Intellect: we're moving ahead

Three years since the ambitious McCartney report set out how the public sector could avoid the major IT disasters of the past, none of its impetus has been lost, says Jonathan Tamblyn, chair of the e-government group at Intellect, the association of IT suppliers.

There are initiatives afoot that should keep the momentum going for some time yet, he says.

McCartney was followed by a raft of initiatives designed to improve the government's abysmal track record in managing IT projects.

The Senior IT Forum of public sector customers and suppliers published its recommendations for how public sector organisations could better manage the procurement process.

Then this year the government announced its Centres of Excellence programme for ensuring a high profile for best practice in project managemen.

But Tamblyn's optimism about the future of public sector IT comes fresh from the first meeting of an Intellect working group which this year aims to create a new set of recommendations - but this time with a different slant.

'The OGC and government are doing a great deal to improve standards on the customer side and we wanted to make sure we developed that on the supplier side,' he says.

With the public sector taking a more mature approach to running IT projects and the industry a more mature approach to delivering them, relationships between suppliers and customers should improve.

Tamblyn believes the right approach will end the adversarial customer/supplier relationships that have characterised public sector IT in the past.

He also believes it will lead to more IT deals running for longer periods - 10 years, say - and as outsourcing or managed service deals.

It should be remembered that this prediction comes from a man whose day job is the strategic development director of one of the largest outsourced service providers, Logica CMG.

But his view that public sector IT relationships need work is widely held among vendors and users.

The history and culture clashes are still such that effective checks, measures and good intentions might still be no guarantee of success.

Tamblyn's confidence rests on a faith in the influence of greater forces: the evolution of technology and ideas.

The whole industry, customers and suppliers are of the mind nowadays that no IT project should be considered outside of the business context.

It is too early to tell, he says, whether the forces of reform have done their job. But he betrays no uncertainty that they will.