Under Major, Blair and Brown, the UK Government has followed a deliberate policy of running down its internal IT expertise and relying on external providers – mostly big companies like Capita and EDS – to provide IT expertise, systems and services.
The result, many argue, has been expensive IT that’s been very successful in maximising the profits of the consultants but rather less good at meeting the needs of the public sector or, for that matter, the public. Project after project has run massively over budget and time, with the companies responsible often seeming to be rewarded for their shortcomings.
So what’s the new coalition government going to do about it?
Back in 2008/09, Dr Mark Thompson wrote a report for the Conservatives on just this issue (and, to be fair, it moved them well ahead of the Lib Dems on IT policy). Thompson’s report was pretty good, and recommended fewer big IT projects, breaking projects down into smaller modules where possible and more use of open standards and open source.
That work’s made it into the coalition agreement in the form of two paragraphs:
- We will take steps to open up government procurement and reduce costs; and we will publish government ICT contracts online.
- We will create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components
Which is all good, but the devil’s in the detail.
To give one example, Labour would claim that there’s already a level playing field for open source software – guidelines issued a few years ago made it clear that open source and proprietary should both be fairly considered. In reality, though, that’s not quite happened. The combination of a lack of in-house expertise, and open source being perceived as riskier by bureaucrats who quite reasonably don’t want to damage their careers by going out on a limb has held it back.
Further, the reliance on the model of the last twenty years of buying in IT solutions externally (as opposed to the more common method of developing them in-house prior to that) makes it difficult to get the full benefit from open source.
To really benefit from the development model, you want to be taking open source software, adding to it and then releasing it so as many parts of the public sector as possible can use it. You want a piece of software developed by the Treasury to be usable – with no licensing cost – by the NHS, the Department of Education and your local council, and for their developers to be able to modify it to meet their specific needs.
So the direction of travel under the coalition – thanks to the work the Conservatives have done – is much more promising than anything for the last twenty or thirty years; but it still needs to get there.
That’s where we come in. Tech-savvy Lib Dem members can play an important role in shaping how the Government actually delivers on these promises and good intentions, and in the process catch up on an area of policy where the party’s fallen behind.
The Act group Lib Dems for some decent IT policy, with over 120 members, has the chance to work with other groups and shape the way Government does IT. If we can get it right, we’ve got the opportunity to save billions of pounds and improve public sector IT into the bargain.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
GUEST POST Forget your two-horse race: Increasingly it's a cavalry charge
Migration: another shooting in the foot
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion polls
Weekly Road Report - West End Ward #dundeewestend
Pure heart
Tiny Steps from Starmer but at least they are in the right direction!
Caron Lindsay
Greg Hyde
Big Tall Tim
Anton McNulty-Howard
Suzanne Fletcher
3 Comments
Let’s be specific here: the Labour government’s procurement policy was designed specifically to cater to the needs of huge contracts being tendered by huge corporations which will then receive approximately zero attention or supervision from the government. This can support only one development model, and only a tiny handful of companies, which is why the same companies keep winning the contracts. While they have a policy which nominally encouraged alternatives, they have a contract tendering system which could never be satisfied by those alternatives.
This has not been done in any explicit policy, but rather in a thousand little rules of minor discrimination. If it was about an individual, we would call it “a complete failure to implement any sort of diversity or non-discrimination policy”, but there’s no comparable rule for contractors.
I started a topic on this in LD Act the other day, clearly it also relates to the brief discussion that took place on Twitter late afternoon yesterday (taking a break from technology procurement to discuss procuring technology on twitter).
There are a number of issues, one is the size and complexity of the public sector, another is the culture both at the intra-department level and around resourcing change programmes. I do mean ”change” and not technology, although it’s common in the public sector to treat ICT programmes as the preserve of technical departments without the business end getting too involved until the solution doesn’t do what they wanted. A third is the requirement that we compete delivery in accordance with the EU procurement directions, and that we assure the use of taxpayers money through supplier stability requirements.
From a culture and skillset perspective, technology project management is not a career path that attracts the brightest and best. In my experience many of these projects end up populated by people who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere in their department. Equally Business Change Managers are either high flyers who don’t hang around long, or see their position as a penalty. MoD is the only department that takes PM seriously, and they have a host of structural and political issues that get in the way of their projects. I’m really not sure on the answer to this side, it’s not fully outsourcing procurement as that way the business ends up disengaged from the changes inherent in delivery. Similarly contract managers are pretty weak, in my experience, tending towards welcoming an easy life rather than driving the supplier to meet the contract. Far too many don’t want to cause trouble and like a nice cozy, friendly relationship.
The inter-departmental rivalry is something to behold, shared services have been adopted in some areas, but the resistance is something to behold. ”Shared services are fine as long as it’s my service that gets shared”. The Tory idea of a skunk works in Cabinet Office might help but it would need primary legislation to change the nature of the relationship between CO and the other departments, for two parties with an espoused philosophy of decentralisation I’m not convinced that embedding more control in CO is the way ahead.
In terms of the complexity I think it’s worth splitting out the infrastructure issue from the applications. While the challenge of getting boxes on desks is probably the preserve of the big Systems Integrators that has the potential to open up the application and services market to SMEs, the size of those contracts would also reduce the Due Diligence barriers that currently exclude many SMEs as the total contract value wouldn’t need the same level of business assurance. As an example Cabinet Office let a contract to Fujitsu a couple of years ago for a system called Flex; a commoditised desktop delivering basic office applications, records management and generic collaboration tools. It was then fairly simple to get specialist applications delivered across that. There are difficulties with the approach taken in Flex, it’s still somewhat exclusionary, but it’s a step in the right direction.
The issue of open source and open standards do tend to get conflated, including in government policy documentation. The GovOSS policy that was released for consultation earlier in the year did just that, treating the two as synonymous. Open Standards are certainly something that I’d support, although in a procurement there are vulnerabilities around how Treasury and OGC have expressed the EU direction. Open Source is less clear cut, most times that I’ve seen it offered as part of a solution it’s not really led to significant financial savings, while licensing costs can be significant they’re still only a small part of the service charge, in part because the people to service open source solutions seem to be more expensive than those required to support proprietary solutions.
The driving factor in a large, complex procurement is which one is the ”Most Economically Advantageous Tender”, The criteria for MEAT should avoid any discrimination around the detail of the solution, and since it’s all liable to be shared with all bidders it’s vulnerable to legal challenge if it does exclude. I’ve seen challenges, although never around the technical detail, mainly they’ve been around procurement process.
None of this is insurmountable, but both Tory and LD approaches at the moment focus on the wrong things, and in both cases don’t really meet the requirements of the EU direction around competition and procurement law, anti-competitive behaviour by government and state-aid.
It is hard to work out the optimal IT strategy, not just for government but for the private sector as well. Many IT projects fail in the private sector.
I have worked in both the private and public sectors, and more often than not what I have seen has left a lot to be desired.
Open source software may be the way to go, but there is a lot of things to take into account as to whether it is. What immediately springs to mind is how well open source is supported. Usually not as well as proprietry software.
In my experience as a software developer the main problem I see is that there is too much short termism. In any IT project there is meant to be a lifecycle. But the only part that delivers the solution is the code. So when deadlines are tight (ie always), then you cut back on the solution design and you cut back on the testing. You also cut back on training the software developers. You end up with badly designed solutions written in out of date technology which have not been tested properly. It is harder to fix bugs once a system goes live, but system maintenance is often accounted for in a difference budget, so no-one notices how inefficient this all is.
What this all adds up to – and the hardest lesson of all in IT to learn – is that if you pay more up-front, you benefit from savings in the longer term. All this has to be well judged of course.