Quocirca's Straight Talking: Gov't IT - get it right

The latest government IT strategy is not all bad but could be even more focused. Quocirca's Elaine Axby points to three areas that need attention.

The UK government published yet another IT strategy document in November, this time entitled Transformational Government, which is destined to become the latest buzzword for describing government IT (replacing e-government, that muddle of 'electronic', 'efficient' and 'effective').

Whilst much of the strategy is eminently sensible - put the customer at the centre of services enabled by IT; increase the professionalism of IT management; look for savings and so on - the government still seems to be trying to do too much and running into that classic mistake of muddling business and IT change.

It has at least recognised that the 'if it moves, put it on a website' strategy carried out in the past hasn't been a success - it's led to too much 'e-enabling' of existing processes and services, not enough rethinking of these processes upfront. However, two out of the government's three strategic 'transformations' are to do with the business processes, not the IT: designing IT services around the citizen and the move to a shared-services culture.

So what should government IT professionals and business managers be concentrating on? Quocirca suggests three key areas.

Firstly, make sure the IT is in service of the business, not the other way round. This means having a clear set of objectives that your council, central government department or agency wants to achieve. These should be specific, measurable and targeted to the local situation or central government policy delivery, and should take into account what the customer wants. This is no mean feat given the plethora of central government initiatives around but all the new approaches to project management set out by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) won't help if the basic business and IT strategy are not in line. Then, set out a business case for change in IT before bringing in the technology.

One big factor which should make more of an impact than it does on the public sector's approach to IT is its lack of appetite for leading edge technology. Quocirca research shows that government IT professionals do not consider themselves big adopters of leading edge technologies. Less than two per cent described themselves as such in one of our recent surveys, compared to 15 per cent of their counterparts in areas such as retail and financial services.

So whilst there are leading edge projects in the public sector, often outstanding because of their sheer size, many of these fail because they are too risky in an environment where neither business management (taking their lead from the politicians) nor IT management have the stomach for risk. Far better to go for tried and tested solutions using relatively tried and tested technologies.

Secondly, then, government IT should go for standards-based solutions wherever possible - these can be open standards such as Linux or Java, or de-facto standards such as Microsoft's .NET. The advent of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) should be an absolute godsend for public sector IT, where the need to employ 'joined up' services across organisations mirrors the need to apply processes across different parts of the value chain in private sector organisations. Think finance and insurance companies, major retail organisations and telecommunications companies - all of these are implementing SOA and have the same issues about needing to reuse existing investments, and avoid the 'silo' implementations of past IT investments, as have public sector organisations.

Thirdly, don't always think that improvements to processes need huge projects with vast numbers of highly paid business process consultants. A number of smaller government departments and agencies are increasingly using standard off-the-shelf software - for example, to design forms - and quietly introducing process changes as users realise the technology is not always a huge cumbersome thing that can't easily be changed but that process improvements can come in gradually. Here technology really is at the service of the end users.

The government has an extremely ambitious IT agenda. Some of it - the desire to see departments and local councils sharing services such as Finance and HR, for example - will need a great deal of political will and clever incentives to make it happen. But other problems - such as introducing mobility to improve service efficiency, or the need to reuse previous investment - are not unique to government and should not be that difficult to solve. Perhaps not so much 'grand transformations' as 'straightforward improvements'.