Underpinning the strategy is a number of strategic principles which will be adopted by all public sector organisations in regards to their ICT strategy. These principles build on the work which began in 2005, with the launch of Transformational Government. The principles can be grouped under three core headings:
- Better
- Secure from design through implementation to operation
- Interoperable facilitating information sharing and accessibility
- Design to improve quality of customer service
- Faster from concept to delivery
- Develop and exploit strong relationships with our suppliers
- Support innovation
- Invest in our workforce to increase capability and professionalization
- Utilise effective portfolio, programme and project management techniques to maximise the impact of ICT-enabled change
- Greener
- Support sustainable economic development
- Deliver the green agenda
- Energy efficient
- Cheaper
- Adopt greater standardisation and simplification
- Adopt the principles of using open standards
- Exploit open source to deliver greater value for money
- Re-use existing assets as the preferred option
- Exploit a more competitive marketplace
- Work collaboratively to procure and manage common solutions
- Develop agreed models for funding cross-public sector ICT programmes
- Benchmark ICT costs annually
Secure through to operation..
No no no, basic error. The system must be secure from design (and arguably before since if the original idea is insecure you can’t fix it). It must importantly also be secure to and through shutdown and disposal.
Needs to replace “exploit our suppliers” with “Get more suppliers and competition including small British businesses”
Imagine if the olympic team was selected from a short list of the fifty largeest people in the country – that would be dumb., but it’s exactly the way IT procurement in government works.
Very few of these actually mean anything. For example ‘Support Innovation’, what does that direct anyone to do, especially as they also ‘Re-use existing assets as the preferred option’?
There is no coherent direction here, just a load of plausible sounding words that have been dropped on a page.
Nothing about respect for people’s personal data, about people’s ability to participate in service design or the ability of others to use data contructively to create new value.
You might as well just say “we’ll employ better IT managers”. Hey – we might as well say “we’ll employ better and cheaper IT managers who wear thermal underwear and save on the heating bills”.
But what we need to do is to save shedloads of money, provide much better services fast, and to start to restore the basis of people’s trust in the IT-enabled aspects of public services. I think it’s a bigger task, more urgent and more important, than these principles suggest.
This is a list of “what” and none of the “how”. Which explains why year after year nothing happens.
It’s not even a very good list of the “what”. Where is the commitment to engage with citizens and enable public services to be designed around them, not Whitehall’s needs? What are the capabilities that Whitehall IT is aspiring to deliver? Where is transparency? Where is developing a more competitive market? (Which you would need to do before being able to exploit it). Where is the need to improve the governance? When are people going to be held accountable (for success or failure?)
Where is the commitment to reforming procurement rules so that SMEs can get a look-in?
“Develop and exploit strong relationships with our suppliers” seems to support the view that the CIO wants merely to have a few companies doing all govt IT rather than a thriving, competitive and diverse marketplace.
In fact, I begin to wonder if their ideal would be to have one single private sector supplier. It’s the way they seem to be driving things (and doesn’t HP now have something like 60% market share alone?)
As others have pointed out, I must agree that some of the Strategic Principles would appear to be mutually exclusive.
Support innovation
Re-use existing assets as the preferred option
The first statement says we should think outside the box! The second statement says we should not try to re-invent the wheel.