As Britain looks forward to the advent of super-fast broadband internet, low-carbon technology and radical new opportunities for commercial growth, government IT is of absolute importance to anyone who hopes to share in the success of UK plc.
Despite the UK spending more per capita on IT than the US, Germany, France and several other comparable nations, e-government continues to be blighted by the costly failure of new projects and low take-up of existing services – despite a high level of availability. Even the much hailed DVLA system only managed 30 per cent take-up. While there is no definite figure for how much government spends on IT, current estimates put the figure somewhere between £16bn and £20bn, with accountancy firm Deloitte categorising this spending as “heavy investment, not delivering results”.
This is absolutely an issue of national importance which affects CIOs and their businesses in every sector. It is not just the delivery of public services that is at risk if the status quo continues. When we survey the UK technology landscape for those innovative ideas which could grow into the next Google or SAP, one of the dominating features is the obstacles facing smaller enterprises offering alternatives and insightful thinking.
The digital landfill
The current approach to IT is to custom-build systems and incrementally change them as required. As the degree of change increases over time, so does the complexity of the system – driving up the cost of change exponentially. Eventually a point is reached where starting afresh is cheaper than changing the existing system – and the cycle begins again.
Much of the government’s spending is simply keeping the lights on and keeping the basic infrastructure working. In the same way as many large corporations, government has become beholden to a few large suppliers, with little alternative to paying escalating support costs to keep business-critical systems working. More worryingly, the current approach of government and many in the private sector to legacy systems means there is a major risk that if a system fails they have no means of quickly replacing it.
The government straitjacket
Because government has become reliant on a small, dominant group of suppliers – to an extent that a group of academics from UCL and LSE, led by Professor Patrick Dunleavy, have warned government-IT industry relations have become “dangerously unbalanced” – there is a significant vested interest in protecting the status quo.
This vested interest, often masquerading as best practice, is a straitjacket on government. However, the wider implication is a chilling effect on the UK’s entire IT industry.
