By David Bicknell
I came across this blog by Alan Mather on e-govenment, commenting on some of the recent rumour and speculation around the future of G-Cloud, especially in light of some recent comments attributed to Nick Wilson at HP.
Mather’s insight on G-Cloud makes for interesting reading:
“Everything I hear today is that G-Cloud is alive and well. It is, though, a programme, not a thing. There isn’t going to be a big cloud (in the sky) owned by government into which each and every bit of IT will be shovelled, dribbled or piled.
“People inside government continue to work on G-Cloud and, whilst it’s not without [some pretty significant] challenges, it’s making progress. Ten years ago when I was at the centre of government, I would have done such a project with some pretty substantial seed funding from HM Treasury and I would have made a strong case for some kind of mandation – I’d have wanted government to get behind whatever the offer was and direct people to use it. That didn’t happen then – cf gateway, DotP etc – and it isn’t going to happen now. The difference now is that departments phone up the G-Cloud team every day looking for opportunities to join up – to save money, reduce risk, speed delivery and get something done. The pressure is on and departments are looking for ways to reduce that pressure.”
Mather says his understanding is that G-Cloud is, amongst other things “aimed at stimulating the widest possible market by lowering the barriers to entry for provision of services (decluttering the commercials as well as taking services as they are rather than with overwhelming government customisation) and so helping smaller businesses gain entry to the government market.
– Architecture neutral. What’s wanted is bare tin at IaaS, a range of suppliers putting capability on top of bare tin at PaaS and true services that are platform agnostic at SaaS. Government is buying services. They want those to be assured services – secure, reliable and performing to service levels… and so on.”
Can’t really fault Mather’s thinking here – I look forward to what he has to say in the future.
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