By Mark Smulian
9 March 2011
A permanent secretary level appointment is needed to end Whitehall’s series of failed IT procurements, according to academics.
Witnesses yesterday told the Commons public administration select committee that the UK’s performance was worse than comparable countries and that the government lacked the expertise to deal with IT suppliers.
Helen Margetts, professor of society and the internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, said: ‘The chief information officer has two jobs but ought to be the IT supremo. It needs someone at permanent secretary level in overall charge.’
Joe Harley, who was appointed chief information officer in February, doubles up as a Department for Work and Pensions director general.
Margetts argued that the IT appointment was needed because government departments could not deal on equal terms with the large suppliers who dominate the market.
Sir Ian Magee, senior fellow of the Institute for Government, endorsed her call: ‘We need a strong independent CIO. The chief executive of a FTSE 100 company would understand the power of IT, and that does not happen in government.’
Margetts said the UK proved ‘an outlier for poor performance’ among seven major governments she studied. One reason for this was that ‘only a small number of large suppliers are getting the bulk of contracts while we have lost IT expertise in government’.
She gave the example of Revenue & Customs. ‘It decided long ago it would outsource everything, and its expertise was lost to the suppliers.
‘It has spent a tiny proportion on contract management compared to what the private sector would have done, and we are seeing the consequences now.’
The government should copy the US, where procurement laws required opportunities for small- and medium-sized enterprises to bid for public contracts, Margetts said.
Edgar Whitley, reader in information systems at the London School of Economics, called for contracts that would allow the government and its suppliers to collaborate to keep up with technological change.
‘At the moment, it is “this is what we do, and don’t, because this is what you screwed the cost down to”,’ he said.
Whitley said the downturn made it relatively easy for government to recruit skilled staff, ‘but those people might then get frustrated by being in a climate in which they have an inability to drive innovation’.
Earlier this week, IT industry experts warned that the savings that could be extracted from IT contracts were reducing.
