Posted in Campaign4Change, Cloud
Tagged Alpha.co.uk, G-Cloud, local government, Nimbus, Socitm, Trustmarque
By David Bicknell
My Campaign4Change colleague Tony Collins has written an interesting piece on his ComputerworldUK blog about Prime Minister David Cameron’s intervention in the future of the NPfIT.
In his piece, Tony argues that perhaps the most important part of Cameron’s statement was that a new deal cannot be signed with CSC until it has been reviewed by the Major Projects Authority, which is a partnership between the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.
Posted in Campaign4Change, NHS
Tagged David Cameron, Major Projects Authority, npfit
By David Bicknell
I’ve just written a piece for the Guardian Professional Network’s Sustainable Business site, which discusses some recent work by Cambium in producing a report on how both suppliers and organisations can benefit from the Government’s CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme.
You can read the article here on the Guardian’s site. And you can find about more about the report from Cambium here.
By David Bicknell
A recent article on the BBC website has suggested that the government is scaling back plans to use the private sector to deliver public services and placed a greater focus on mutualisation.
According to James Landale, the BBC’s deputy political editor, documents suggest ministers have decided that the “wholesale outsourcing” of public services to the private sector would be politically “unpalatable”.
Instead, ministers are planning to increase the role of charities, social enterprises and employee-owned “mutual” organisations.
Outsourcing was believed to have been a key element of the Coalition Government’s drive to cut costs and reduce the UK’s budget deficit. But the article says, the shift in policy will raise questions about whether the government can make the savings it has promised – or deliver the services it is committed to – just by using charities and mutuals.
More will become clear when the Open Public Services White Paper is due to be published later this month.
By Tony Collins
There are signs that a long-running £700m dispute between Fujitsu and the Department of Health over the NHS IT programme will reach a settlement without a court hearing.
A settlement, it should be said, will be due largely to reforms of central government initiated by the coalition and Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister.
Maude’s reforms mean that major suppliers to the government are now managed centrally, at “Crown” level, not contract by contract. So a dispute with one department can affect a supplier’s relationship with government as a whole.
That didn’t happen before, when each department managed separately its relationships with major suppliers.
It’s likely now that Fujitsu will want to improve its relationships with government, particularly since the:
– Tsunami in Japan which has weakened the company’s operations.
– premature ending of Fujitsu’s £330m desktop contract with the Department for Work and Pensions.
The wish for improved relations with government makes it more likely it will reach a settlement over its withdrawal from the National Programme for IT in the NHS – NPfIT – in 2008. Fujitsu was said to have been seeking £700m after its departure. It’s now thought to be seeking a settlement without any formal proceedings.
Comment
It has long been obvious that government should be a “single customer” to its major IT suppliers. Only now is that happening, thanks to the coalition’s reforms. It means that, for the first time in living memory, it’s the government – the customer – that is in control of its major IT suppliers, and not the other way round.
Few of the top 20 IT and services suppliers to government will now be willing to carry on a dispute with a department when it could cost lost contracts with other departments.
By David Bicknell
From an environmental point of view, one of the areas that government is going to have to get to grips with is transport with respect to carbon emissions.
It’s well-documented in this post by ecoXchange on its greeninblackandwhite blog. The piece discusses why the focus of central government and the Mayor’s Office in London is only on four-wheeled electric cars, and why these authorities are failing to take on board the benefits of two wheeled electric bikes, which might be the ideal solution to the likely transport problems facing visitors to the Olympics in 2012.
There’s an economic aspect here too. Rising costs, for business or individual use are a major headache – whether transporting product or people. Overall transport costs have risen by nearly 25% in the last year and are likely to rise by another 30% or more, over the next three years. And that means increased transport subsidies from companies to their commuting employees.
Electric or electric/hybrid cars may help reduce emissions, but will do nothing in terms of reducing congestion, over-crowding or journey times. This debate urgently needs to go beyond the recharging electric cars argument.
Posted in Campaign4Change
Tagged 2012, ComOOt, ecoXchange, electric bikes, greeninblackandwhite, London Ulympics, transport
By David Bicknell
Interesting report from Greenpeace on what it describes as “the energy choices that power Cloud Computing.”
“How dirty is your data?” is claimed by Greenpeace to the first ever report on the energy choices made by IT companies including Akamai, Amazon.com (Amazon Web Services), Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo, and it says, highlights the need for greater transparency from global IT brands on the energy and carbon footprint of their Internet infrastructure.
In its highlights from the report, Greenpeace suggests:
• The $1 Billion (USD) Apple iData Center in North Carolina, expected to open this spring, will consume as much as 100 MW of electricity, equivalent to the electricity usage of approximately 80,000 homes in the U.S. or over a quarter million in the E.U.. The surrounding energy grid has less than 5 percent clean energy, with the remaining 95 percent coming from dirty, dangerous sources like coal and nuclear.
• Both Yahoo! and Google seem to understand the importance of a renewable energy supply, with Yahoo! siting most of its data centres near sources of renewable energy, and Google is directly signing power purchasing agreements for renewable energy and investing in solar and wind energy projects in many US states as well as Germany. Their models should be employed and improved upon by other Internet (“cloud computing”) companies.
• Facebook, one of the fastest growing and most popular destinations on the web, is unfortunately on track to be the most dependent cloud computing companies on coal powered electricity with over 53 percent of its facilities estimated to rely on coal to power the Facebook cloud.
In its executive summary, Greenpeace says: “Information Technology (IT) is disruptive. Largely for the better, IT has disrupted the way we travel, communicate, conduct business, produce, socialise and manage our homes and lives. This disruptive ability has the potential to reduce our dependence on dirty energy and make society cleaner, more efficient and powered renewably. But as we applaud the positive, visible impacts and measurable, game-changing potential of IT, we also need to pay attention to what’s behind the curtain.
“The ‘Cloud’ is IT’s biggest innovation and disruption. Cloud computing is converting our work, finances, health and relationships into invisible data, centralised in out-of-the-way storage facilities or data centres. This report seeks to answer an important question about this trend, currently underway across the globe: As Cloud technology disrupts our lives in many positive ways, are the companies that are changing everything failing to address their own growing environmental footprint?”
Key learnings from the report are that:
•Data centres to house the explosion of virtual information
currently consume 1.5-2% of all global electricity; this is growing
at a rate of 12% a year.
•The IT industry points to cloud computing as the new, green
model for our IT infrastructure needs, but few companies provide
data that would allow us to objectively evaluate these claims.
•The technologies of the 21st century are still largely powered by
the dirty coal power of the past, with over half of the companies
rated herein relying on coal for between 50% and 80% of their
energy needs.
•IT innovations have the potential to cut greenhouse gas
emissions across all sectors of the economy, but IT’s own
growing demand for dirty energy remains largely unaddressed by
the world’s biggest IT brands.
•There is a lack of transparency across the industry about IT’s own
greenhouse gas footprint and a need to open up the books on its
energy footprint.
•In emerging markets, where there is limited reliable grid electricity,
there is a tremendous opportunity for telecom operators to show
leadership by investing in renewable energy, but many are relying
on heavily polluting diesel generators to fuel their growth.
•Data centre clusters (Google, Facebook, Apple) are cropping up
in places like North Carolina and the US Midwest, where cheap
and dirty coal-powered electricity is abundant.
•IT companies are failing to prioritise access to clean and
renewable energy in their infrastructure siting decisions.
•Of the 10 brands graded, Akamai, a global content distribution
network, earned top-of-the-class recognition for transparency;
Yahoo! had the strongest infrastructure siting policy; Google &
IBM demonstrated the most comprehensive overall approach to
reduce its carbon footprint to date.
•Across the board, IT companies have thus far failed to commit to
clean energy in the same way they are embracing energy
efficiency, which is holding the sector back from being truly
green
Posted in Campaign4Change
Tagged Akamai, Apple, carbon footprint, Cloud, energy, environment, Facebook, Google, Greenpeace, Yahoo
By David Bicknell
There is an interesting Guardian piece on mutuals published today. It features some quotes from Campbell McDonald, a director of the employee-owned trust Baxi Partnership, which is working with some of the public sector organisations now setting up mutuals.
“If you are going to do it, there has got to be a set of things that are in place,” he says. Strong leaders will be needed to steer the new organisations, as well as support from government and from those commissioning services at a local level. But mutuals could transform services, he believes. “The prize is that you see big gains in productivity and huge rises in employee motivation. That tends to trigger innovation and will free up the organisation to make things happen more quickly.”
“If any of this is going to succeed on scale, we cannot allow new organisations to be set up to fail,” he adds. “The mutual option is not a silver bullet, and without a decent number of success stories to point to in two years’ time this movement will struggle to really get off the ground. The most worrying factor right now is that with so many groups of employees considering a mutual way forward, a huge number are still struggling to get the right support and advice at the right time to give them the best chance of survival.”
Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, Uncategorized
Tagged Baxi Partnership, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector, The Guardian
By David Bicknell
There are a number of public sector events coming up in May. Here is advance warning of a couple that the Campaign4Change has come across.
This one, by Westminster Briefing on 12th May, in Westminster, the latest in a series of briefings all about mutual ownership models in public services, discusses the issues for local authorities, employees and communities and has invited the head of the government’s mutuals taskforce, Julian Le Grand, to take part.
The Trustmarque TE2011 Customer Event, ‘Efficiency Through Technology’, on Friday 20th May at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London, features two keynote speakers, championer for British Business and former CBI Director-General Lord Digby Jones and author and futurologist Richard Watson.
The event will provide the first opportunity to discuss with Trustmarque and see demonstrations of some new Cloud based services it is offering, and will also feature informative seminars, and provide practical advice for customers. One of the highlights will be a Q&A session with Lord Jones and a selection of Trustmarque customers, setting the scene for a discussion around some of the key issues arising from the IT industry at present.
Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation
Tagged efficiency, Julian Le Grand, Lord Digby Jones, mutualisation, mutuals, public services, technology, Trustmarque
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