In 2020, public sector ICT will provide secure services to citizens, businesses and public servants, where they need it, how they need, when they need it and at a price the tax payer can afford.
The ICT Strategy supports delivery of core public sector goals:
- Improving public service delivery
- Improving access to public services
- Increasing the efficiency of public service delivery
These goals are set in Digital Britain, Building Britain’s Future, Excellence and Fairness, and the Operational Efficiency Programme. Each Department, Local Government and Wider Public Sector organisation also has their own business strategy to deliver specific services and commitments. The ICT strategy for Government provides a standardised, flexible and efficient infrastructure which enables delivery of individual departmental business objectives. It provides public servants with the confidence that they can deliver their objectives effectively and securely in a sustainable manner. It reduces inefficiency, replication of systems and duplication of effort.
The strategy will go further by providing Accounting Officers with the confidence that services available across the public sector have met procurement legal requirements and provide value for money to their business. This will be assured through the Supply Management strand which is accountable for pan-Government procurement of ICT products and solutions. The governance structure will ensure that Information Assurance requirements are incorporated into all strands of the strategy. This will provide assurance to Senior Information Risk Owners (SIROs) and Departmental Security Officers (DSOs) that solutions meet public sector mandatory Information Assurance and Security requirements. Most importantly, it will enable delivery of pan-Government objectives whilst maintaining local control over delivery and personalisation of services.
The UK public sector is facing significant pressures:
- Citizens are demanding access to services at times and in ways that are convenient to them rather than the provider
- Citizens and businesses have higher expectations of the levels of service and interaction they require from service providers
- The boundaries between public sector, third sector and private sector service provision are becoming increasingly blurred
- The global economic downturn of 2008/2009 will have long-term ramifications for market structures and investment models, leading to greater pressure for efficiency and savings
The time is now right for the public sector to take a fresh approach to its ICT and to review how ICT services and systems can be fully exploited to enable organisations to meet the challenges they face. The strategy addresses core infrastructure, standardisation and simplification of technical standards and designs, embedding of core policy and building of capable people – both internal and external to the public sector.
This page contains no useful semantic content.
I have tried to discern some actual meaning, but I think a well-meaning sub-ed should have scratched the entire page.
Also: “The boundaries between public sector, third sector and private sector service provision are becoming increasingly blurred.”
is (a) untrue, and (b) should remain untrue.
The government operation is very large and very diverse. This suggests that any sort of IT Strategy to cater for it must emphasise flexibility in order to allow the IT presented to the huge number of different end-users fully meets their needs. What is not needed is a monolithic ‘one size fits all’ approach, and fortunately modern IT allows for the required flexibility. Not here, however. We have a ‘common desktop strategy’ for the whole of the public sector and total confusion on what a ’service’ is. A better approach would be to establish a framework for the presentation of a library of well-formed services in the proper meaning of the word using a series of common protocols. That is all of the definition the desktop needs at this level, individual departments can provide a more granular definition against the service and protocol library.
Also where is the data management strategy as opposed to the data centre strategy, or do we really think that the government has got their data handling right? Security and resilience are also notable by their absence.
I spent a good while working on the ‘NHS supercomputer’, and saw many such ‘all encompassing strategic wrap-the-world’ documents such as this during my time. Now i know where all the air-headed, blue sky, cat herding ‘architects’ disappeared to from that project – they’re working on this one!! Another monolithic beast for the next gravy train participants to get their PRINCE II nonesense into! But i’m sure they’ll produce great plans in MS Project, will micro-manage and scale resources adequately, avoid reverting to type, and ensure there are at least 500 meaningless acronyms to learn before anything makes any sense; and absolutely ensure that delivery criteria are re-negotiated by all sides to be able to tick the box and claim success when the money has gone.
How about just keeping it simple, and commit to providing one elementary and much necessary service, only one – that of secure data, once done, all else can be built ontop. Until that’s provided, readers are bound to be sceptics. Can’t you just see the strategic directorate malware language throughout the website, massively impressive to the average reader no doubt. Ooooooo, how can we fail to understand that our government really has nailed this strategy, it’s in the bag! Please!
Personally, in the next 5 years, i’m committed to microwaving my iPhone, burying my laptops, removal of my personal details from any gov’t computer, and going to live in the Scottish hills in my tent – my personal data, namely how many naturally available berries and fruits i might find to survive will remain in my head, won’t be shared, or placed on any ‘wall’, not disseminated, nor indexed!
Remember the super-computer in the film ‘AI’, ‘where can i find the blue fairy?’ the boy asked, and the entire world’s data records were searched – everything ever recorded – at least at that point in our future, the boy will then know the people in the hills over Glencoe descended from the great Wilson.
It looks like the same format to me ABC [AT&T] their e-dict being “build more data silos using F-Teradata and SGI racks”, yet personally, I’d prefer my everday ATM limit GBX300 cash in-hand, thank you.
Proof indeed that the current government know absolutely nothing about computers or computing especially with regard to the ‘public sector’. What the public sector requires, if we are to pursue a public sector are, professionals. Professionals who are skilled enough to merit, whatever qualification is, that they hold. For, no amount of computing, computers, ‘clouds’ or replacement ‘pointer device’ is ever going to be a match for a medical practitioner being up to scratch for instance or providing nursing staff with ‘real’ training. A degree in nursing may require a trainee to sit in front of a computer and push a few buttons but it does not provide the nurse with insight into medical care. Computing facilities within the field of medicine are of bogus requirement unless they are deployed as monitor systems, a CT scan for instance.
The medical record system is a sham, where for instance is the indexing and what data types are being crossed referenced ?
As, far as I can ascertain, there is virtually no point in providing patient details across the intranet or internet for if the people who are going to be ‘ignoring’ the data held in the notes there is little point.
For, the medical profession, is a closed shop and scant attention is paid to any of the notes that exist on file anyway. Medical professionals opinion, however un-quantified would appear to override any data present on the patient notes. The NHS computer development is, a white elephant.
The medical profession requires, two things. 1) Brain power. 2) Disinfectant.
The medical profession also requires a detachment from statistics and being statistic driven.
The medical profession requires a management structure that is derived from the top echelon of medical teams. The current management processes have no grounding in medical science and that has a knock on effect all the way down to the ward. Where Science is considered to be, old hat.
The NHS does not require computing.
The NHS has never required computing, ever. Computing systems have been thrust upon the NHS by nitwits who, want to make a fast buck.
The medical profession, requires people, not more monkeys that operate ‘Government cloud, pie in the sky twaddle’. How, about spending a 100 million pounds on cleaners and a few new scalpels.
With regards, to other public services, pull it.
The public, do not need computing.
The report sites, websites such as Tesco and Amazon, probably the most boring and unenlightened sites on the web.
If the Government wants ‘bang for buck’, invest in people.
Where’s the Power of Information in your source stuff? It’s the best piece of work done on IT. It shows the way on governemnt data.
What you still need to sort out is treating personal data with the respect it deserves, respecting the fact that it’s valuable, and it’s ours not yours.
Forget all this sucking up to senior officials **What about restoring *public* confidence?
Dear god! This “crowdsourcing” experiement is turning out to be an absolute disaster.
I do hope someone at HQ is considering pulling it. It’s going to get more embarrassing as each day passes.
The problem with this approach is that you have no way of telling my expertise, my agenda or my political affiliation from my comments and you have the same problem with the other commenters.
For example –
Martin Coxhall – doubtless very passionate, but uses words he clearly doesn’t understand (Actually Martin – there’s a lot of semantic content in the diagram)
Robert – is a complete nutter who would seem to want to roll us all back to the days of Florence Nightingale
Gary Wilson – Obviously hadn’t worked on the NHS-IT project otherwise he’d have referred to it by its name rather than “NHS Supercomputer” which is a term that I’ve never heard in the context of NHS-IT
This is absolutely the worst scenario for croud-sourcing, and I sincerely hope that rather than relying on the input from a collection of madwags, the conservative party will actually engage with people who know what they’re talking about.
… but William according to senior officials the “vision is clearly still fit for purpose”: http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/publicsector/IGA/IGA2009_NIAS_Owen_Pengelly.pptx
@GarryBarnett “this is absolutely the worst scenario for croud-sourcing [sic]”. indeed i’ve never seen anything worse myself – this just the sort of thing just brings out the trolls isn’t it..?
In response to Gary Barnett…
regarding ‘Gary Wilson – Obviously hadn’t worked on the NHS-IT project otherwise he’d have referred to it by its name rather than “NHS Supercomputer” which is a term that I’ve never heard in the context of NHS-IT’
I was using the term much used in the media, to refer to it in a way understandable by idiots like yourself. After 3.5years on the project, the use of ‘NPfIT’ and hundreds of other crazy terms, ‘Connecting for Health’, ‘CfH’, ‘National Spine’, ‘National Programme for IT’ etc, etc, its inner workings, its enterprise architecture, data, logical, physical together with its requirements capture and realisation through use cases became well known and very well understand. Keep on bean counting, but leave the IT commentary to the real IT professionals, amongst which my many years hard gained experience and grey hair qualifies me as a member!
You whine about crowdsourcing, the subject is the G-Cloud IT project! Stick to the point man!