Conservatives will “pick out the best ideas that fit with our political narrative”.
But “narrative” suggests not merely policy formulation but also political debate. In other words, they reserve the right to selectively use some of our comments as a stick to attack the present Government.
However, it is good that the BBC is monitoring this crowdsourcing experiment, and I trust that Rory and his colleagues will catch any overly party-political use of this material.
Noone is advocating taking risks with data but government simply cannot afford the long-term costs of enabling transformation the ‘old-fashioned’ way. Suppliers are happy not to change their ways because that delivers the maximum maintenance / integration requirement but it isn’t sustainable.
We need:
1. Customer-centric business vision – everything is organisation-centric at the moment
2. An end to civil servants & politicians making tactical decisions on technology without any understanding of the long-term consequences
3. An understanding that there has to be strategic, architectural governance over the use of enabling technologies (completely absent in England – present in Scandinavia & China – where SITFO.org has engaged)
4. Cross party buy-in to a long-term strategy of enabling technologies being supplied as a public utility through regional service centres, on a public, high-speed fibre network.
Video case studies available at: http://www.sitfo.org
A government run “cloud” sounds suspiciously like a single point of failure. Even google – who are a good deal more competent than HMG – have outages.
Imagine if some poorly paid government I[C]T worker messed up a database upgrade and wiped out tax returns, car tax renewals, social service payments and ordering supplies for the army for a week or so.
How we would all laugh.
Having worked in IT in both Public and Private sector I think most of these comments, and most of the reports they comment on, are missing the point.
Working in the Public Sector is like climbing a ladder in a suit of jelly.
Everything is constantly changing. What was true yesterday is no longer necessarily true today.
Inefficient use of resources will continue as long as knee-jerk policies are the norm. The public sector needs time to implement new policies, and it’s not uncommon for the rules to change before the project is finished.
There are efficiencies to be had from “joined up working” (between central and local govt, and between depts). But this needs to be based on fundamentals. Get those in place first, then add bells and whistles. Failure here, IMO, is the cause for the failures in Connecting for Health.
@DavidChassels – apologies this was meant to be read “this means that in the future software code will be written and maintained separately from the databases? visionary stuff indeed”
There are some good sites/implementations out there, DVLA and Inland Revenue for example.
“The pervasive use of ICT goes beyond the public sector. In the UK, the ICT Industry employs about 1 in 20 people. There are over 100,000 ICT companies and many sell to the public sector. Half of Europe’s productivity gains in the last few years have been attributed to ICT investment. So much so that the Gross Value Add per ICT job is £81,400, some 2.5 times higher than the UK average – this may be attributed to the high skill set of those employed within ICT – 55% of ICT people are qualified to at least level 4, nearly double that of the UK working population.
It is estimated that there are over 35,000 IT Professionals in the public sector after outsourcing. Research from e-skills indicated that the public sector employs in total over 10% of the entire UK workforce, at some 135,000.”
Irrelevant waffle doesn’t belong in a technology strategy …
“SOA provides a set of governing principles and concepts that define how services will operate with each other and requires a common approach to the detailed information (metadata) associated with services.”
You need to treat each application you have as an asset, SOA, is very good for wrapping and packaging older otherwise date expired applications and giving them a new life as part of a enterprise application set. Previously inaccessible applications can then be integrated into the wider Enterprise. Services provide a façade behind which older systems can be transformed with minimal impact on the downstream/consumer systems. This is a very important concept, when you consider the comments later in the document about reducing the number of applications in play and the duplication of service provision. SOA is mainstream now and has been for a number of years.
“Hosting applications within the Government Cloud (G-Cloud) means that organisations will be able to pay per use for applications.” Pay per use is an interesting concept, they could do interesting things around the number of cpu cycles each department uses per month, a bit like I get an electricity bill for a quarter the Inland Revenue might get a bill for the number of CPU cycles used in a quarter…. The danger is that you add another level of administration that eliminates the costs savings.
You could also introduce a level of unpredictability to the size of you bill at the end of the quarter. Though for an organisation like HM Gov I’d like to think they would have a fairly good handle on the potential customer base and demand levels, eg, Inland Rev should know how many potential tax returns there are to enter, how many email accounts they need etc…
The G-Cloud terminology is confusing, its not really Cloud in the true sense more software as a service or computing on demand… or am I being pedantic ..
There are also issues highlighted by other contributors around the data security and privacy legislation that affects the use of the cloud. There is for example significant data protection legislation that would prevent the effective export of Inland Rev data to a cloud hosted outside the EU. I honestly can’t see HMG hosting its data/services outside the UK.
What isn’t mentioned is virtualisation upon which a lot of the commercial computing power on demand products are based. The flexibility a virtualised server farm can give to a large organisation is huge. If you are looking to reduce costs, your environmental footprint, the number of physical computers you have to maintain and the number of people required to keep them going ….. that’s the way to go.
Bring the duplicate applications from the different government departments in to the virtualised server farm, use the SOA architecture then evolve out the weaker applications, consolidate mail/collaboration services onto a single unified platform. That’s what large companies do when they merge, merging government IT needs to take a similar route.
I’m not sure what government’s problem is, Bill, but Derby have had a SOA / Federated architecture for seven years, have case studies and business cases to demonstrate the benefit, and even have everything virtualised. Half of Scandinavia is following their lead, as are the Chinese… then they go and find themselves a new CEO who looks at some short-term targets, doesn’t have the first clue about the strategic use of technology, and they’re back to square one with point solutions.
Issue? A total lack of governance from national government, and the clueless, quango auditors…
Thank you for the opportunity to comment.
I have already started a dialogue with Ian Taylor MBE MP on the role of “value networks” in addressing innovation, incorporating the views of David Chassels posted earlier.
Those concerned about connections with enterprise / information architectures should have no fear, but be assisted in handling people issues.
Those concerned with the auditing of carefully designed formal work flows will be reassured.
Those that are prepared to recognise officially that the real organisation and its energy is contained in the informal networks that mesh with the formal, will be encouraged to combine the two in creating new IT support to “business” activity.
Think Boeing. They achieved a six fold increase in productivity in two days of effort involving 200 staff in designing a new test flight centres’s processes using value network input.
The future IS here. But goodness knows where to start in the conservative approach to procurement. Safe-fail in testing new methoids is key in our current crisis. Fail – safe is a misnomer.
Unfortunately, and it’s not for lack of attempting to engage on our part, we’re seeing just minor variation on the same old, same old from ALL of the major parties. What do you expect, when they’re being briefied by the same civil servants protecting the same vested interests?
We still see idealogues and business managers unwittingly making strategic IT decisions, without even realising that they are affecting strategy that, in turn, effects total cost of ownership, and hence, sustainability. There is zero strategic IT governance inside English government because those making the decisions haven’t the slightest idea of the consequences of their ‘business decisions’.
“David, I’ve promised Gordon Brown a solution in eighteen months and I don’t care how brown-field or dirty the solution.” That senior civil servant was committing £100Ms of tax-payers’ money to an unsustainable solution to hit his performance-managed target and earn his next gong…