Select committee asks for feedback on government IT strategy

Asks whether lessons from past reviews conducted by the NAO and OGC have been learned

The Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) has launched a review on the government's IT strategy.

In a paper entitled Good Governance: the effective use of IT Issues and Questions, the committee invites responses to questions around the strategy so far. This has included cuts of £95m to central IT spending ,announced in the emergency budget; a moratorium on new contracts greater than £1m; steps to centralise IT procurement; and renegotiation of contracts with suppliers.

Key questions include: have past lessons from NAO and OGC reviews about unsuccessful IT programmes been learned and applied, and what role should IT play in a ‘post-bureaucratic age'?

Relevant parties should respond to the paper by noon on 21 January.

Separately, iIn a week that has seen Communities secretary Eric Pickles urge councils to hurry up and move their spending data online before the end of January, the Local Government Group and local authorities body Socitm has released a practitioners guide on how best to publish new contracts and tenders information.

The report, Local Transparency - A Practitioners Guide to Publishing New Contracts and Tenders Data, advises councils on what data to publish, how to publish the data online in open format, what to consider when publishing, and how to enable more constructive use of the data as Linked Data.

This follows a letter from Pickles to local authorities in June 2010 in which he said they must publish items of spending over £500 including tenders, contracts and actual payments - the information should be made public by the end of January 2011.