The government’s ICT strategy sets out the coalition’s desire to take smaller bites at the IT pie, testing flavour and minimising indigestion. Civil Service World reports back from a round table debate on how to realise that ambition:
The coalition is pursuing an ambitious ICT strategy that represents a change of pace and approach in government computing. Ministers want to develop services on an ‘iterative’ basis – moving in small steps, rather than commissioning monolithic IT projects – and to emphasise the use of open source and open standards technologies, and procurement from small businesses. The government is also promoting collaboration between departments, and introducing central controls and coordination in order to cut costs.
In the past – as many in government willingly admit – public sector ICT projects acquired a poor reputation. But the strategy notes that while “there have been significant failings, the coalition government is determined to do things better”.
To find out whether the strategy contains the answers that will allow government to do so, CSW teamed up with IT solutions provider VMware to host a round table focusing on the opportunities created by the ICT strategy to deliver better, cheaper services to the public. And although some frustrations were expressed, along with fears about the pace of change, the discussion identified signs of hope for the path ahead.
Headline concerns
Not every CSW round table begins with a reflection on the editorial policies of the nation’s tabloid press. But Andy Tait, formerly a Cabinet Office staffer and now VMware’s head of public sector strategy, used this topic to demonstrate the challenges that plague public sector ICT investment. Civil servants live in fear of “headlines in the tabloids”, he said, where their IT failures are shared with the entire population. These fears can present an unfortunate barrier to innovation in the public sector, he argued, by influencing the appetite for risk within government departments.
In fact, as the Cabinet Office asserts in the ICT Strategy itself, large organisations in all sectors experience failures in delivering big ICT projects. As VMware’s Russell Acton said: “In the private sector, ICT doesn’t have a great reputation; it is just that failures are not so widely publicised.”
The headline, then, was plain: the public sector shouldn’t think itself uniquely prone to IT failures. As Tait said, “it’s not fair to say that ICT delivery in government is always poor. There are a large number of projects that go very well, but we don’t hear about them. We just hear about the handful that don’t go so well.”
Measuring success
Gill Ince, from HMRC, added nuance to this analysis, saying the measures of success in the public sector are different from those in the private sector. This makes comparisons between them difficult. “Context is important,” she remarked. “I think part of the problem is that you’re comparing apples and pears when comparing the public sector with the private sector. We have different drivers, different considerations, different types of funding – and the programme management isn’t the same… We’ve got different strengths and weaknesses.” Joe Baguley, VMware’s chief technologist, agreed, saying that success would look different for government departments than for commercial organisations.
Nonetheless, it is clear where the civil service has made some of its biggest errors in the past. In some cases, for example, it has been so focused on building IT systems that eliminate all risk of error and meet every possible need that – paradoxically – the civil service ends up disastrously trying to deliver the undeliverable. “We end up over-complicating our processes, and over-defining our requirements,” said Fraser Miles from the Ministry of Defence. “You then end up with over-bespoked capability, and any changes [to the solution] cost the earth.”
Another problem is overcapacity in data centres – often caused by departments pursuing their own agendas, as the ICT strategy makes clear. Tait observed that “clearly there is an opportunity across government for a significant amount of data centre consolidation. The government is now publicising its virtualisation figures, which is a key part of the roadmap to consolidation, and at 17 per cent, it’s a long way behind the average private sector levels”.
While she recognised these problems, Deborah Lawrence from FCO Services said that she sees the ICT strategy as an invitation to change. “The whole strategy looks towards how we can work more closely together; how we can become one civil service,” she remarked. “We’ve all got different priorities within each department, and it’s about how we manage those priorities but at the same time implement all the requirements around the ICT strategy. It’s a whole different way of working for all of us.”
Changing the culture
Rob Anderson, a software procurement specialist from the Cabinet Office, echoed Lawrence’s views. “It will take a culture change,” he said, “particularly in a federated government where people have been used to doing their own thing... Until there is a mandate saying: ‘You will do it this way’, I think people will still do their own bits and pieces”. Miles, though, responded that “I don’t want to wait for a mandate. If we can just get the right people in the right organisations in government [talking], most of the architecture is in place at the moment to proceed and develop these capabilities.”
Tait, however, was less sure about departments’ willingness to sacrifice autonomy in the pursuit of efficiency. “I never sensed in the time I was in the public sector a desire to be a consumer of shared services,” he said. “Many organisations were standing up to say: ‘I’ve got this great solution that could be a shared service, and everyone else has to change their processes to suit mine’.” Indeed, publication of the coalition’s plan for sharing services has been postponed to next year.
Civil service leaders’ readiness to give up some ownership of their IT capabilities will help define the strategy’s success, as many of its elements depend on government acting as a single organisation to produce savings – by negotiating with suppliers through a single point, for example, or by integrating departmental systems and buying shared software via the common Public Service Network. Savings here depend on officials’ willingness to give up their bespoke systems and adopt more generic alternatives – an option that is, in many cases, readily available within government.
After all, as FCO Services’ Greg Bailey said, the civil service already runs class-leading multiple-user IT operations. Giving the example of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems – which integrate internal and external management data across an organisation – Bailey said that HMRC runs the “ultimate” solution, one provided for every taxpayer in the UK. “Surely they are experts at that?” he asked. “So why are other departments going out and specifying their own ERP systems?”
The answer is that certain department-specific functions require bespoke technology, Acton said. The challenge, then, is to “discern what needs to be centralised and what needs to be customised”. Departments will then need the skills to get together to buy a common solution, while purchasing add-ons that enable them to meet their own unique needs.
Buy now, don’t pay later
With that in mind, there is a renewed focus on improving civil service procurement – especially, though not exclusively, in relation to ICT spending. The difficulty with this, as Rob Anderson explained, is that the public sector is short of skills when it comes to buying. “We have outsourced a lot of our skills,” he said: civil servants are struggling to manage contracts in a way that will achieve the ICT strategy’s aims.
One way of plugging that gap would be more centrally-provided information and capability – and while Miles said that he’s “very comfortable” with the Cabinet Office’s ICT spending controls, he added that “what I would like to see back in return is… ‘This is what we can do for you: these are the dialogues that we can facilitate with our broader vision of what’s going on across the whole of the government sector’.”
It’s not just a question of buying well, either. Russell Acton noted that the procurement process sometimes moves more slowly than the pace of technological change – meaning that by the time a contract is awarded, the technology available has moved on and the client’s already buying outdated kit. The challenge, then, is one of “contracting for change” – something that can be achieved by avoiding getting “locked in” to the kind of lengthy contract that was once de rigueur in government procurements.
A problem for departments, as Manchula Kuganesan from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office observed, is that organisations that are locked into existing contracts face financial penalties for exiting them. That makes it hard for them to start cooperating with other departments until their contracts expire. Even so, said FCO Services’ Deborah Lawrence, being tied to a contract needn’t preclude using the “breathing space” this provides to work out ways of doing things differently next time.
More than that, departments need the capability to revisit contracts and see if they can be reworked, claimed Home Office project manager Joan Ogbebor. Baguley noted that this is a good reflection of how contracts operate in the commercial world, where client-supplier relationships are more “iterative” than has traditionally been the case in government.
This means the concept of delivering 100 per cent capability is old-fashioned, said Acton. In its place will come solutions that are cheaper, quicker and perhaps 80 per cent effective, but with the agility to adjust in response to changing client needs and technologies.
To manage the complexity involved in this new way of working, Acas’s Mark Stephens said, we must better train the workforce. “The challenge is to bring business skills back into the civil service,” he said, “because they are not there at the moment. We need them to realise the ICT strategy, and join-up government.”
Support from the centre will also be crucial to realising the strategy, the group agreed. As well as imposing central controls, said Miles, the Cabinet Office should function as a “broker” across Whitehall – facilitating collaboration and assisting in procurement. Rob Anderson said the Crown Representatives system helps deliver this vision, but conceded that it’s in need of “refinement” as circumstances change.
It is these changing circumstances that make the current context particularly challenging, stimulating and full of potential. The ICT strategy maps a vision of a joined-up future for the government. If nothing else, the discussion demonstrated both how eager individual civil servants are to work together to improve the quality and efficiency of public services; and how powerful is the force of institutional inertia that constrains their efforts to collaborate.
The participants – and their conclusions
“We’re seeing a major decoupling of infrastructure and applications in ICT. The trick is to make sure one doesn’t dictate the other.”
Russell Acton, vFabric (Cloud Application Platform), EMEA, VMware
“The Cabinet Office doesn’t need to mandate; it needs to facilitate. We need to communicate better to departments what’s going on, in a timely manner.”
Robert Anderson, software sector lead, Commercial Relationships Team, Cabinet Office
“ICT as a profession needs to throw away some old practices and engage with some new ideas in order to consume new ways of doing things.”
Joe Baguley, chief technologist, EMEA, VMware
“Public sector e-delivery of services has to go to the next level in order to… continue what we have now for the next generation. It’s about more than just doing things more cheaply.”
Greg Bailey, cloud services architect, FCO Services
“The speed of change in technology is so fast. How do we keep up?”
Gill Ince, head of security and information HR, HMRC
“We’re all on a journey. The cost of IT is falling, and end users are becoming more IT-aware. There are good pressures for change; we just need a route to get there.”
Manchula Kuganesan, accountant, Foreign and Commonwealth Office
“The ICT Strategy is a hill, and we are at the top of it waving our flag. We need now to collaborate, work across the boundaries that we have, and get it right first time. Let’s take this guidebook that we have and put it into practice.”
Deborah Lawrence, head of corporate affairs and strategic engagement, FCO Services
“We need to get smarter in collaborative working, and in understanding how to articulate our requirements in a manner that is going to be quickly understood by industry, so that they will want to participate in the business we put to them.”
Wing Commander Fraser Miles, programme director, Ministry of Defence
“Speaking as a provider of services and a member of the public, we need to break down the IT strategy very simply and clearly, and for the benefit of the end user.”
Joan Ogbebor, programme and project manager, Home Office
“The government has to take advantage of the opportunity to work with the best minds in IT.”
Mark Stephens, local information manager, ACAS National
“Public sector IT is transforming, but fundamentally the pace is slow. There are some great examples, but trying to move forward… into this dramatically more efficient world is difficult.”
Andy Tait, head of public sector strategy, VMware
Chair: Joshua Chambers, deputy and online editor, Civil Service World