All products, services and assets contained in the ICT infrastructure will benefit from a suite of common standards. This will assure security, interoperability and common data standards which will facilitate easier data sharing and joining up of public services.
- Architecture and Standards: The technical architecture and standards work underpins all elements of the ICT strategy. This work will ensure that each element of the strategy can interoperate and be reused across the public sector, delivering agile public services that are efficient, responsive and tailored to meet the needs of citizens and businesses.
- Open Source, Open Standards, Reuse: Traditionally, the public sector has relied on Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software from global providers. This restricts the ability of the public sector to reuse solutions, reduces flexibility to manage assets efficiently and prevents the public sector from switching suppliers when problems occur. The Open Source, Open Standards, Reuse strategy will provide the public sector with Open Source alternatives to COTS software that meet public sector requirements for Information Assurance, resilience and ongoing support and integration with existing systems. Government already commits to only using open standards for documentation. The ICT strategy will build capability within the public sector to increase the amount of open source code and software in use and to make it available for reuse elsewhere.
- Greening Government ICT: ICT globally emits more carbon than the aviation industry and use and emissions continue to grow. Recognising this, the Greening Government ICT strategy sets two challenging targets which support delivery of mandatory SOGE (Sustainability on the Government Estate) targets. Government ICT will be carbon neutral by 2012 and carbon neutral across it’s lifecycle by 2020. The Greening Government ICT strategy is embedded in all elements of the ICT strategy and will deliver significant cash savings from smarter working practices as well as reduced energy consumption, alongside lower carbon emissions.
- Information Security & Assurance: Recent data losses within the public sector have rightly raised the profile of Information Assurance (IA). However, without appropriate levels of data sharing, Government will be unable to meet its aim of joining up services and providing easier access to personalised services for citizens and businesses. Effective, proportionate management of information risk is essential to meet the challenge of delivering personal services enabled by ICT, as well as making us more effective and efficient. Work to enhance Information Security & Assurance through the National IA Strategy cuts across all elements of this ICT strategy and is embedded within all work-streams. The ICT strategy will deliver a secure and proportionate infrastructure that will allow public sector bodies to match their information risk appetite with their information risk exposure – users of that infrastructure will be able to take IA for granted without feeling that their effectiveness has been compromised.
- Should concentrate on standards and interoperable solutions to create a competitive market. Open source helps but the open standards are the vital bit
- Software purchasing needs reform. Right now the government ends up excluding most small and dynamic (and usually British !) companies due to the paperwork and hassle, plus the slow payment systems.
- Computer security in business starts by
– Not storing stuff you don’t need in the first place
– Minimum access to stuff that is needed (and assumptions of non-need, lack of access gets queried and fixed, overaccess is never reported)
– Deleting anything sensitive that has no continued use (eg fingerprint data!)
- Security is not an IT problem, it is a systems problem and that involves people, process and technology together. No single one can fix it.
dg/EMC || ENTERPRISE_SYMMETRIX
I am definitely in favour of open source and open standards (although it remains to be seen how open source is defined). For Government open source is the superior development model, and open standards are essential to ensure we all have access to that data now, and in the future.
Don’t forget the idealogical ideas of Free software, which are also a better fit with government. If we are paying for the development of a system, shouldn’t we, as taxpayers have full access to it? and surely we as stakeholders in the system should be able to contribute improvements, as with this web site.
Here again no mention of Information Management and Governance and Project Management Standards that need to be adhered to.Some companies opnelny disregard the rules at the point of tendering and say later our next release will support those standards.
Technical IT Architecture and standards are very important, but they have to align to business architecture for effective delivery. This seems absent, and so we have the danger of IT laying down standards that deliver poor outcomes, or have to be modified, for particular types of government business. Given the pervasive nature of modern IT an organisation cannot simply dictate IT standards in the absence of business realities, because the need to get the business done will reduce them to irrelevance in practical terms.
The critique of commercial software is far too sweeping, and suggests that governmental commercial arrangements with suppliers may be at fault. Open source has a very valuable place, but the simple fact is that it is only available for a narrow range of applications compared to commercial software, and even where it is available it is sometimes inferior to commercial offerings. Even if an organisation does embrace open source, it is not ‘free’ because it needs to be supported. So, either a commercial third-party is engaged or an investment for in-house expertise has to be made. Then there is the small matter of the government’s existing installed software base. Migrating large-scale applications is very expensive, and is usually not cost-effective if at the end of it all you get is the same function on a new platform.
The idea that the government embraces open source and everything suddenly improves is too simplistic. A more balanced approach would probably bring benefits, especially if the focus was on demonstrably successful open source offerings such as LINUX, but there is no sign of that here.
The Information Assurance section was fact-free, and does not deal with the government’s obsession with very large databases that have many thousands of users from a multiplicity of organisations. These are very, very difficult to secure unless some very clear principles are applied, because you end up being dependent on the processes of partner organisations over which you have no control. Such problems are simply ignored with an airy assurance that the government is working on it.
Comment from Ben “…If we are paying for the development of a system, shouldn’t we, as taxpayers have full access to it? and surely we as stakeholders in the system should be able to contribute improvements, as with this web site…”
Submitting improvements would be totally absurd I’m afraid. Assuming a competent service provider is employed to manage this (I dont believe for a second that the government has the skills in-house), the systems will be baselined at a certain version and then religiously maintained with fixes tested to death and only applied on an absolute totally-required-to-keep-running-the-service-ONLY (including security) basis. Taking code submissions from any tom dick or harry with arbitrary “improvements” just wont fly and no service provider would offer to support such patches. Its far too risky.
Usually with “open source” licenses such as the GPL you are only required to re-distribute the source code if you distribute the modified version publicly. Simply running a server/database/application on an internal, private network generally means you do not have to distribute the source to the general public.
Yet another piece of B*Bingo fodder – putting this through Word’s readibility scores gave a reading ease of 18.7 and
Yet another piece of B*Bingo fodder – putting this through Word’s readibility scores gave a reading ease of 18.7 and a grade level of 17.1
“Flesch Reading Ease score rates text on a 100-point scale; the higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. For most standard documents, aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70.”
“Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score rates text on a U.S. school grade level. For example, a score of 8.0 means that an eighth grader can understand the document. For most documents, aim for a score of approximately 7.0 to 8.0.” – Word Help file
The BCS should be involved much more in government decisions about standards/architectures and making sure people/external agencies adhere to them (random code reviews?).
As mentioned elsewhere – open source is not the same as free – sometimes off the shelf items modified to match the business process can be much more efficient. Also where a language/archtitecture is in common use, the amount of people who can use it is much higher keeping overall costs lower and reducing risks from losing the developer.
It’s odd why now – not long before a general election – this document has appeared. The current CIO largely scrapped open standards when he arrived – the old eGIF (eGovernment Interop Framework) was precisely that. It used Internet and WWW standards. It was working to make all the proprietary formats (such as .doc) legacy. In the interim, the CIO and his team have pushed proprietary software – the OGC monopoly deal with Microsoft for example apparently doubled Microsoft’s profits from the public sector. Now he wants to go back to open standards. So why did he ditch them and mothball eGIF in the first place? He’s wasted years.
Where is the delivery rather than the talk? What does the CIO and his team actually achieve? What % of govt apps have moved to open source since their open source announcement? Have any? Anywhere?
Architecture and Standards: Good
Open Source, Open Standards, Reuse: The problem stated in the first section relates to too many applications. This talks about reuse which is good, not sure which Open source apps HMG would use, though Linux would presumably be in the data centre somewhere … etc
Greening Government ICT: Good — Less Electricity use == reduced cost of IT
Information Security & Assurance: Don’t keep more than you need/can afford to loose, don’t give people any more than they need and make it easy to share data the safe way and you won’t loose too much.
But you will always loose some somewhere, the more data you have the more people access the more likely it will end up in the wrong place at some point (variant on Murphy’s Law). This leaked report is an example. Better to work on the assumption that you will loose it. Lets face it everyone looses their keys sooner or later.
Open, unencumbered standards (the market will then deliver FLOSS) no “Yes Minister” special cases
interoperability and plugfests (e.g., http://www.odfworkshop.nl/
Don’t confuse products with processes
It’s not about finding an FLOSS solution (which BTW, can also be “COTS”) to replace a proprietary (so called “COTS”) solution
It’s about document processing, spreadsheets, databases, (with interoperability) not product X or product Y
For an education example see http://www.theingots.org