With a little application

In April last year, the Treasury committed the public sector to saving £3.2bn on its information technology spending by 2014; and in January this year, the ideas for how those savings should be made were announced in the government’s ICT strategy.

The most eye-catching ideas were those for cloud computing for government – dubbed the G-Cloud – and an applications store where a department seeking an IT product, such as a file-management system, could view what government already owns and reuse it for minimal extra cost. There are 14 other strands to the strategy, many of which cover well-established areas of work, such as sustainable IT and procurement of a common desktop across government.

John Suffolk, the government’s straight-talking chief information officer (CIO), who’s based in the Cabinet Office, says the strategy is a no-brainer. Take its promise to deliver a Public Sector Network (PSN) for the public sector, he says. At the moment, central government has the Government Secure Intranet (GSi), which connects to local government and other bodies through the Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSX), and separate networks are run by the health service, schools, local authorities and countless other public bodies. “How many times, as a public sector, have we paid for the same cabling and the same infrastructure? A lot!,” says Suffolk. “If I had a newspaper now, we could find an advert for high-speed internet for £6.75 a month”. This, he says, is cheaper than the £10 to £12 that the government currently pays. “Where are the economies of scale?”

Given this, the PSN – and the G-Cloud or the apps store – will only provide economies of scale, and the £3.2bn of savings by 2014, if enough organisations in the wider public sector opt to join them. For example, the strategy calculates that the PSN will save £500m a year by 2014, based on 80 per cent of the public sector using the network. A chunk of that will be made up of the GSi family, which is due to migrate to PSN when the current contract runs out, but other sections of the public sector will have to be persuaded that PSN is the right secure network for them. Suffolk says there will be no incentives – despite a suggestion by the Society of IT Managers (Socitm) that there should be – because he believes the 15 to 35 per cent saving promised by PSN “is incentive enough”.

Suffolk and his team have no power of compulsion over central government departments, let alone the wider public sector, so they are dependent on the economic arguments to override any concerns organisations have about functionality. Suffolk believes the system for delivering the strategy – which relies on CIO council leads and the teams of people they pull together from across the public sector, rather than Cabinet Office diktat – will ensure that organisations and officials have ownership and can influence what the strategy delivers. As a consequence, he says, they’ll be less likely to reject those products.

However, if a public sector body does act against the spirit of the strategy –procuring a new data centre, say, when the aim is to reduce the number from 130 to a dozen or so – Suffolk is ready to intervene and have a chat with whoever is taking that decision. He is happy to accept that there will be times when a divergence from the strategy’s aims is necessary – due, for example, to contractual obligations or an urgent business requirement – but ultimately, he says, “the aim is convergence”.

While Suffolk is convinced that economic conditions and the bottom-up approach are enough to secure success, Institute for Government senior researcher Michael Hallsworth is less sanguine. The co-author of a recent report, Governing IT, he believes the Cabinet Office needs some “hard power” to influence the decisions public sector bodies make about IT purchases and ensure that they are doing what is best for the collective good, not just themselves – although he does not advocate a return to the “combative” style of the Office of the e-Envoy, which was responsible for getting government services online between 1999 and 2004.

Hallsworth argues that collaboration between the civil service’s technology experts, such as that taking place through the CIO and CTO (chief technology officer) councils, is insufficient because departments are working in a political dimension and in some departments CIOs are not powerful enough to put their foot down.

“ICT comes very late in a political decision,” he says. The primary concern is usually getting something done quickly, “and the cost is often hidden; you end up reinventing the wheel across government”. Hallsworth and his co-authors believe there needs to be a minister responsible for ICT, and a board within the civil service that can broker compromises between departmental and cross-government objectives. “You can’t get away from this difficult question of negotiating between different departmental priorities, and we’re saying that it doesn’t work at CIO level,” says Hallsworth.

Graeme Swan, government IT lead partner at Ernst and Young, also believes that delivery of the strategy is not assured. Departments are simply “not very good at sharing”, he says, because there is “an insistence that each individual business process is unique” and therefore requires a dedicated piece of software. In reality, he argues, only about five per cent of processes are unique. The stumbling block for the strategy, he says, is the lack of incentives for departments to act collegiately and change their behaviour. “Departments need to be rewarded for sharing and giving things away,” he says. And CIOs should be rewarded for reducing their budgets, he argues, instead of furthering their career “by having major projects under their belt and building a budget up”.

Suffolk, however, argues that the reason why public bodies have failed to reuse and share ICT products in the past is because they haven’t been aware of what is out there. Once a “shop front” has been created – in the form of the application store – there will be “visibility” which “drives innovation, drives capability and drives the price down”.

As well as the agreement of public bodies, the ICT strategy requires the cooperation of suppliers; not least in agreeing to make licences out to the Crown rather than individual public sector organisations, so that products can be reused and shared across the public sector estate. Suffolk says there have been two types of reactions so far: “Absolutely not a problem”, and “Absolutely over my dead body”. He admits that “there are some tough conversations going on” with suppliers, some of which are unhappy about such a radical move away from the existing business model.

Suffolk believes that market forces and the size of government will force suppliers to accept the new arrangement; some big names, such as Microsoft, have already signed up. However, Fujitsu marketing director Simon Carter questions whether cross-government procurement will work well for small public bodies, whose needs might be ignored by giants such as HM Revenue & Customs or the Department for Work & Pensions. “I do not see that this is where government wants to go or where the market wants to go,” he says. However, he admits that Fujitsu “are not going to walk away” from a 40-year relationship with government and “would like to find a way to make that work”.

Suppliers, then, are likely to climb on board; but only if enough of the public sector plays by the strategy’s rules and combines its buying power. CIOs may already be on board, but it is the ministers, permanent secretaries and directors general who really need to pay attention: when they are told that there is already a government app which does 80 per cent of what they want, will they resist the temptation to demand something brand new that delivers 100 per cent of their objectives? The ball is in their court.