OneOne Hundred Blog

Earlier this year the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, suggested that if the Conservative Party were to form the next Government they will put a cap on project size of £100m.

In a recent paper from the Centre for Policy Studies- ‘it’s ours’, author - Liam Maxwell, recommends a move away from centralisation under Transformational Government to more distributed data, substantially reducing or removing the need for monolithic government systems holding an individual’s data.

The paper asserts that essentially outside of Defence, Law and Order and Tax Collection the role of government IT is ‘Facilitation’.

The paper calls for:
• the development of a well-designed Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), where, core data can be accessed by different applications through a data transfer layer enabling users to draw information and services from multiple sources and to enjoy choice in which providers they select. • a move to a Cloud Computing infrastructure platform based not in a government server room, but within the internet cloud providing a simple and effective platform for users to access the computing services they need. This would enable a diversity of application ‘building blocks’, hence the element of choice and consent that will help both drive and underpin citizen-centric public services. Importantly, cloud computing is also supported in open source products, underpinning the call to open up public sector IT procurement to the increased use of open source and the greater involvement of small and medium sized UK businesses.

The combination of these two approaches it suggests will bring more efficient business processes and simplifies the IT services to support them – but crucially this change will enable effective data control by citizens; and choice over where to hold that data.

Government processes will become easier to navigate, smoother and more efficient. But crucially, they will also be able to evolve to meet change. Incremental changes over time could be implemented in many local, relatively low-risk environments.

Government departments will no longer need to procure and own the entire IT infrastructure itself, or to pay an outsourced company to do so on its behalf. Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) has come onto the agenda of large public and private organisations which recognise the benefits of providing their customers with the tools to complement and contribute to their data ‘with their consent, for their benefit’. VRM users store their data where they want and issue consent for access.

So the suggestion is, if they wish, people can host data with a trusted VRM provider (e.g. Google) rather than the sole Government supplier.

As a way of transition from Transformational Agenda the paper calls for the development of ‘a government data hosting agency’. This would allow access to services for those who prefer to make use of the more traditional forms of communication - ‘The proportion using this approach will diminish, but it will always be with us’.

The Backdrop

As anyone who has followed our work over the last two years will know the UK Government spends the equivalent to 1.4% of GDP on its IT projects - £16 billion this year. Only 30% of projects succeed e.g. meet their stated business objectives.

The paper states, ‘It is time to abandon expensive, failing and intrusive IT projects and to reverse the Government’s attempt to nationalise data. Control over the information that the government holds on us should be given back to those who should own it: us’

‘This approach is common in the private sector. Its potential benefits include improved public services; estimated savings on government IT expenditure of 50%; greater security and privacy over data; and far less intrusion by the State into the everyday lives of its citizens current movement towards accountable, consent-based, user-driven data administration and storage.’

So would abandoning Transformational government in favour of a distributed data approach mean that we would have fewer major projects to fail ? Possibly but it would also potentially fail to capitalise on the benefits of transformational government that we have paid for and in many cases are well advanced.

A centralised approach to data comes with other benefits, for example, it allows for planning. If we know the number of children born, and living in an area central government can plan a funded school place for every child. Ditto for health, Social care etc. Some centralised information is rather useful - it is not that anyone is really that interested in the detail of an individual - it is the high level more general application of information that proves useful.

Rather than wait around to decentralise the data why not deal with the project issues now by reviewing current projects with a specifically designed tool - the OneOne Hundred Approach or the public version Approach-G.

We agree that the 70 % of failures need to be addressed but let’s do it right now.