By Julian Goldsmith, 5 December 2007 10:48
COMMENT
Julian David, IBM's vice president public sector business, has been with the company 26 years, with previous roles seeing him involved with retail and small business units. Now he heads up the public sector team, one of the most important in terms of customer base for the company in the UK.
silicon.com: Having had experience of both private and public sector customers, what would you say the biggest differences are?
David: The major difference is the complexity and size of what they are doing, if you think about the number of people that are encompassed by some of the programmes - the number of users, the number of families and other businesses. That's something you don't often find in a private sector organisation, particularly a national one.
How does IBM's strategy equate with public sector policy on IT?
We are participating in programmes there and we are proposing an enterprise architecture for government. We've made a number of contributions to the discussions around that. We've also picked up the challenge for asset reuse. How do you get an efficient architecture that government can use to deliver its infrastructure and then how do you reuse assets within that?
I would say traditionally - and the government says this itself - they've developed individual responses to individual problems within departments. Often - yes there are differences - but often many bits of what they are developing could be used in various other places. When you do that, you have to make it in such a way that it's robust and has general characteristics as well as specifics in the development.
That is a trend that's been common in [the] private sector but has not been used extensively in government. If you look at the whole concept of consolidation, this is something we think, that government can actually consolidate its IT and get a better result in terms of efficiency but also of the new green agenda and climate change.
Doesn't that mean selling less IT?
It means selling the right IT. The most challenging things for any organisation these days are power and space. The percentage of costs that are going to be spent on providing power to IT equipment and taking heat away will rise to 70 per cent of budget by 2020. So, the first thing an IT supplier can do is focus on that. Now that doesn't affect my business model because I'm not a supplier of power and although we do run data centres for people, it's not a general proposition of ours to supply space. So, we can come up with propositions there that will be good business for us, good savings for the client and good for the planet. At the same time, the kind of equipment you put in place to do that - consolidation, virtualisation, bringing together what you are doing, cutting your applications down - you cut costs, but you can also provide a better service.
What projects are you working on in the public sector where transformation is a key part?
One of our major transformation programmes is with the DVLA. We run the whole of the DVLA's infrastructure and their transformation activities. It's a contract that was given about four years ago to Pricewaterhouse Coopers Consulting [now part of IBM] in a consortium with Fujitsu. Effectively all of their transformation agenda is carried out by us and we sit together with them in a joint approach. That's what's enabled them to do things like become the biggest online retailer with the vehicle licensing service. So, when they produced the new driving licence they did that under this arrangement. We were involved in everything from procuring the card supplier and all the systems that needed to be done to drive that project.
Green IT from A to Z
Click on the links below to find out more...
A is for Abroad
B is for Blades
C is for Carbon footprint
D is for Data centres
E is for Energy sources
F is for Freecycle
G is for Government
H is for Homeworking
I is for Ice caps
J is for Jobs (Steve)
K is for Kilowatts
L is for Landfill
M is for Mercury
N is for Nanogeneration
O is for Offsetting
P is for Paperless office
Q is for Queen
R is for Recycling
S is for SmartPlanet.com
T is for Travel
U is for Upgrade
V is for Virtualisation
W is for WEEE
X is for Xmas
Y is for You
Z is for Zero emissions
Some local authorities are considering sharing their resources, is IBM involved in any of these projects?
The newest transformational project that we've embarked on is in Somerset. That is all about providing to their citizens a new approach to service. We used an approach that says start with the better IT and efficient delivery. You then expand into improving customer access. Through that, move to a transformation agenda based around a multi-agency approach - joining up the council for the benefit of the citizen. Also part of our proposition is considering the social and economic activities you can now bring to bear and how the council provides a better environment. We've just started taking over some of the services but the idea is essentially joining up what was two previously discrete authorities within the county. Interestingly, when they wrote the specifications for the procurement, they invited other local authorities to join in the framework. They took a joint venture approach with us so that this could happen and we are actively talking with a number of other authorities.
Do you think other authorities will be happy to have their data all in one place?
It's entirely possible to run a completely virtual set up with a data centre where all the entities within it are completely separate and discrete, but they use the same infrastructure. You get those benefits of scale, lower cost and a greener environment. The project we are involved with in Somerset is probably the most advanced in the UK. Other organisations have done shared services or improved customer access, but no-one has done the whole complete story. They have committed to a level of saving here that they will then use to plough back into the council to provide better services to their citizens.
There's been a lot in the news lately about how government is handling the nation's data. It is likely that regulations on data will increase. Will that impact on your business models?
We've always had data governance right at the forefront of what we do. The security of data in systems terms is absolutely paramount. That's a key conversation we have with our customers as you can imagine. We've always had to deal with protecting data, so any increase in regulation shouldn't impact on what we do too much.
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