I have many times applauded the government's IT strategy for its vaulting ambitions to change public sector IT utterly, and I have also equally doubted the likelihood of such high ambitions becoming reality.
The problem with introducing radical new strategies is that most of the old guard, who have loyally worked their way up the hierarchy, do not understand or embrace them, and so cannot be relied upon to implement the brave new world.
How do you replace the old guard, those who are over the technological hill? One way is to handpick their replacements from the young, stroppy, innovative and talented among the existing staff. This may involve accelerated promotion for some, and sideways – or downwards – moves for others. Rancour and jealousy will follow, but that may be a price worth paying if you are keen to see your radical strategy come to fruition.
Another method is to hire an implementation tsar from outside, probably from one of the big four consultancy firms. This tsar will set about recruiting cadres of young stormtroopers to march in and roll out the new technologies, riding roughshod over the old timers.
This strategy does not often work - the NHS's National Programme for IT shows how it can go awry. The tsar in question, Richard Granger, hired an army of project managers to form Connecting for Health, which was to run alongside both the Department of Health and the NHS' own IT staff.
Granger's team got tangled in the old Spanish practices of the NHS, and met no great success in project management. They were like a failed transplant, rejected by the surrounding tissue.
The same rejection tends to happen in central government to outsiders, particularly those who come in to change culture cross-departmentally. So, when I read Guardian Government Computing's recent interview with Liam Maxwell, the government's director of ICT futures, I got worried.
He is a complete outsider, with no central government experience at all. Yet, one part of his remit is to persuade departments to procure IT from SMEs, rather than from the companies that Tony Blair's first health secretary Frank Dobson used to call "the intergalactic rip-off merchants". To buy from SMEs is well-known to be against the whole ethos of the civil service. Can this young chap succeed where others have failed – or rather have not tried very hard?
He may do the trick, because he is not just an outsider, but an outsider with political edge. His main claim to IT success, apparently, is having been a councillor for the royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, which has developed some advanced local government systems.
Another reason may be that his day job until he was seconded to the Cabinet Office last September was head of computer studies at Eton College and he is, I believe, an Old Etonian himself.
Far be it from me to say that this provenance will stop him shaking up the procurement of government IT.
Nonetheless, I do find his CV intriguing in 2012.
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