A revised Government IT Strategy was published on Wednesday 30 March 2011.
One quarter of the document (Part 2) is focused on 'Creating a common ICT infrastructure', within which the cloud features strongly as well as 'common technology standards' and 'interoperability enabled by open standards'. There is also a new proposed governance structure (Part 4).
Does any of this have relevance to Higher Education IT Strategy do you think?
1 comment:
This as an interesting report and I'm grateful that it is short enough to read and digest in a reasonable amount of time. It has a lot of good positive language in it but I am a bit concerned that it is a bit short on actual substance. For example on page 8 it says "government will adopt the right methods and policies and develop a skilled workforce in order to improve and exploit its ICT" but it doesn't say what the "right methods and policies" are or what skills the workforce will need.
There seem to be some generalisations that perhaps need justification. The report has an implicit that big IT projects are bad and doomed to fail whereas I think the reasons for project failure are more commonly to do with ill-defined scopes/project briefs, poor management controls, project drift and poor financial controls.
It's good to see a move towards open-source solutions and compulsory open standards but I hope this won't mean the common mistake is made of spending huge amounts of resource to develop software to support basically broken business processes. Business processes and the way information is used and shared between government departments and other public bodies must be properly considered, reviewed and optimised before starting to design software solutions.
It must make sense to move towards a common infrastructure but given the scale of things government supports (DVLA, DWP, HMRC to name just a few) I struggle to see how this fits with the presumption to stay away from large projects! I think the cloud approach is probably the right one and is certainly in line with the way ICT in the HE sector is moving. Computing resource as a service rather than something individual departments have to buys themselves, manage and maintain will surely deliver significant cost savings. THe challenge will be addressing how to deal with the different data security requirements of individual departments and how to ensure that sufficient, but not excessive, data will be shared between departments. As a local councillor I already see how those things don't even work properly just between business units of the same local authority!
I think the approach of delivering APIs is a sensible acceptance that in-house is not always the best way to design services, or at least interfaces to them, and I hope that encouraging external development will leverage market forces to optimise quality and functionality of customer-facing interfaces.
Finally, on Governance I think the CIO council is a sensible plan although I do wonder if the Public Expenditure Committee (Efficiency and Reform) might actually be little more than a talking shop that will tend to get in the way of progress rather than enabling it. I guess time will tell. I think I read the report as the individual department CIOs reporting to the overall Government CIO and the Government CIO reporting to the Cabinet Secretary. I hope too that the government ICT governance structure enables full discussion and collaboration with other public sector IT providers, most notably those in the Higher Education sector and the funding councils. There must surely be huge opportunities for joint exploitation of the advantages, cost-efficiencies and resiliency offered by Cloud-style IT provision and support.
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