Leak reveals government plan for single IT strategy

The government is developing a Whitehall-wide IT strategy to try to emulate the cost-savings and flexibility achieved in the private sector.

Documents drawn up at the Office of the eEnvoy and leaked to Computing detail a Common Systems Strategy designed to 'reduce the cost of IT whilst getting improved output' and 'make government more agile and responsive'.

'Government currently spends around £10bn a year on IT without delivering to its full potential. We should transform government, following key examples from the commercial sector, into a common systems based organisation,' says the strategy.

The plan has four strands:

• To ensure departmental business processes are re-engineered in line with off-the-shelf software for common requirements such as office automation and human resources;
• To ensure the use of central infrastructure, such as the Government Secure Intranet (GSI), as the foundation for future IT projects;
• To develop common datasets to improve efficient sharing of basic information on citizens and businesses;
• To create a central repository of IT components that can be re-used by other parts of government.

'In the future we will provide utility common systems and services from consolidated datacentres over a high capacity network such as GSI,' says the strategy.

The plan is being considered by the Supervisory Board of Whitehall buying arm the Office of Government Commerce (OGC). The next step is a feasibility study to develop a detailed roadmap and evaluate the overall costs and benefits.

The data protection implications are sufficient to require a separate study of their own, says the paper.

'Experience shows that the creation of shared datasets in government raises significant policy issues including privacy, civil liberties, security and legality,' it says.

The programme is likely to deliver between 2005 and 2008 and could be linked to a proposed new government chief information officer role outlined by eEnvoy Andrew Pinder at a conference last week.

A common technology strategy is a good move, but privacy questions will need to be resolved, says government IT expert Jim Norton.

'Unless they crack the issue by engaging with citizens and coming to an understanding about what data is shared and what is not, it will become a problem at a later stage,' he said.

Cultural questions also need more thought, says Norton.

'There is a passing note that departments will have to champion this but how are they going to do that? And since systems usually displace people, how will they be re-deployed?'