Liam Maxwell: Open standards and focus on inter-operability has opened the way to 'government as a platform'

Maxwell expects continuity of IT even if there is a change of government after the general election in 2015

"Government as a platform" will become the dominant approach to public-sector IT over the next few years - regardless of who wins the election next year, according to Liam Maxwell, chief technology officer at the Government Digital Service, and in charge of IT strategy across government.

That will coincide with a more active role for "IT leaders" as mega-outsourcing contracts draw to a close and are either brought in-house, or broken up to encourage greater competition and value-for-money - with the IT leaders recruited by Maxwell taking a more proactive role in directing IT, regardless of whether it is an in-house or outsourced IT activity.

"We are now going for 'government as a platform'," Maxwell told Computing. "There are so many things that have been siloed in the past. We had different case management systems, different identity systems, we had 392 websites that had nothing in common."

The drive towards open standards led by Maxwell will enable more and more cross-government IT platforms to emerge as old modes of delivering IT draw to a close and new systems are brought on-stream.

"We have got all of those different silos that we are turning into platforms. Not because we in the middle are saying so, but because it's possible - because we deal with open standards, because we focus on interoperability. That's because we have invested so much time into making sure that our departments can work together that we are now able to introduce more and more platform-based approaches," added Maxwell.

"So over the next three years, government as a platform is going to be the major theme for the whole of [central government] IT. Think about identity assurance, booking or transaction monitoring - these are all services that every department of government does. Case management platforms - everything that we share; everything we do that is the same has the capability to become a platform play.

"What we are doing, where it makes sense, is providing it from the centre and then the departments can focus on the technology that focuses specifically on what their departments do," said Maxwell.

Maxwell was appointed chief technology officer at the GDS in December 2012 and given the task of supporting the network of departmental "digital leaders" created by the GDS to identify new technologies to drive Whitehall's Digital by Default agenda.

Part of the aim of Maxwell's strategy is also to reduce central government IT costs, as well as unifying them and improving government's strategy on fraud detection and prevention.