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.
