By Nick Heath, 30 November 2009 17:34
NEWS
Shared services delivered through the cloud will help the public sector shave billions from its annual IT spend, according to a leaked Whitehall report.
The leaked draft document, Government ICT Strategy: New world, new challenges, new opportunities, sets out priorities for public sector IT chiefs through to 2020.
The report, prepared by the CIO Council and the Cabinet Office, details how the government could cut billions from its IT budget each year.
According to the report, the savings and efficiencies will be realised by implementing:
- The Public Sector Network (PSN): a single telecoms infrastructure that will provide converged voice and data comms. The report estimates that the PSN will save government bodies at least £500m each year by 2014.
- The G-Cloud: A cloud infrastructure that will allow public sector bodies to host their IT systems on a central, efficient datacentre. The report says that proliferation of vendors providing services through the G-Cloud would make it easier for a public sector body to switch suppliers if needed. It says the G-Cloud will play a key role in realising the £3.2bn savings that the government's Operational Efficiency Programme said can be achieved by improving the efficiency and sharing of back office IT systems.
- Government Application Store (G-AS): The G-AS will be an online portal that allows public sector organisations to access business applications and services. By encouraging organisations to reuse applications across the public sector, Whitehall will save £500m from its IT running costs by 2020, the report says.
- Datacentre rationalisation: The G-Cloud and more efficient server technology will allow the number of datacentres being used in the public sector to be cut from hundreds to just 10 to 12, the report says. As a result, the cost of running public sector datacentres will be cut by 75 per cent and IT infrastructure costs reduced by £300m per year by 2020.
- Standardised desktops: All public sector bodies will be provided with a common design for desktop and software, which suppliers will be required to provide at the lowest price available. The report says this will provide significant economies of scale and better information security. It estimates that once implemented across the public sector, this will deliver a saving of £400m per year.
Sureyya Cansoy, head of public sector programmes for UK IT trade body Intellect, said: "The strategy brings together a number of key issues that we have been talking about as part of a transformational government strategy for a number of years."
As well as detailing the billions of projected savings, the report also says it will provide guidance encouraging public sector systems to be based on common technical architecture and standards, in order to help ensure they are interoperable and can be reused across the sector.
Use of open source software will also be encouraged by giving public sector bodies a list of open source alternatives to commercial offerings.
The report also commits government to continuing a recent drive to recruit more IT graduates. The drive is aimed at helping government reduce the amount it spends on consultants and contractors, with a view to cutting spending by half by 2020.
A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said the report was "still a work in progress" and that it would be published shortly.
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1. anonymous
Sounds like more expensive Public Centre IT Train-wrecks in the making - Public Accounts Committee/National Audit Office - 'on your marks'....
They can't do IT competantly in a normal environment, never mind the largely unproven cloud computing.....
...*Unless the G in G-Cloud is off-loading the whole job to Google :-) like in California.