New Socitm Futures boss has head in the G-Cloud

Roberts has high hopes for the public sector cloud platform, G-Cloud

The new chairman of Socitm Futures has outlined his intention to introduce more cloud-hosted services into local government organisations.

Dylan Roberts, chief information officer at Leeds City Council, has taken on the additional role of replacing Glyn Evans as chairman of Socitm’s IT strategy and policy-generating body.

He told Computing about his aspirations for local authorities to extensively rely on the G-Cloud, a government-wide cloud computing platform.

He said that Leeds City Council has delivered almost as much efficiency as it could in its ICT services and that any more efficiency that is derived from rationalising or consolidating applications and infrastructure will be insignificant.

“For me, the G-Cloud and the associated public sector network are extremely important [for increasing efficiency],” he said.

He explained that he wanted public sector organisations to be able to consume applications and services from a cloud platform with the assurance that the information is secure and access is controlled.

He explained that the first applications he hopes to see in the G-Cloud are generic applications that are frequently cloud-based already, for example email and collaboration technologies such as Microsoft Sharepoint and unified communications.

“The key things that we are looking for from a local public service perspective is that your more generic applications are made available first because they have a level of maturity – they have been offered extensively in the cloud,” he said.

He added that he also wants to see software vendors make other applications available as cloud-hosted services.

“I would love to see ERP [enterprise resource planning] applications in the cloud, but I’m not sure if the likes of SAP and Oracle would want to do this yet.

"I’d also like to see in the local government environment, things like council tax and benefits providers – line-of-business providers – social care system providers; I would like to see those vendors starting to bring offerings into the cloud.”

Dylan Roberts will be discussing G-cloud as the future for public sector IT at The Guardian’s SmartGov Live event at ExCel London from 15-16 June 2010.