George Osborne - Agenda Setters 2009

Name: George Osborne

Title: Shadow chancellor

Position: 32    Last year: Not ranked

Why? Promises to reform government IT

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• Padmasree Warrior
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• Chris Anderson

Shadow chancellor George Osborne has pledged to scale back major IT projects and end the government's track record of delays and overspend on tech.

In February of this year Osborne backed the findings of a Conservative-commissioned review of government IT that claimed "the government would never need to sign another IT contract worth more than £100m".

Osborne and the Conservatives want to achieve this by relying on common hardware and open data formats. Osborne claims rather than relying on one large overarching system, departments could be served by a network of smaller, cheaper systems able to understand each other's data.

The Conservatives hope that smaller IT projects will be easier to manage and less prone to delays and running tens or hundreds of millions over budget.

He also said a Conservative government would publish as much Whitehall data as possible online in an open format that would allow people to mix and match it with other information.

IT and business process outsourcing could also be in line for a boost under the Conservatives, with Osborne pledging to see if outsourcing successes at local authorities could be replicated in Whitehall.

Osborne's journey to the shadow cabinet saw him serve as a shadow minister in the Work and Pensions Department and a special adviser to Agriculture, Fisheries and Food under the John Major Conservative government in the 1990s.

Panellists chose Osborne for his role in "Asking some searching questions about government's approach to citizen data and other fundamental aspects of IT delivery".