The UK public sector faces major challenges – the scale of services delivered across organisational and international boundaries, the requirements of customers and the need for ever-increasing efficiency mean that we cannot continue with a fragmented infrastructure that duplicates processes and solutions. This strategy delivers two significant benefits to the public sector over the next 10 years:
- A secure and resilient infrastructure providing flexible and efficient services to the public sector and delivering savings of over £3.2bn
- A simplified and standardised infrastructure across the public sector that enables interoperability and data sharing where appropriate to deliver improved public services to citizens and businesses
This is a substantial strategy for Government. Transforming services against a backdrop of economic pressure requires leadership and a fundamental change in the way we specify, procure and deliver ICT to the public sector. This strategy provides the means to achieve the benefits outlined above. CIOs and their businesses will implement the strategy and provide transformed ICT, that supports and enables the public sector to meet its core aim of improving the lives of the citizens and businesses it is here to serve.
I have been working with computers since before Mrs. Thatcher came to power. That includes seeing one total outsourced IT balls-up at a large QUANGO that I worked for just before I emigrated. I know from contacts with my former colleagues after I left the UK that the project resulted in a court case and was then scrapped totally in favour of a system that was developed largely in-house.
It’s not government policy that causes the problems, it’s the multiple layers of administration that are inflicted on government IT projects, with the top few layers of management knowing as much about programming computers as I do about speaking Serbo-Croat (and you can assume I’m no linguist!)
In short, folks, assuming the Tories displace Labour at the next election, you can outsource and privatise everything you like, and come up with all the waffle you want to, but until government IT projects are broken down into SMALL, MANAGEABLE CHUNKS, so that projects can be delivered in thoroughly tested stages, and until you put a few damn good TECHIES at the the top of the pile, instead of time-serving penpushers and beancounters, the failure rate will be just as bad with Cameron in power as it was under Blair and Brown (and Major, who was PM when the balls-up I referred to above was perpetrated).
If anything, outsourcing the projects will make things even worse. Develop code with teams of in-house programmers, and you have a chance (not much of a chance, but at least a chance) that the programmers will be given the time and resources they need to do a competent job. Outsource IT projects to private industry, and the emphasis will be on maximising profits by cutting corners. The first corner to be cut is ALWAYS adequate testing of developed code, which is why big IT systems generally collapse in a bloody great heap within a few days (or hours, or minutes) of going live.
It’s the whole damned METHODOLOGY of public sector IT projects that you need to change. Lots of luck, because you’re sure going to need it.
P.S. Don’t feel too bad about it, things aren’t that much better here in the USA.
Chain of command and incentives of suppliers of information to that chain. These are the two constant issues in every ICT imbroglio I’ve ever read of. You need substantially fewer layers of command between the responsible minister or quango and the person who will be battering out code and purchasing equipment. The people who supply you with information must be vetted to make sure that they do not have their own motives: “Why, certainly, minister, it’s a fairly easy task to undertake: it just needs several supercomputers and a cast of hundreds to program” – for a project that could be done with a single box and MySQL database.
Oh, and someone up at the top should read the Mythical Man Month. Thirty years old and nothing changes.
^^ what he said ^^
??? Expenses on software/apps ???, the most advanced and secure software is open source. Linux Mint for instance (not the most advanced but so easy to convert users from windows its a breeze, even my kids use it) with Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgeon – Why does the tax payer foot the bill for microsoft when really an empty CD will fill with all the office needs, and will run on any PC a lot more efficiently, so no need for new machines to keep up with the demands of the software either.
I agree with Brian here… and why does everyone assume that IT in the public sector is any better. Just because we don’t know how many systems are messed up in the public sector doesn’t mean they do a better job. It is also worth remembering that the complexity of an IT system in a commercial company (with a specific focus on the bottom line and thus analysis and design to maximise efficiency of cost) is very different from the public sector which must take into account many conflicting views. In Healthcare for example the balance must include cost, ethics, politics and opinion (the reason cancer does better than mental health), professional bodies, stakeholders of various types, clinical expertise… For tesco is is “does this make money”…
Finally remember that Gartner highlighted 66% of ALL IT PROJECTS FAIL… so government cannot be blamed as much worse than the rest – Brian is right – it is just bloody difficult.
Sorry meant “PRIVATE sector is any better”…
I’ve skimmed through the whole report and no where have I seen any mention of usability or user experience. Until government IT projects start addressing and formally identifying the real needs of users they are going to continue with their current level of “success”.
The total IT systems are almost mutually exclusive to the iD of each citizen and thus far we kept these entire and separate too.
I don’t believe the problem lies in the technical infrastructure at all. The problem lies much deeper -and is the result of failures by both Conservative and Labour governments to adress the (social and educational) issues properly.
Leon Bagrit in his 1964 BBC Reith Lectures “The Age of Automation” saw the problem correctly: “Automation in this true sense is brought to full fruition only through exploration of its three major elements, communication, computation, and control -the three ‘Cs’. I believe there is a great need to make sure that some, at any rate, of the implications to our society of the three ‘Cs’ in combination are recognized and understood. That is the purpose of these lectures”
Unfortunately, successive governments ignord Bagritt’s plea for an integrated education sytem and an accompanying research programme that could compete with the American “Project Mac”. “Today, if we know where we are going and if we use the slave services of automation intelligently and courageously, we have the chance of building a really high civilization for ourselves. And when I say ‘for ourselves’; I mean the whole community, not just for a small elite on the Greek pattern. This is the essential purpose of automation……”
“……I hope it is clear from the examples that I have given, that automation is not simply a matter of “hardware”, of machines. In none of the cases I have mentioned could one simply buy a computer and use it effectively. The successful application of automation demands a combination of right equipment for the purpose -that is to say, hardware -and adequate thought and intelligence -software. a computer system can be disastrous, if the firm or institution which has invested in it lacks the outlook and the understanding to handle it…….”
Unfortunately, this wisdom was ignored completely. The result is not “wealth for all” but a disasterous new form of “digital feudalism” where both the public and government is entirely dependant on a few global companies. Short-term commercialism is killing human intelligence. The economic exploitation of humans should be made redundant by machines -so why has a trully corrupting “economic incentive” been our main aim for decades now?
28 years experience in writing and mangaging the writing of software in a large multi-site, multi-project private sector company tells me that 1) Top level management MUST BE computer literate and have a good general understanding of what the required software is to do. 2) The people writing the software must be experienced in the areas of activity to which the written software is to apply. 3) The people who are to USE AND TEST the software must be committed to its development and their activities in the development process must be fully funded. 4) Where the software is to be used across multiple departments and/or organisations, the stakeholders (Ugh!) in those areas must have their contributions to the development PROPERLY PROJECT MANAGED and be subject to proper audit. 5) Beware of trying to replace a multitude of ‘bespoke’ systems, developed over decades with one grandiose system, in one go. It rarely works. 6) Don’t let anyone be in a position to say ‘But surely its obvious that I wanted the software to do such and such’. In other words have proper Requirement Specifications written and agreed. 7) Don’t let requirements specs drift (i.e be added to – virtually impossible to achieve, but desirable)
ABOVE ALL, Properly Project Manage the development.
I am including this Demonstration / Talk by Pranav Mistry (an MIT student and inventor of the year) as I am very confident that if the Government used this or part of his ideas, then they will save a lot of money in the future and at the same time make the UK’s systems one of the most advanced and easiest to use for it’s IT. And guess what Pranav Mistry is making his technology OpenSource. – You’ll find his talk/demo at:-
http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html
This strategy is business-as-usual, looking to the potential of developments in IT, claiming worthwhile savings, not producing credible delivery mechanisms, and sketching out work-programs for the IT folk. In this sense, it is entirely similar to earlier efforts and is probably only a step forward in some of the sub-areas it sketches out.
Govt IT is big, cumbersome, and projects in particular often perform below expectations in terms of functions, time and cost. Much IT business is conducted with a sub-set of suppliers who have become acclimatised to how things work in govt projects, and feel they cannot change it readily.
Where are the voices of the citizen (customer and taxpayer), and the voices of suppliers in this strategy?
IT is one of the most important areas of society today. It’s one of the key deliverers of change, progress and economic efficiency. Every big company has board level supervision of the IT side by highly IT literature people generally including a CIO.
There really should be a meaningful “Minister for IT” if the government want to drive effective change here.
Having worked on several government projects I’m only too aware of the problems and costs.
The solution is simple stop giving work to the big three companies who always cock it up and break projects down into smaller chunks with defined targets BEFORE YOU START……. OUT-TASK not OUT-SOURCE
As a small contracting company we sell our services for a few hundred quid per day, IBM sell the same service for Thousand quid a day. IBM then pay us to do the work because they don’t have the staff numbers to cover the work.
It’s a no-brainer really; It’s people like me doing the work at the end of the day, so why pay an extra thousand quid, it’s not like any value is added by them, apart from the ability to attend pointless meetings and make excuses.
I worked at DWP for 9 months on a project and did ‘NOTHING’,'ZERO’,'ZIP’ I ask daily for more work and was basically told the project requires my skills on site even though there is nothing to do.
This was the structure DWP -> Big Company -> Smaller firm -> my company -> me.
The projects was 2 years late and vastly over budget, everyone knows it’s a gravy-train and will ride it until it hits the buffers, then swap tracks and ride it back.
Oh and stop putting crappy fronts-ends on legacy systems that should have been decommissioned years ago and must be costing a fortune to have the support agreements extended.
I have to agree with Mike Nixon here, eye candy terminals on legacy systems will never resolve the problems.
If correct IT implementation is to ever succeed,then the old data has to be migrated to newer equipment. However there is an important point here. Doing it all at once is impossible, thus there needs to be an amalgamation of new and old tech within virtual server technology.
Within this approach retro (Legacy) hardware and data storage formats can be supported within much newer applications.
In this way, staff do not have to be retro trained in old tech (which is expensive).
Another point within the use of virtual technology, these systems can be backed up, migrated, upgraded or switched as live systems. Thus negating the massive down times. It also allows many incompatible OS’s and applications to talk to each other in a manner never before possible in the hardware environments of yesteryears.
Implementation of Open Source OS’s and applications is important. However the need for implementation of Virtual OS’s and Virtual Processing far exceeds that.
Virtual computing is adaptive, and not bound to a specific hardware setup. Thus instead of becoming outdated before it is even implemented. Virtual Computing Platforms offer a more future proof and cost effective approach for physical (or virtual as it is in this case) I.T project and usage implementation.
It also allows you to de-centralise your I.T staff. Allowing many to work from home or from local small units. Dramatically reducing the overall carbon footprint involved with staffing and running I.T facilities.
As a local government IT bod, but ex private sector with an academic interest in all this (just completing a PhD on e-government) I would like to point out that it’s not the IT that’s a particular issue (although projects waste money), it is the complex processes that need aligning across the multiplicity of government organizations and this should be done before spending on ICT.
Channels need to be aligned so as not to exclude the digitally or otherwise excluded folks (perhaps 40% of the population) and what we need is a service delivery strategy!
Mick http://greatemancipator.com
Anna Raccoon seems to have solved the problem of the NHS IT programme at zero cost. Innovative and interesting.
http://www.annaraccoon.com/politics/government-it-economies-its-in-the-sick-bay/
At present the public sector is not capable of delivering any IT project successfully.
Success being an information system that can not only meet the mid to long term needs with enough flexibility to adapt to changes in the user’s requirements, but also being delivered on time and for the right price.
Government is not agile enough to deliver the changes and the leadership do not have insight or understanding.
The puppet masters are from a generation that began to use the internet in their 30’s+ and they want to dictate how young people will be using technology in the future! not going to happen.
Get the right people apart of the projects from the start and embrace agile developement remove the middle men (80% of the civil service) and get the job done.
Having read most of the strategy and most of the comments it looks to me like politics is descending into farce. Who is more ridiculous, the Tories thinking that this pointless exercise will impress anyone – that they can claim modernity via it, Labour – writing such a feeble strategy document that they probably realise they won’t get a chance to implement, or us foolish comment-writers thinking the Tories care at all about anything that might be posted here.
This is an astonishingly poor piece of work, that lags the current thinking in IT Architecture, Technology and Governance by about a decade. The key criticism is that there is no coherency to it, no key business objectives that can be traced through to delivery via IT policy.
What are they actually trying to achieve?
How are they going to bring it about?
In business it is called the ’so what?’ question.
I’m a graduate who has just came out of university, i’ve done an internship with one of the big US banks in the city and with all the money the government puts into technology these banks are doing a much better job with half the investment. Come on look at IT security over the past year, CD’s lost, USB drives and laptops lost. In the private sector there would be guildlines put down that would keep this from happening for example software to restrict the transfer of data from networks to storage devices.
No IT system will ever work until the public knows the Government has this sorted out. The public doesn’t trust them with anything anymore. Regaining the trust of the public seems to be a key element of what the governments from now to doomsday will have to do cause everytime they try to build trust they lose it by doing something stupid that smaller organisation could handle with a tenth of the budget the government has at there hands.
In relation to the IT Professionals scheme to recuirt people. I think its a complete disaster. I applied to this scheme, I was tested on elements that someone in IT wouldn’t need tested on. So a Verbal Reasoning tests allows the government to choose someone who maybe is better at english than someone who can provide a good anaylsis of a project and provide a sound project fit for any organisation. The people today that are being hired have all the speak and know how to use our money but have no clue as to how to go about doing basic IT Project Development. Its time the government hired people by looking at IT based skills.
Labour simply spends money for the sake of it if any other organisation spent money like them they would be filing for bankrupty by the end of the year. Its time government was more careful and stopped employing so many IT consultants to tell them something that anyone with common sense could tell them.
MagareT we know nobody is listening, and nothing posted above is anything different from what us techie types have been saying for years. But it still feels good to get it of our chests.
Would you please when it comes to mentioning BILLION substitute the words THOUSAND MILLION,because the public are being softened by the word billion, they need to be reminded what a billion is !!!!!!
Plenty of comments from people who undertsand IT. As a basic user with little understanding or interest, living 4 miles from the centre of Cambridge, a Hi-Tech centre, we get half a megabit download speed. If they can’t even sort that yet what chance of them sorting anything else.
I agree with most of the comments on here. The government are not equipped with the personnel to deal with the fast changing digital revolution. They are always going to be susceptible to the “one book ahead” smooth talking “bells and whistles” IT salesmen. Strict control of the IT budgets is what is required.
Computers are a tool, a very powerful tool. They should not be allowed to over control or enslave or master our existence. Computers need feeding just like we do. Unfortunately that’s where one of the main problems lies. They feed on data and without it they die, along with the spreadsheet managers they support. Large armies of people are required to feed them, these armies gather the data from us, using numerous forms and even other computers to get their food. They bog down the operatives with form filling, in the NHS, Police, Education and Public services just to mention a few. The spreadsheet managers will tell us that it will make us more efficient and cost effective. 50% increase on this and a 12% reduction on that……
How? You might ask! Well they say, we can measure the data against previous data and then monitor the changes, then issue new forms to gather more data to analyse the results of the previous data. This they say will reduce waiting times in the NHS or arrest rates in the police. They tell us “Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people” or “Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day!” What is needed is not data, but useful information.
On the subject of information, why do individual government departments and quango’s see themselves as the centre of the world? Expounding a fountain of duplicated information, about how we should live our lives on their individual websites. Why not have one website for all, clearing out the overbearing costly IT departments.
All is not lost though. People are smarter than computers, they know they can fiddle the figures and feed the computer with the data that produces the information they want to come out. They also know they have an inbuilt insurance policy against charges of poor management or judgement “Well the computer says this or that” We all know you get out what you put in. Scrap the quangos, reduce IT budgets. Sift out the input required and the departments and people who can authorise the issue of new forms!
Give the time and money back to the people who do the work, reduce the mountain of managers.
The people of UK should have a voice in government matters and leaks concerning the country. Take this to to people on the streets and see what they have to say. It would polite to ask the people before you any laws into affect, since when do you put other nations laws into affect if they are from another nation like Shari laws. That’s not UK founded upon the soil of a nation. You need more women then men in your government matters. Margaret T was Iron Lady who take no rubbish from no one especially men.All men are messing things up look at the news boys there all men screwing things up right and left. Power to the people not government, the people’s voice’s need to be if not it back fire on you.
This report, in my experience, is lending credibility to the PM when he states in due course that “we have identified £X billion of cost savings in public spending”.
The truth is that this is an extra cost, the cost of paying consultants to provide the “right answers” for the above PM statement.
Some years ago I did a quick evaluation of the cost of the NHS computer project. Assuming 1.4m employees, 400,000 not requiring a PC, a benchmark of getting a quote from Michael Dell for 1m PCs (£100 per unit with servers thrown in) and licencing the software from the US. This benchmark evaluation concludes an overpayment of 20,000% when 5% would be unaccepable in the private sector.
The last I heard of the NHS computer project was that a dispute with the supplier after the expenditure of 87% of the £20b had put the project in limbo.
It is not possible to cut £3.2b otherwise the £3.2b would not have been in the initial estimate. The only way to reduce the cost is to scrap some projects at the design stage before they start escalating in cost.
We should only go forward with PCs, servers and the internet (password protected). Any investment in IM (information management) only has a useful life of 18 months to 2 years before there is a step change in the IM technology and it needs replacing.
What has been achieved since 1997 – 12 years and some £120bn or so later? What do these CIOs do on a daily basis?
12 years is enough time, and the budget has certainly been more than enough, for legacy systems to have been retired and replaced, for open standards to have become embedded, for agile project methods to have become enshrined, for core common systems (such as housing benefit, taxation etc) to have been open sourced.
There is little evidence of productive outcomes (improved public services for example) from the last 12 years and huge sums invested.
Who is to be held accountable and responsible for that? And how do we make sure that in another 10 years time we’re not still staring at the same words on paper (or onscreen), but with no more delivery than we’ve seen over the last decade+ ?
The National Programme for IT has represented a massive waste of public funds, the employment of over 1,000 civil servants, staffing infrastructures at each of the Strategic Health Authoriries costing many £100,000’s and a predominantly disengaged and disillusioned base of clinicians who’ve been waiting for electronic patient records since 1998. Yet, none of the lessons of NPfIT seem to have influenced the current document.
@Laurence Maguire.
Agreed, but actually…
In the correct longscale (unfortunately abandoned by the UK Gov in 1974), a billion was actually a Million Millions.
Another self inflicted eradication of British culture by that of the Americans.
Having worked on many a Government IT system in the past as a supplier and of course as a taxpayer, there are a few fundamental reasons as to why a significant number of all large scale government IT projects fail/overrun or overspend :
1) Lack of clarity in requirements. The paper leaked here is a perfect example of this. The supplier, eager for revenue, quotes a price and timeline based on too little knowledge, while the Gov Dept, with no or little understanding of the concept of profit, will squeeze for the cheapest & shortest deal. This results in a kind of ’sales haze’ from both parties, where impossible optimism takes over from pragmatism.
2) Lack of identifiable & accountable Stakeholders. The cynic in me would suggest that huge swathes of the civil service are merely concerned with avoiding responsibility at all costs, while maintaining an antiquated hierarchical system which means that the folk at the coal face of services, are rarely allowed to influence a system design or core functionality. This leads to a system being created that neither fits the (liitle understood) requirements or is disowned by the stakeholders.
3) Too much complexity. IT works best when it’s simple, as indeed does any system. Usually the scope of Gov IT projects encompasses multiple legacy system, multiple platforms and many different processes. This makes it very hard to define what the legacy systems do and thus how the new system should operate. Add into the mix that the folk who worked on the legacy systems have now probably been outsourced and are uncontactable, then you can get into the realms of decompiling ancient code to find out what should be going on. Not a good recipe for success.
4) Using IT to drive business change. Yawn, how many times have we heard this? But why is it never taken on board? My last project involved significant business change, but it was left to the technology to drive it forwards and yes, we struggled. Decide how the business needs to change, then use IT to enable it.
5) Lack of strong project management and responsible partnership.
I’ve gone on too long, however, this report is a perfect example of failure in itself. It dwells on technology at the 30,000ft level, has little to say about improving requirements capture and definition and shows no leadership.
It’s perfect PowerPoint material.
I think Dave hits the sensitive subject that this report ignores the real key issues on the Government IT failures. Trouble is even a success like the DVLA cannot be regarded as a success as the cost to run its Partners Achieving Change Together is eye watering both in absolute numbers and increases. An original estimate for 2002 to 2012 £287m revised up last year to £437m and now recently extended by 3 years for an additional £300m. This is no success it is by definition another failure on grounds of cost overruns. And who is the supplier? IBM! We as tax payers are paying way over the odds but quite cleverly such big suppliers with their expensive and complex technologies have us locked in.
As I have said earlier government need to get smarter and more knowledgeable at the procurement stage to understand the ever changing art of the possible, the technologies to be used, the ability to support change in the future and ultimately reduce both ICT support costs and increase operational efficiency. UK Government approach to ICT has failed on all these key aspects and what a price we have paid. Do not be fooled into thinking such as open source, cloud computing even outsourcing are answers. Such approaches may have roles to play but unless as a buyer you get the fundamentals right the continuing chaos will play into the hands of the vested interests of the large vendors such as IBM.
Based on my 20+ years experience of the IT industry, and my particular interest in the problems of large-scale IT, I have four concerns about this report.
1. It presents an inappropriate IT strategy for the UK public sector.
2. It will cause damage to the IT industry.
3. It will create a loss of political accountability.
4. It will weaken industry standards.
1. Public sector IT strategy is inappropriate
In the UK, the public sector takes around 43% of GDP, and presumably a similar proportion of IT activity. This is so large that you can not separate public sector IT from the IT industry in general. It is no more realistic to set strategy and architecture for the whole public sector than it is to do so for the entire IT industry. Rather than considering the public sector as a separate entity, the government should focus on policies to ensure a competitive, flexible and viable IT industry for the benefit of both public and private sector.
2. Damage to the IT industry
In pursuit of economies of scale, the report sets out public sector procurement initiatives for networks, data centres and applications. In the short term these may achieve their objectives, but in the long term a concentration of purchasing power and resultant concentration on a few major suppliers undermines competition in the IT industry. The best way to achieve economies is to ensure there is a competitive, flexible and viable IT industry.
The IT industry is largely supported by small and midsize IT businesses. Large scale centralisation disfavours these businesses and undermines the flexibility, economy and innovation that they bring.
3. Loss of political accountability
The report refers to sharing services across the public sector, but does not consider the impact on accountability.
We have separate agencies, councils and authorities to provide accountability. Without this we would have a totalitarian state.
Different parts of the public sector need independent accountability and management. This means they must have separate IT systems. IT systems and IT service agreements must not cut across boundaries of political accountability.
Where data sharing is required, this should be achieved through controlled integration that is open to public scrutiny, and not through data centralisation. Different government agencies should be no more free to share your data without your permission than your bank, supermarket and power supplier.
4. Weaken standards
The report refers to standards, but does not grasp what needs to be done to ensure that the public sector strengthens standards rather than weakens them. I suggest:
* All public sector standards should be replaced with standards that apply across both public and private sectors. There should be no standards that are “private” to the public sector.
* Where possible, the public sector should contribute to existing standards, rather than create their own.
* Any standards that receive significant public funding should, as a condition of funding, be available for free, allow royalty-free use, and freely permit the creation of derivative works. This opens up the usage and innovation around the standards.
In general, the report looks like a corporate IT strategy super-sized for the government. But running a country is not like running a business. The public sector is so large that any decisions have a fundamental, defining impact on the IT industry. The public sector is so broad that more controls are required to ensure accountability is not compromised. We need a radical rethink.
Andrew Clifford
It is a very poor document and many of the comments already posted here are very valid. I am afraid they also do not inspire much hope! Pinpointing obvious (for the enlightened) best practice, methods and approaches to Enterprise Architecture, Project Management and large scale software development is not going to solve anything as, in the main, they will not be implemented and certainly not imbedded in the culture of the department or of their suppliers.
To be even gloomier, the IT industry has a catastrophic record of tangible project success which is well documented by numerous respected industry analyst organisations. However, what can you expect from an industry that has no professional standards or qualifications – would you be happy to know that the tallest building in the world had just been designed by a bunch of people that only had to spell Architect on their CV to get the job (Burj Dubai’s budget was on only $4b incidentally!)? No doubt, today’s popular off-shoring trend is justifiably backed by board executives on the fairly sound basis that, “if we know we are likely to fail, let’s fail at a fraction of the cost”.
That said, I cannot agree with some commentators that Public Sector IT is no worse or no more inefficient that the Private Sector as in my experience it is simply not true. So if we are inherently inefficient, used to failure with no consequences, and its impractical to teach or imbed best practice where is the hope for the Public Sector?
Well firstly do something non-IT (often the best way to get a result) and get rid of the vast bureaucracy currently in place. At a local level this can be done by removing the layers of non crucial civil servants currently tiered, pyramid like, in swathes of red tape and unhelpfulness and categorically with no experience of successful IT implementations. At a central level we could do the world a favour by ridding it of the inept procurement agency “OGC Buying Solutions” who, since their inception, have managed to award over 70% of all annual IT budgets to less than 10 companies – it is the most uncompetitive scenario imaginable and if you are fortunate enough to be an approved large SI, well done, as it’s been a license to print money for countless years now.
In these uncertain times, getting rid of a load of unnecessary civil servants and a expensive central government body could be seen as a reason alone to be more cheerful however, it gets better than this because as a by product of these measures, we could in fact solve some of the “techy” problems for non-delivery that have already been highlighted above. I won’t list them all (there are a lot, but this post has gone on a bit already) but the main improvement and, one that is mentioned by several astute commentators already is the manageable size issue (small chunks please!). Having a normal competitive market would mean more specialists rather than generalists as suppliers to UK Plc. This means, by definition, that projects are much, much more likely to be chunked up and distributed to companies in more achievable sizes, greatly increasing their chances of success – furthermore, both requirements management (in my view the most important issue for project success) and project management should become that much easier. You are, of course, also much more likely to get a better value for money deal in a competitive marketplace.
Lastly, JohnSmith:
“For Tesco it is, “does this make me money””
No, I don’t agree with that John. For starters, Business people decide what makes money at Tesco and then IT people enable it but mainly my comment would be that Tesco’s meteoric rise to success has been largely through their vastly superior efficiency compared to their competitors. As a result your question would have been better put as “For Tesco it is, “does this save me money” – and this question is exactly what I and countless other tax payers in this country want our Government and their IT Managers/Procurement Teams to be asking continually.