Tag Archives: SME government contracts

School report on Govt ICT Strategy – a good start

Posted on 21/12/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

In a review of progress on the Government’s ICT Strategy after six months, the National Audit Office says that the Cabinet Office has made a “positive and productive start to implementing the Strategy”.

The NAO says that at least 70 people from the public sector have worked on the Strategy in the first six months though the public sector will need “at least another 84 people to deliver projects in the Plan”.

The UK Government’s ICT Strategy is more ambitious than the strategies in the US, Australia, Netherlands and Denmark, because it sets out three main aims:

– reducing waste and project failure

– building a common ICT infrastructure

– using ICT to enable and deliver change

The US Government’s ICT Strategy, in contrast, encompasses plans for a common infrastructure only – and these plans have not produced the expected savings, says the NAO.

In a paragraph that may be little noticed in the report, the NAO says that senior managers in central government have plans to award new ICT contracts (perhaps along the pre-coalition lines) in case the common solutions developed for the ICT Strategy are “not available in time”.

The NAO report also says that “suppliers were cautious about investing in new products and services because of government’s poor progress in implementing previous strategies”.

Of 17 actions in the Strategy that were due by September 2011, seven were delivered on time. Work on most of the other actions is underway and a “small number” are still behind schedule says the NAO.

The NAO calls on government to “broaden the focus to driving business change”.

Some successes of the UK’s ICT Strategy as identified by the NAO:

* The Cabinet Office has set up a small CIO Delivery Board led by the Government CIO Joe Harley to implement the ICT Strategy. The Board’s members include the Corporate IT Director at the DWP, CIOs at the Home Office, MoD, HMRC, Ministry of Justice and Department for Health, together with key officials at the Cabinet Office. The departmental CIOs on the Board are responsible directly to Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, for implementing the ICT Strategy in their departments and are accountable to their own minister. No conflicts have arisen

* Senior managers in central government and the ICT industry are willing to align their strategies for ICT with new cross-government solutions and standards but need more detail.

*  Some suppliers have offered help to government to develop its thinking and help accelerate the pace of change in ICT in government.

* The Cabinet Office intended that delivering the Strategy would be resourced from existing budgets. Staff have been redirected from other tasks to work on implementing the Strategy. “We have found collaborative working across departmental boundaries. For example HMRC and the MoD have combined resources to develop a strategy for greener ICT. Teams producing the strategies for cloud computing and common desktops and mobile devices have worked together to reduce the risk of overlap and gaps.

* The BBC has shown the way in managing dozens of suppliers rather than relying on one big company. For BBC’s digital media initiative, the Corporation manages 47 separate suppliers, says the NAO.

* The Cabinet Office intends that departments will buy components of ICT infrastructure from a range of suppliers rather than signing a small number of long-term contracts; and to make sure different systems share data the Cabinet Office is agreeing a set of open technical standards.

* Some of the larger departments have already started to consolidate data centres, though the NAO said that the programme as a whole is moving slowly and no robust business case is yet in place.

* The Cabinet Office is starting to involve SMEs. It has established a baseline of current procurement spending with SMEs – 6.5% of total government spend – and hopes that the amount of work awarded to SMEs will increase to 25%. Government has started talking “directly to SMEs”, says the NAO.

Some problems identified in the NAO report:

* Cloud computing and agile skills are lacking. “Government also lacks key business skills. Although it has ouitsourced ICT systems development and services for many years, our reports have often stated that government is not good at managing commercial relationships and contracts or procurement.”

* Suppliers doubt real change will happen. The NAO says that suppliers doubted whether “government had the appropriate skills to move from using one major supplier to deliver ICT solutions and services, to managing many suppliers of different sizes providing different services”.

* The Government CIO Joe Harley, who promoted collaboration, is leaving in early 2012, as is his deputy Bill McCluggage. The NAO suggests their departures may “adversely affect” new ways of working.

* The NAO interviewed people from departments, agencies and ICT suppliers whose concern was that “short-term financial pressure conflicted with the need for the longer-term reform of public services”.

* The culture change required to implement the Strategy “may be a significant barrier”.

* The Cabinet Office acknowledges that the government does not have a definitive record of ICT spend in central government (which would make it difficult to have a baseline against which cuts could be shown).

* The Cabinet Office has not yet defined how reform and improved efficiency in public services will be measured across central government, as business outcomes against an agreed baseline.

**

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said today: ” ICT is going to play an increasingly important role in changing how government works and how services are provided.

“The Government’s ICT Strategy is in its early days and initial signs are good. However, new ways of working are as dependent on developing the skills of people in the public sector as they are on changes to technology and processes; the big challenge is to ensure that the Strategy delivers value in each of these areas.”

NAO report:  Implementing the Government ICT Strategy: six-month review of progress.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, capacity building, change, change management, Cloud, Cloud Computing, collaboration, compliance with spending review, EU procurement, G-Cloud, government, Government IT, Green IT, improving communications, innovation, Lean, managing change, managing outsourced services, open source, operational issues, outsourcing, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, recruitment freeze, reducing cost strategically, reforms, SME, supplier relationships

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Officials pay supplier invoices – then raise purchase orders

Posted on 24/11/2011 | 1 comment

This morning the National Audit Office has published a report that says the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in up to 35% of cases, raises its purchase order after it gets the invoice from suppliers.

It’s unlikely that any private sector company could survive if it didn’t know what it owed, didn’t know what it had bought, and had to wait for an invoice from the supplier to raise the purchase order.

Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO, says in his report today:

“While I welcome the considerable improvements that the Commission has made in its controls over procurement, there are still areas where it needs to make improvements. In particular, up to 35% of the Commission’s purchase orders are still not raised until after the Commission has received an invoice for goods and services.

“This means that Commission staff are committing funds without going through proper processes and are avoiding some of the checking processes. Consequently the Commission does not have an accurate understanding of its committed expenditure at any one point in time.

“The Chief Executive has made it clear that he takes noncompliance with these processes seriously such that in cases of repeated non-compliance delegations will be withdrawn.”

A common practice? 

Is this absence of proper accounting worryingly common in central government and its agencies, particularly on IT contracts?

Auditors told us that in the case of NPfIT contracts they found some invoices that were paid when they came in, awaiting reconciliation with any past paperwork.

This, perhaps, ties in with the experiences of Conservative MP Richard Bacon, a member of Public Accounts Committee who, when asking civil servants for a breakdown of IT spending has, in the past, been referred to the department’s IT supplier.

On the C-Nomis IT project for prisons, the National Offender Management Service paid £161m without keeping any record of what the payments were for.

The Cabinet Office wants to cut the £17bn or so spent every year on public sector IT. But before departments, agencies and other organisations cut their costs they’ll need to know what those costs are. Maybe they should ask their major IT suppliers? We wonder if the domination of GovIT by a small number of suppliers has got to the stage where it’s the suppliers managing the civil service IT budgets. If that’s the case it is not the fault of suppliers.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, capacity building, change management, Government IT, managing change, managing outsourced services, operational issues, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, public sector, public services, supplier relationships

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G-Cloud and agile briefings

Posted on 18/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

On 22 November the Government Digital Service is giving a briefing for potential G-Cloud suppliers. It’ll be streamed live.

Officials say the briefing will be particularly useful to suppliers whose employees have never participated in a government tender.

At the ApplyCamp, officials will explain G-Cloud, steps in the OJEU procurement process, what information potential G-Cloud suppliers need to give, and what happens next.

The event is particularly aimed at Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service and other specialist cloud service suppliers. It will be held at Google, 76 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 9TQ – 3pm – 5pm.

Agile TeaCamp – 24 November

Between 4pm and 6pm at the Cafe Zest, House of Fraser, Victoria St, London, there will be talks on agile. Derrick Cameron, MD of software consultancy Eximium and COO of agile software house Procession will speak on “Becoming the Intelligent Buyer”.  Chris Parsons, a “freelance thinker, coder and trainer” will talk about the e-petitions project and the aims of the Agile Delivery Network.

Teacamps in November and December – Government Digital Service

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UK GovIT often a barrier not enabler says Cabinet Office official

Posted on 17/11/2011 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

In an interview for UKauthority.com Chris Chant, Executive Director at the Cabinet Office and head of the G-Cloud programme,  debunks the claims of some that GovIT doing a great job and should remain largely untouched.

Chant says: “IT is supposed to be an enabler. Quite often in my experience in government IT it is actually a barrier to getting things done. That’s no way to use IT. It is supposed to support what we do.”

His criticism puts into context claims by some in the civil service that GovIT is an unpublicised success because of the ease and success of online re-taxing of vehicles, the payment of benefits to millions of people and the collection of taxes.

Chant has made clear his concern that some departments are locked into major IT suppliers through costly, inflexible long-term contracts that, in some cases, are being signed anew.

“In the main we are not delivering good quality IT to government and public sector workers. We are not delivering good IT solutions to the citizen …”

He calls for internal change and describes SMEs as “front and centre to what we need”.

“It is with SMEs that agility and innovation lie, and it is that market we are really encouraging… Good IT is not developed by spending a long time trying to work out a definitive answer, and then taking ages over delivering it only to discover it is not what we needed in the first place. It is about iteration. I have said all along that we do not have all the answers. We will develop as we go and take SMEs with us.”

Asked whether the public sector is ready for the cloud Chant replies: “No we are not. We are quite a way from that… We are very well positioned to operate in a world where our IT is delivered by multinationals but now it is a different world.”

He says that the cloud has security limitations. “It is difficult to see the cloud in the short term handling some of the higher security aspects of what we do but for a lot of what government does it’s about commodity products and we need to get people in who know how to handle that.”

The focus he says must always be on the citizen – assumptions should not start from a departmental or systems standpoint. “We will need to change the way we do things; we will need some new people and I suspect a lot of retraining. I think we will need a lot fewer people working on the client side of government IT…

“We are in really tough times and the idea that we can operate with [current] cost levels is wrong…”

Government clouds take shape – UKauthority.com.

The unavoidable truths about GovIT – Chris Chant.

Vested interests will try to stop GovIT changing.

What exactly is HM Revenue and Customs paying Capgemini billions for?

DWP signs new large contracts with HP, Accenture, IBM and Capgemini.

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Posted in Agile, capacity building, change, change management, Cloud, Cloud Computing, compliance with spending review, EU procurement, G-Cloud, Government IT, innovation, managing change, managing outsourced services, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically, reforms, SME, supplier relationships, Value

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SaaS or Cloud SME? – get in touch says Cabinet Office official

Posted on 11/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Chris Chant, Executive Director in the Cabinet Office working as Programme Director for the G-Cloud initiative, says in a blog post that “if you are an SME and you have a SaaS or other cloud service that government might use – we want to know about it”.

Chant says the government is changing the way it buys and uses IT. “We have trained our suppliers and ourselves to think that we need big, complex solutions to complicated problems; which has meant that all too often it’s only the big, complex suppliers that get a look in.

“We are changing all this. We are giving SMEs and ourselves a chance to work together by levelling the playing field for all IT suppliers.”

Chant says it won’t happen overnight and mistakes may be made.  “This is new territory for many departments and very few are experienced at handling this new way of working.

“I think it’s fair to say that many just can’t see how this can happen yet though
many know it must.” Government users are not so different to others.

“First off government has realised that it’s not that different. From now
on, if government wants some IT,  it needs to do what everyone else does and look  at what’s already available, not just what we can pay to have built for us and not just what we are used to doing.

“It will be uncomfortable, uncharted territory for many but it must be done. It is unacceptable for things to remain the same. So if you are a SME and you have a SaaS or other cloud service that government might use – we want to know about it.”

Chant says that government will use open standards wherever it can, and buy IT on pay-as-you-go or short term contracts.

“Some contracts may be longer but there must be a break option, in my view, at no later than 12 months.

“Of course organisations will offer lower prices for longer lock-ins but, as I’ve said before, the cost of being unable to exit will almost always outweigh the savings.”

Chant says that if you are an SME, any supplier that’s never worked with government, or an existing supplier that “gets” cloud “you are the type of people we need to work with the deliver the savings all of us need”.

Talk to us, he adds.

Chris Chant’s blog post.

Vested interests will try to stop GovIT changing.

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Praise for departing Deputy government CIO

Posted on 10/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Bill McCluggage, the departing Deputy government CIO, has been praised by friends and colleagues for his strength of purpose as a change advocate, and for steering through the government ICT Strategy.

He is also admired by friends for “telling it like it is” despite the Cabinet Office’s restrictive communications policy.

Said one friend: “To get the ICT strategy out and into delivery underlines Bill’s credentials as a deliverer not just a strategist; and he regularly held his ground with those who sought to maintain the status quo.”

McCluggage announced this week he is leaving government to join storage supplier EMC. He said on Twitter that it’s “sad to leave excellent team that have delivered real change but time to move on and address new challenge”.  He said he counted himself “lucky to have been part of the vanguard of new GovtIT”.

Mike Bracken, Executive Director of Digital, Efficiency and Reform Group, Cabinet Office, said that Whitehall will be poorer in McCluggage’s absence.

McCluggage joined the Cabinet Office as Deputy Government CIO in September 2009. He has been Director of ICT Strategy & Policy and Senior Information Risk Owner with overall responsibility for the formulation, development and communication of cross-Government ICT strategies and policies.

He was IT Director at Harland & Wolff Heavy Industries in Belfast and was an engineering officer in the RAF. He is a chartered engineer and member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

As Deputy government CIO McCluggage has been a firm advocate of agile techniques, cloud computing, open source, cutting out waste and duplication, and bringing many more SMEs into GovIT.

Deputy Government CIO to join EMC.

Deputy government quits.

Cabinet Office loses another top ICT man.

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Posted in Agile, change, change management, Cloud Computing, collaboration, compliance with spending review, Government IT, innovation, managing change, procurement, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically, SME, Uncategorized

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Vested interests will try to stop GovIT changing – Cabinet Office official

Posted on 03/11/2011 | 3 comments

Image courtesy of Paul Clarke

“There will be many on the sidelines who criticise what we’re trying to do and who will say that it can’t be done. Some of their criticisms will hold true, at least at the beginning,” says G-Cloud director Chris Chant. “They’ll use what goes wrong as a chance to reinforce their view that it can’t ever be done. And our job is to prove them wrong.”

By Tony Collins

Chris Chant, Executive Director in the Cabinet Office, who is working as Programme Director for the G-Cloud initiative,  has added to the “unavoidable truths”  talk he  gave to the Institute for Government.

He writes on the Government Digital Service website that the “last 20 years of government IT say that we’ve been doing it wrong all along”.  He adds that the “change we are going to make now is a chance to shift that approach massively, to make a 180 degree turn, and start to get it right”.

He warns that there will be:

“many vested interests who try to stop the change both overtly and covertly”.

Chant suggested that the usual suppliers to government have a history of preferring complicated solutions to simple problems.

 “Government, like all of us, wants IT that works. For too long, though, we thought we were special in government and that we needed special IT. We trained our suppliers to think the same and, in return, they proposed ever more complicated solutions to simple problems; our suppliers failed to convince us that we needed something else and continued to make the same mistakes in trying to deliver what they’d promised. After decades of stimulus / response and countless billions spent, it’s time to make a change.”

This is what he said:

“The change we are already making is a big one. It will affect the way government buys IT, who we buy it from, how we handle security, how we focus relentlessly on our customers and how all our employees work, not just those in IT.

“Every aspect of government and the public sector will be affected, thankfully, things will never be the same.

“Cloud computing – the ability to buy proven solutions on a pay-as-you-go basis – is what lets government make this change. Once we recognise that we’re not different and that we don’t need special IT, then we can buy what everyone else is already buying and using.

“After all, at home you probably let Google handle your e-mail, you might be using iCloud for your contacts and calendar, you stream your music from Spotify and so on. There are business equivalents of those services that mean government, too, can move its e-mail, collaboration, customer management, payments and accounts – to name a few services – to the cloud.

“Everything changes when we do this. We will pay less, get more and get it sooner. If a supplier fails to do what they’ve promised, we will find another supplier – with no tears.

“There won’t be contracts running for decades; smaller businesses will be able to enter the market, engage directly with Government and compete with far larger companies; UK businesses will get a chance to out-deliver foreign ones; government will be more efficient and our customers will get the service they need.

“This change isn’t easy of course. A lot of things have to be different. And there will be many vested interests who try to stop the change both overtly and covertly.

“Over the last few months with the G-Cloud initiative, we have developed a small number of pilots that prove that this model can work. We have overcome some of the issues, and have confronted others that still need work. With the recent launch of the procurement, we are signalling that we think we’re ready to do some more.

“We won’t get it all right this time round and we will certainly encounter some more problems, and we will all work hard and fast to overcome those.

“There will be many on the sidelines who criticise what we’re trying to do and who will say that it can’t be done. Some of their criticisms will hold true, at least at the beginning.

“And they’ll use what goes wrong as a chance to reinforce their view that it can’t ever be done. And our job is to prove them wrong.

“The last 20 years of government IT say that we’ve been doing it wrong all along. The change we are going to make now is a chance to shift that approach massively, to make a 180 degree turn, and start to get it right.

“Over the coming weeks I will set out how I see this working, looking at each of the issues in turn and also seeing how the change will affect different people from permanent secretary through to front line staff and from big systems integrators to niche suppliers. A new and exciting journey is about to begin.”

Chris Chant talking about G-Cloud – audio

The Unacceptable – Government Digital Service.

The unavoidable truths about GovIT.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, change management, Cloud, Cloud Computing, G-Cloud, Government IT, innovation, managing change, procurement, public sector, public services, reforms, supplier relationships, Uncategorized

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Why GovIT reform is so slow?

Posted on 28/10/2011 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

An NAO report “A snapshot of the Government’s ICT Profession in 2011”  depicts government CIOs not as business leaders who are passionate for change but as middle-managers who are more or less dispensable.

The impression given in the report is that CIOs are, in general, necessary but not of strategic importance,  not necessarily party to key business decisions.

The NAO reports concludes that there is “more Government and departments could do” to:

– raise the influence of CIOs in departments;

– move the ICT profession from a support service or overhead to taking an active or lead role on business decisions; and

– develop people to a level so that they become leaders and bring ICT into the heart of the business.

Of 17 departments the NAO investigated a CIO sat on the main boards of only two. One department abolished the role of CIO in April 2011. The NAO quoted a CIO as describing his department’s perception of ICT as “at best an overhead”.

What CIOs told the NAO

CIO comments to the NAO on the impact of cost reduction measures were generally negative:

“We are having to re-prioritise and delay IT service enhancement projects.”

“A significant headcount reduction… and consequently a new operating model and a new strategic approach which will affect the roles of all IT professionals significantly.”

“Continual focus on cost-out and scrutiny of spend – in some ways this has helped engender a positive culture of efficiency but the constant demand for information/data is distracting. Skills shortage owing to recruitment freeze on external candidates and reduction in contractors. Requirement to broker cross-network relationships to drive out costs/savings.”

“Pressure to reduce costs/headcount to the Iowest levels means desirable things such as career development opportunity planning, implementing SFIA etc are left on the shelf whilst we divert resource to focus on significant projects to deliver running cost savings to the dept. … The consequences for the lCT function are not yet fully known.”

“The situation has been uncertain and reviews have caused some loss of momentum, but the set of future projects is now clear and we are progressing. Austerity measures have limited our ability to obtain the level of IT skills required for our portfolio.”

“As part of our change programme, the Central Department is reducing cost by approximately 30%. IT is included within this envelope. No money and everybody having to re-apply for jobs.”

[Source National Audit Office survey of central government CIOs 2011]

Skills most needed

It’s a shortage of IT people with business skills that appears to be one of the biggest barriers to change. Demand is greatest, says the NAO, for programme and project managers, procurement specialists and business analysts.

In particular CIOs perceive the need for good people who have contract and supplier management skills, and the ability to manage stakeholders.

On the technical side the skills most needed, as perceived by CIOs, are architecture, analysis and design, and information management/security. The biggest barriers to recruitment, as perceived by CIOs, are public sector pay constraints and inflexible civil service recruitment processes. [On pay some departments are still able to pay large bonuses – see near end of this article.]

NAO recommendations

The highest immediate priority for Government is to continue to motivate and reinforce the value of its ICT profession, says the NAO.

“ICT leaders need to dig deep to manage their teams whether in development projects, service management or operations. CIOs themselves need to continue to reinforce their standing in departments ideally by sitting on departmental boards or, if this is not appropriate, finding other ways to develop their influence so that ICT is properly included in strategic and business decisions.”

ICT leaders will have to find innovative ways to develop skills to fill roles.

“… government cannot ignore the capability gaps because it is so reliant on ICT to conduct its future business.”

The NAO said that CIOs described the same business and technical skills as being in short supply. It advised “structured on-the-job experience and mentoring”.

Greater collaboration across departments and with suppliers may “help to make optimum use of the skills that the profession already has to offer”.  Where
necessary, government must “find practical ways to recover lost skills”.

It added: “With more services being delivered through technology channels, there is a real need to ensure that service delivery is being driven by a skilled and capable ICT workforce.”

The Government Digital Service has at least made a good start – it has begun recruiting innovators.

And when it comes to paying bonuses to keep valued staff, departments still have scope. The Financial Times reported yesterday that the Department for Work and Pensions was the most generous employer in the civil service: it paid more than £45m to its staff in bonuses in the year ending April 2011.

**

Thank you to ComputerworldUK.com for spotting this report which was not distributed by the NAO to the media.

NAO report “A snapshot of the Government’s ICT profession in 2011”

Government CIOs are undervalued, official audit report finds.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, change management, Government IT, managing change, procurement, public sector, public services, reforms, Uncategorized

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Government’s new ICT plan – the good, bad and what’s needed

Posted on 24/10/2011 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

There is much to commend the 102-page Government’s ICT Strategy – Strategic Implementation Plan”.  Its chief assets are the touches of realism.

In the past Cabinet Office documents have referred to the billions that can be cut from the annual government IT spend of £15bn-£20bn. This document is different.

In promising a saving of just £460m – and not until 2014/15 – Cabinet Office officials are not being ambitious, but neither are they making impossibly unrealistic claims. [The press release refers to £1.4bn of savings but there’s no mention of that figure in the document itself.]

The Implementation Plan also points out that the oft-quoted annual government IT spend of £16bn-£17bn is not spending in central government IT alone but includes the wider public sector: local government, devolved administrations and the NHS. The Implementation Plan concedes that there is “no definitive or audited record of ICT spending in central government for 2009/10”, but it adds, “the best estimates suggest this to be around £6.5bn in central government…”

Now at last we have a figure for the cost of central government IT. But we’re also told that the Cabinet Office has no control or strong influence over most of the ICT-related spending in the public sector. The document says:

“Though implementation is not mandatory outside central government, Government will work with the wider public sector to identify and exploit further opportunities for savings through greater innovation, and sharing and re-use of solutions and services.”

That said the document has some laudable objectives for reducing ICT spending in central government. Some examples:

–         50% of central departments’ new ICT spending will be on public cloud computing services – by December 2015. [Note the word “new”. Most departmental IT spending is on old IT: support, maintenance and renewal of existing contracts.]

–         First annual timetable and plans from central government departments detailing how they will shift to public cloud computing services – by December 2011.

–         Cost of data centres reduced by 35% from 2011 baseline – by October 2016. [What is the baseline, how will the objective be measured, audited and reported?]

Drawbacks:

It is a pity the document to a large extent separates IT from the rest of government. If simplification and innovation is to be pervasive and long-lasting senior officials need to look first at ways-of-working and plan new IT in parallel with changes in working practices, or let the IT plans follow planned changes.

Not that this is a black-and-white rule. Universal Credit is an essentially IT-led change in working practices. The technology will cost hundreds of millions to develop – an up-front cost – but the simplification in benefit systems and payment regimes could save billions.

Another problem with the Implementation Plan is that it is in essence a public relations document. It is written for public consumption. It has little in common with a pragmatic set of instructions by a private sector board to line managers. Too much of the Cabinet Office’s Implementation Plan is given over to what has been achieved, such as the boast that “an informal consultation to crowd source feedback on Open Standards has taken place…” [who cares?] and much of the document is given over to what the civil service does best: the arty production of linked geometric shapes that present existing and future plans in an ostensibly professional and difficult-to-digest way.

And many of the targets in the Implementation Plan parody the civil service’s archetypal response to political initiatives; the Plan promises more documents and more targets. These are two of the many documents promised:

“Publication of cross-government information strategy principles – December 2011” …

“First draft of reference architecture published – December 2011.”

Platitudes abound: “Both goals are underpinned by the need to ensure that government maintains and builds the trust of citizens to assure them that the integrity and security of data will be appropriately safeguarded.”

There is also a lack of openness on the progress or otherwise of major projects. There is no mention in the Implementation Plan of the promise made by the Conservatives in opposition to publish “Gateway review” reports.

What’s needed

More is needed on specific measures to be taken by the Cabinet Office when departmental officials resist major reform. The promise below is an example of what is particularly welcome because it amounts to a Cabinet Office threat to withhold funding for non-compliant projects and programmes.

“Projects that have not demonstrated use of the Asset and Services Knowledgebase before proposing new spend will be declined.

“Departments, in order to obtain spend approval, will need to move to adopt mandatory common ICT infrastructure solutions and standards, and spending applications will be assessed for their synergy with the Strategy.”

But these threats stand out as unusually unambiguous. In much of the Implementation Plan the Cabinet Office is in danger of sounding and acting like PITO, the now-disbanded central police IT organisation that had good intentions but could not get autonomous police forces to do its will.

Unless Cabinet Office officials take on more power and control of largely autonomous departments – and overcome the uncertainties over who would take responsibility if all goes wrong – the Implementation Plan could turn out to be another government document that states good intentions and not the means to carry them through.

It’s as if the Cabinet Office has told departmental officials to drive at a maximum speed of 50mph when on official business to cut fuel costs. Will anyone take notice unless the speed limit is monitored? It’s the policing, monitoring and open objective reporting of the Implementation Plan’s intentions that will count.

Otherwise who cares about nameless officials making 100 pages of boasts and promises, even if the proof-reading is impressive and the diagrams look good if you don’t try to follow their meaning?

SMEs and agile to play key role as Government launches ICT plan.

Cabinet Office’s Government ICT Strategy – Strategic Implementation Plan.

Puffbox analysis of Implementation Plan.

Is there a useful job for the Cabinet Office?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, change management, Cloud, Cloud Computing, collaboration, G-Cloud, Government IT, improving communications, innovation, open source, openness and transparency, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, public sector, public services, reforms, supplier relationships, Uncategorized

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Are civil servants giving more work to SMEs – or less?

Posted on 15/09/2011 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

David Cameron, in a speech to a Government procurement conference on 11 February 2011, gave a pledge to ensure that  “25% of all government contracts are awarded to small and medium-sized enterprises”.

He said: “If we meet this goal it will mean billions of pounds worth of new business opportunities for SMEs”.

The Government has since dropped its pledge to give SMEs 25% of public sector contracts, though it remains an “aspiration”. To back this up, departments are under pressure to show they have awarded more work to small and medium-sized businesses.

As part of David Cameron’s Transparency commitments, all departments are required to publish each new contract let over £10,000 and state whether this contract has been let to a SME.

This information is available on the new Contracts Finder website alongside tender documents and opportunities. As part of the business plan process each department is also required to measure and publish the percentage of their third party spend that goes directly to SMEs.

The Government says it is investigating how best to collect data on spend with SMEs as sub-contractors.

That said, the firm target of 25% has been dropped because European tendering rules do not allow officials to give contracts specifically to smaller businesses.

The Cabinet Office says its official position now is:

“We will promote small business procurement, in particular by introducing an aspiration that 25% of government contracts should be awarded to small and medium-sized businesses.”

The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has been more cautious. He said at the time of Cameron’s talk that “as much as” 25% of public service contracts will be awarded to the private and voluntary sector in a bid to break up existing public service monopolies.

Have plans for more SME work gone into reverse? 

eWeek Europe now reports the concerns of SMEs that the 25% aspiration may give way to plans to consolidate government administrative work which could end up with major suppliers being given even more work.

eWeek Europe says that at the first meeting of the ‘New Suppliers to Government’ working group, which was put together by the Cabinet Office, members said the government’s aspiration to place 25% of its business with SMEs is in direct conflict with projects such as Sir Philip Green’s ‘Efficiency Review’,  which pushes for consolidation within the supply chain.

“There are two competing tensions inside the government,” said Mark Taylor, CEO of Sirius and lead for the New Suppliers to Government working group. “One of them is the Cabinet Office’s stated commitment to getting more SME involvement. However, the other drive within government is pushing things the other way…

 “The implication of that programme is they will reduce the number of people they buy from to a very small amount of very large suppliers,” said Taylor. While this can be an effective way to cut costs through economies of scale, it is not appropriate to every sector, added Taylor.

In the case of IT innovative ideas are coming from smaller companies, which can help reduce government spending through agile processes and open source.

Taylor cited the Ministry of Justice’s Cipher project as an example of how SMEs are being elbowed out of contracts as a result of these conflicting objectives. In March 2011, the MoJ cancelled freelance IT contractors supplied through SMEs and transferred their work to outsourcing company Capita and its £123m Cipher contract.

“The solution that we are proposing is very simple,” said Taylor. “In the private sector, companies of whatever size will purchase from whichever entity makes the most sense. If it’s a commoditised service, buy it from a huge supermarket at commodity prices. If it’s a specialised service that is appropriate for the business, buy it from an SME.”

Stephen Allott, the Cabinet Office’s crown representative for SMEs, has said it will take up to two years for Whitehall to stop excluding small businesses from work they could do more effectively than larger rivals.

Allott was quoted in the Telegraph as saying that meaningful reforms were being rolled out, but that they would take time to be implemented. “There are a lot of things that need to be fixed,” he said.

Comment:

There is a real risk that the coalition’s laudable aspirations to change the way government works will fall victim to a combination of strong lobbying by the big suppliers and overwhelming forces within the civil service to keep things much as they are, which usually means playing safe – or that is how it is perceived – by continuing to rely on the large suppliers, the so-called systems integrators.   

For decades the big companies have had their way and have been paid very well for services of mixed quality. One result of the domination of big suppliers is that inefficiency is endemic. The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude wants government to change and we support him. He’ll need to do more to make change happen, though. Meanwhile the civil service is doing what it does best: keeping the hands of ministers off the steering wheel. Maude is being given so much work that, in his words, it’s difficult to “keep all the plates spinning”.

Many in the Cabinet Office want to support Maude and effect reform. But can they do it when Maude is distracted by having too much work, the big suppliers are doing all they can to keep and expand their existing contracts, and departmental civil servants are confortable in their existing SI relationships?

eWeek Europe

An example of one SME’s innovative ideas

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Posted in change, Government IT, procurement, public sector, public services, SME, Uncategorized

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