According to its new strategy paper published last week the UK government is aiming to become a “single intelligent procurer of ICT” with greater integration across the public sector, better oversight by senior staff and streamlined mechanisms to speed up procurements and roll out (you can read the full strategy paper here).

The paper identifies seven key problems in the way government IT projects are run:

1. •they tend to be too big and too complex;
   

2. •departments rarely re-use or adapt existing systems, leading to wasteful duplication;
   

3. •there is little system interoperability;
   

4. •there is insufficient infrastructure integration;
   

5. •there is serious overcapacity, particularly in datacentres;
   

6. •there is a lack of oversight from senior staff; and
   

7. •lengthy procurement timescales squeeze out all but the biggest suppliers.
   

Tackling these problems looks set to involve a raft of changes to the way government IT projects are managed. The coaltion says it will introduce new central controls to ensure greater consistency and integration, and encourage smaller procurements by creating a presumption against projects with a lifetime value of more than £100 million. It also plans to streamline procurement processes and use outcome based contracts whilst expecting officials overseeing projects to stay in post until an appropriate break point in a project's lifecycle.

The strategy paper sets out some quite specific initiatives such as the scaling back of the 8,000 or so datacentres currently used by public bodies and the setting up of an online government ‘app store’ that will allow applications and components to be shared across the public sector. There are also plans to impose compulsory open standards, starting with interoperability and security.

If some of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The notion of re-using or sharing government ICT has been a public sector mantra ever since the Gershon Report suggested (back in 2004) that reorganising and aggregating procurement could save New Labour £20 billion. ‘Shared services’ has been a recurring theme in public policy over the last 7 years and was prominent in the previous ICT strategy (published in January 2010) until IT procurement generally was derailed by the Cabinet Office moratorium which followed the election.

So will things really be different this time? It is easy to be sceptical. Having witnessed more false dawns than an English spring, and knowing how difficult public authorities find ‘collaboration’ (even internally, let alone with each other), one is naturally drawn to the conclusion that in 18 months we will probably find ourselves operating in a landscape which looks very much like the one we’re in now.

There are, nevertheless, reasons for optimism. Francis Maude’s Efficiency & Reform Group has a strong mandate and is throwing its weight around. Major overhauls at OGC and Buying Solutions are already underway. The ICT strategy paper talks of an open-source advisory panel and implementation group, and a system integrator forum.  Pilot ‘agile’ projects are to be identified within each department to help streamline the IT project development process. And we await publication of a cloud computing strategy and open-source procurement toolkit.

Cutting through the detail, the government’s primary objective is clearly to save money. Given that Labour spent £16 billion on IT in 2008/09 this ought to be achievable, but what remains to be seen is whether it can be done without radically diminishing the quality of service delivery.