All of today’s public services are underpinned by technology. The delivery of all future services will be driven by and enhanced through ICT. The skills, capabilities and value of public sector IT Professionals are therefore of huge strategic importance.
The Government IT Profession aims to drive the development of a more professional government IT workforce by putting into place the building blocks for the Profession; setting the standards, policies and guidance required to ensure that the public sector has capable people and capable organisations, delivering and managing fit for purpose IT-enabled projects and services.
The first of these building blocks is the Government IT Profession competency and skills frameworks – the basis of which is the UK IT industry standard Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). This provides a common language to describe the skills and attributes required of IT professionals. We have already started building by providing the Profession with:
- The Civil Service Technology in Business (TiB) Fast Stream programme, for the recruitment and development of tomorrow’s IT leaders
- The Government IT Profession community space, providing a single place for IT professionals to come together, build communities of interest, and collaborate to share knowledge and best practice
- The Capability Consultancy, to work with organisations to enable them to implement IT professionalism
In order to enable organisations to achieve excellence, the standards, policies and guidance we plan to provide will result in an increase in the efficiency with which IT organisations operate and deliver. Increased professionalism across the IT workforce will result in the delivery of IT projects with a greater rate of success, and the delivery of IT services more effectively and efficiently. However, measuring increasing professionalism in isolation is meaningless, as it is the application of professional skills that will deliver better outcomes. Therefore, we will measure the increase in capability in relation to IT costs, customer satisfaction and project success rates.
As the Profession develops and utilises internal talent more effectively, the reliance on external contractors and consultants will diminish. Therefore, we will aim to drive a decrease in organisational annual spend on IT people of at least 5% year-on-year from 2010. This is predicated on increased flexibility in HR practices and headcount. In 2010, we will publish a qualifications policy to enable IT professionals to understand what they need to achieve to help progress their careers – enabling organisations to define local learning strategies and focus training budgets. By 2012, we will be in a position to influence the provision of industry wide learning, based on a robust learning needs analysis across the Profession. By 2014, we will enable organisations to grow their own in-service talent through local talent management schemes based on a proven methodology. By 2015, with industry partners, we will develop an industry wide method of recognising exceptional IT professionalism. We also aim to establish the Government IT Profession as the definitive source of information relating to professionalism and the broader IT landscape by 2020.
This would be funny if this wasn’t so wrong.
How many government IT contracts have sub-contracted out requirements definition and analysis?
A lot.
Why?
Because they have no analysts or requirements gathering sufficiently qualified to then go and ask the business how it all works.
Because actually, very few people understand how the business works.
It is usually, very, very broken.
Want to improve government IT?
Fix the business end first, streamline, organise and make it efficient.
THEN computerise it.
This proposal fails to address any of the staff-related causes of IT failure in the public sector. These causes are:
Too much job security: I’ve heard it from recruitment consultants who are begging me to go into the public sector “no one ever gets fired, and if they do then it’s accompanied by a massive payoff”. In the private sector, if you screw up big time on an IT delivery you’ll get one month’s pay if your lucky and be marched off the premises. It certainly helps focus the mind!
Pay: The pay in the public sector is woefully below that in the private sector. Why would a good IT professional go from the private sector into the public sector to receive a paycut of between 30% and 50%? The pensions don’t make up for it. You get what you pay for. True.
Barriers to entry: Many jobs rightly have a requirement that a new entrant has, or can obtain, security clearance. BUT, these roles are sourced by recruitment agencies, who have a vested interest in ensuring that no candidate fails vetting (because then they’ll lose their commission). And so they only put forward candidates who already have clearance. And you can’t get clearance unless you’ve previously had a government job or contract. Catch-22.
Finally, the culture: We all have to do paperwork, contend with office politics, put up with poor management etc from time to time. But if what I hear is right, these things happen (in triplicate) all the time.
Until someone in government wakes up to these truisms, there will never be good government IT.
There is probably noone in teh public sector IT or business who knows how things work end-to-end. The convolutions and complexities and vested interests are such that even external consultants paid handsomely wouldn’t be able to map out the processes to allow them to be analysed and improved.
Implement six-sigma, I would say, and do not tolerate mistakes! But the issue is the people measuring mistakes can’t rely on the numbers they are presented with. To many mistakes get swept under the carpet, and processes to cpature tehse mistakes do not work.
I particularly like “By 2014, we will enable organisations to grow their own in-service talent”. So, if you work in IT in any government department you have to wait 5 years before you can get any meaningful training…
Frankly, you can lay down all the “Professionalism” rules you want (assuming anyone in the Civil Service can recognise what that means – from the report it seems to think it means a common way of doing things, which is about 100% wrong) but you will end up with the same problem – public sector IT salaries are rubbish compared to the private sector, and especially compared to consultancies.
Let’s face it, if you’re a bright IT whizzkid, do you want to work for, let’s say HMRC, with all the “the standards, policies and guidance” enforced by the Government IT Profession, and look forward to a career spent messing about with the VAT calculators, the Self Assessment website and other similar worthy but frankly dull stuff that goevernment departments do, or work for XYZ consulting with the promise of rapid promotion, a variety of projects in the public and various private sectors, and twice the money. Yes, me too. And as long as vendor salesmen and programme managers get paid several hundred percent of what the public sector procurement people and programme managers get, all the quality and power will stay with the vendors.
If you want to make internal people as “professional” as the extenal ones, you are deranged. No large private sector organisation has acheived it, what on Earth makes ministers think the public sector can do any better.
Get certified, do-it-yourself and then be Independent.
Why does everyone want more/better IT professionals in the PS? I think what we need are more IT-conversant Permanent Secretaries!!!
Technology Skills needs to be a fundamental requirement for public service recruitment and promotion.
Those that don’t have them, don’t get advancement.
Add to that a nationwide Technology Skills Development programme and a requirement for a technology skill development target in all public service appraisal/performance management schemes. At that stage we are starting to build the type of public service that is fit for purpose in the 21st century.
Government policy in this area is driven by IT illiterates who are unfailingly taken to the cleaners while being dazzled by the contractors.
Starting at the top with permanent secretaries and ministers all the way down the food chain only those with demonstrable IT competentcy should be allowed the final say in all important decisions relating to the implementation of IT solutions and the regulation of computing and communications in general.
At the moment we have critical decisions about future infrastructure, and laws relating to it, being made under the duress of special interest groups and based on advice that the decision makers don’t have the knowledge to attempt to critique or fully understand the ramifications of.
As it stands they are lambs to the slaughter; the government, as a client, needs to add considerable know-how to put themselves on a par with the contractors so that the wool isn’t so easily pulled over their little lamb like eyes.
Decisions about issues generated by more and more complex technologies will become an increasingly important part of the government’s function and the consequences of poor decisions will be an order of seriousness greater.
A bunch of mainly arts graduates, who used to pride themselves on not being able to program their VCRs, amateurishly blundering about will not be fit for purpose.
Money spent on buying in staff with the expertise to combat the contractors, and then, crucially, listening to what they have to say, would be an excellent investment that would be repaid many times over by the savings in money, time, resources and the successful implementation of worthwhile, achieveable projects.
Just seen your comment Feargal. Snap!
There needs to be a simple traffic light system implemented, where those lagging behind in certain skills needed for their position of employment are flagged for the appropriate training, those who already have those skills are allowed to progress or be trained to become trainers themselves.
Over the years I have been the web-master of many large online tech forums, one the issues we had was obtaining suitably trained people to help our forum members. By a simple change to forum etiquette we achieved this, basically we treated all new comers in the same manner as we would have liked to be treated. We did not jump on them for making mistakes, we just showed them the alternative or easier way to complete a tash. They quickly learned and before they knew it, they where the staff helping others.
Why is this applicable here?
Instead of having a set of rules set in stone that drives people away with the trying to drive a square peg of rules into a round hole. I.T demands progressive and active response, which is constantly adaptive to the situation in which it is demanded. Thus the sourcing of IT staff and implementation has to be adaptive to the complexity of environments this implementation applies to.
I am a Data Analyst, amongst other things. I could make a real and substantial difference working on some of the NHS contracts (for instance). What is stopping me? The recruiters and managers insist on only hiring people who have worked on NHS data before. When you hire the same people- you perpetuate the same problems. If they can’t see to fix it the first time, they are never going to manage it the second time around.
When you want to think differently, call me.