Government launches new IT strategy

Suffolk: there will be more innovation across public sector

The government launched a radical overhaul of its IT strategy today which it says will save the public sector £3.2bn annually in IT costs.

The new initiative aims to facilitate greater sharing of resources across the public sector in the use of hardware and software where departments have traditionally taken a more siloed approach.

Government CIO John Suffolk told Computing yesterday: "The technology has matured to allow us to do this now it will mean we can cut costs and deliver public services better."

The strategy aims to create a government cloud, meaning that public sector bodies will be able to get IT services from a secure online network rather than having to buy off the shelf themselves.

Over the next few years the government will embark on a scheme to consolidate hundreds of datacentres owned by the public sector down to 10-12 secure resilient centres. This small group will be used to host the government cloud, saving £300m by reducing power use by 75 per cent.

Public sector bodies will be able to choose their applications - such as word processing, communication, or customer relationship management tools - from a store hosted on the government cloud known as the government application store.

Currently these bodies procure in the traditional way by buying software and services through individual contracts with suppliers.

The new way of doing things will allow smaller suppliers to compete against bigger ones, because the government will be providing the infrastructure on which they can operate.

Suffolk hopes this will introduce a more innovative edge to public services.

"We want to open up the front end of the public sector to as many innovative organisations as possible," he said. "This gives them the ability to put their product on the 'shelves' and us the opportunity to find them."

The final part of the strategy will see a new set of common designs for desktop computers introduced across the public sector, rather than each department purchasing their own. This move alone will save £400m a year, according to the Cabinet Office.

The new strategy will also help many public sector IT departments reduce their use of expensive consultants, as well as their carbon footprint, Suffolk says.

Government departments which are currently tending to replace large outsourcing contracts, such as DWP, will be allowed to let those contracts run to the end of their natural conclusion.

And large specialist tax and benefit databases owned by the DWP and HM Revenue and Customs will not be placed onto the cloud infrastructure, though this "doesn't stop us interoperating with them", according to Suffolk.

The strategy was widely leaked earlier this year and the Conservatives have already set up a web site to criticise it.

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