Divided loyalties may scupper government's ICT strategy, warns Gartner

The UK government's recent ICT strategy does not include an adequate governance structure, according to a recent report from Gartner.

The government's ICT strategy promotes changes in areas such as procurement, vendor management and the reuse and consolidation of technology.

The governance challenges highlightd by the analyst firm are the result of the co-existence of two centres of ICT leadership with potentially conflicting objectives.

The first is the CIO Delivery Board, comprising CIOs from large departments, which has responsibility for the implementation of cross-government ICT strategy.

The second comprises the IT heads of the individual government departments, who sit on a board called the Major Projects Authority.

The report argues that this two-tier governance structure is likely to create tensions and conflicts for CIOs as they head up shared services or community cloud delivery units.

The report argues that the full weight of accountability for delivering the strategy cannot fall on the CIO Delivery Board and that until the UK government makes the permanent secretaries accountable for achieving centralisation goals, the CIOs will suffer from mixed allegiances.

Gartner also criticises the strategy for failing to explain how departments should tackle the move from legacy systems and contracts to common platforms.

Since the timeline for strategy implementation is tight, at two years, the report argues that it would be appropriate to suggest how these transitions would take place.

Moving from a legacy to a common platform will be expensive, complicated by the fact that the government prefers to avoid using vendors, even though the internal talent needed to do the job is lacking, Gartner said.