Post-election revamp for IT procurement

Change is on the cards no matter who wins

The Tories want to strengthen the role of government CIO, currently held by John Suffolk

IT procurement across government has seen damning criticism from the National Audit Office and others in recent years – a fact that both the Tories and Lib Dems were keen to highlight in their manifestos.

Unsurprisingly, the Conservative manifesto attacked Labour’s IT procurement track record: “This government has a dreadful record of managing procurement, with billions of pounds wasted on mismanaged projects,” it said.

Although the Tories had mooted capping ICT projects at £100m before releasing their manifesto, the wording in the document was more circumspect: “There will be a presumption against IT projects costing more than £100m,” it said.

The manifesto also promised to publish details of all procurement deals, with a view to increasing transparency and opening the market to new and smaller entrants.

The Labour Party has also said it would publish details of procurement deals and create a level playing field for open-source ICT.

The Tory manifesto argued that the situation under Labour, where just nine IT companies received 60 per cent of all public sector IT spending, did not represent healthy competition.

The Tories also promise to tackle the problem of unwieldy IT projects that suffer from poor management by strengthening the role of the government chief information officer, currently held by John Suffolk, who will be charged with managing them.

Although the Liberal Democrats did not make ICT a central issue in their manifesto, they put emphasis on using cloud computing technology and open source software.

Sarah Burnett, government IT analyst at Ovum, welcomes the use of open source technology in government.

“It could save a considerable amount of money. However, it must be managed properly,” she said.
“It can’t fall under the radar like so many government IT projects have – this could result in all sorts of security issues,” she added.

Janet Grossman, chairwoman of Intellect’s public council, said that the Conservatives have been pretty specific about where ICT cuts will come from – citing asset re-use (shared services) and the cutting of some of big projects such as identity cards and the Contact Point childrens database.

However, she also said she thought that all three parties were missing the bigger point, which is that well-applied technology can cut labour costs.

“The bulk of public sector spending is on labour and people, and sometimes really clever technology rollouts can result in the removal of staff,” she said.

“But implementing change is costly, and the savings from headcount would not be felt for some time, so this could make things difficult in the short term when there is so little money available,” she added.