The coalition government has yet to publish its ICT plans but more electronic provision of services is likely to be near the top of the list
The coalition government has rightly been taking its time sorting out its policies on information and communication technologies. With all the other pressures on the government, it would have been relatively easy to just put a new gloss on Labour’s January 2010 ICT strategy and continue broadly on the same path.
But the departure of government chief information officer John Suffolk suggests that a rethink is taking place.
The public sector spends £16bn a year on technology, almost 5% of overall public sector expenditure. It is also the largest employer of IT professionals in the UK and a very significant customer for ICT suppliers.
The challenge it faces is to use technology more intelligently to reduce costs and dramatically improve efficiency, while stopping the mega projects that are notoriously hard to manage and stifle competition.
Getting it right could save billions of pounds; getting it wrong could stop public services from modernising and also damage the UK’s IT industry.
Before the general election, the Conservatives were very critical of government ICT policies. They made it clear that if elected they would introduce a ‘presumption against’ big IT projects (those worth more than £100m), introduce an initial moratorium on new projects, renegotiate existing contracts and make new contracts more accessible to smaller suppliers.
They also highlighted the major problems experienced with projects such as the £12.7bn NHS National Programme for IT, the £7.1bn Defence Information Infrastructure project and the £5bn National Identity Card scheme. Setbacks included escalating costs, function creep, delays and technical issues.
Since the election, the coalition’s ICT agenda has broadly followed the main thrust of Conservative party thinking. The Coalition Agreement promises:
‘We will create a level playing field for open source software and enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.’ It also pledges a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public. There is an assurance that all data published by public bodies will be in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.
There are also commitments to introduce better technology to make policing more effective and to make hospitals share non-confidential information with police about gun and knife crime hot spots.
So, what will be included in the new ICT strategy? We can expect an even greater focus on electronically provided services following the recent call by UK ‘digital champion’ Martha Lane Fox and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude for government services to be ‘digital by default’.
Moving an additional 30% to 50% of government service contracts to digital channels has the potential to save £1.3bn–£2.2bn annually, according to Fox.
There will also be pressure to reduce the number of government data centres, moving from hundreds to perhaps fewer than 20 more modern centres could make dramatic savings in staffing, power consumption and technology costs. This should be linked to greater use of: shared services; re-use/sharing of technology that already exists; virtualisation (using one machine to operate multiple servers, operating systems and applications); and cloud computing (using external hosts for your software systems).
A major difference is likely to be what Ian Watmore, head of the Cabinet Office’s new Efficiency and Reform Group, calls a ‘tight/loose framework’. This means that the centre will focus intensely on controlling a small number of vital items and devolve the remainder to local managers. It will be interesting to see how this is achieved.
John Thornton is an independent adviser and writer on business transformation, financial management and innovation and a member of the CIPFA IT Panel.
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