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The Government ICT Conference 2013 in the QEII Conference Centre kicked off the event season with traditional gusto and the key themes were focused on delivering change, supporting the Government’s reform agenda and enabling the delivery of more efficient public services. All worthy themes but the core challenge still seems to be how can the public sector tackle some of the more intransigent issues that Chris Chant identified in his ‘unacceptable IT is pervasive’ blog post in early 2011. It was great to hear Chris Chant, a friend and colleague when I was in the Cabinet Office, name checked 3 times during the conference. This speaks to the legacy of the G-Cloud that he left behind when he retired.
In October 2011 Chris said that:
“The vast majority of government IT in my view is outrageously expensive, is ridiculously slow, or agile-less, is poor quality in the main and, most unforgivably I think, is rarely user-centric in any meaningful way at all.”
Andy Nelson, UK Government CIO, kicked off the conference and started his talk with a diagram from the Government’s ICT Strategy that we came up with in 2011 and it showed the 4 key themes that underpin the strategy. He highlighted the new risk management regime (SCaRAB), the delivery of the principles on the use of open standards by Government, progress on common infrastructure projects such as the Public Services Network (PSN), delivery and implementation of the end user device strategy, Green ICT and delivery of the G-Cloud environment and Cloud Store. While implementation of these programs and the achievement of many of the goals set out in the strategy struck a positive note, he was not as positive on data centre consolidation. He seemed frustrated at the lack of progress and said that it is was “not such a good story” and that Government still needs to “think through how we attack it”.
This frustration is born out in the metrics in the Cabinet Office’s progress report on delivery of the ICT strategy which was published in May 2012 and shows lacklustre performance on the modernisation of the data centre estate used by Government. Progress has been painfully slow since the whole issue of the number of data centres was centre stage at CIO Council meetings in 2009 and the opportunity to save an estimated £300m in infrastructure costs was identified by the Strategic Supply Board Study in 2009. Utilisation figures languish at 24% and the level of virtualization is reported to be only 17%. Given EMC’s own experience on its move to the Cloud, this is where the company started the first stage of the journey back in 2004-2008. Hopefully with the appointment of Lesley Hume as the new data centre lead in the Cabinet Office we will see a step change in progress.
In my normal fashion I will leave you with a quote from the immortal words of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll:
Alice Kingsley: ‘This is Impossible’. The Mad Hatter: ‘Only if you believe it is’.
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