Liam Maxwell, director of ICT Futures at the Cabinet Office, is not one to mince words. "British government IT is too expensive. At £21bn the annual cost dwarfes some government departments. It is three times the amount we spend on the army, more than the Department for Transport," he wrote one year ago as one of seven co-authors of the uncompromising document Better for Less for thinktank the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age. "Across the country," the report continued, "schools are going to have to look for savings while central government IT programmes continue to burn staggering amounts of money." It costs up to £1,600 a year to run a desktop computer in central government, the report also pointed out, so there are potential savings of at least £2bn just by bringing that cost down to the £345 typical in local government.
Putting government applications and services in the cloud is central to achieving those savings. The previous Labour administration proposed the G-Cloud – a government-only cloud computing service – that would save £3.2bn out of a central budget of £16bn. Maxwell's team suggested that by using commercial services from Microsoft, Google or Amazon, or one of the burgeoning number of private British cloud providers, serious amounts of money could be saved without the hassle of specifying anything beyond functionality.
The G-Cloud idea would see the government running the data centres, consolidating hundreds of centres currently being run around the country by central government, police, local authorities and other public sector institutions. The security services', meanwhile, would remain separate.
Outlining the idea in January 2010, John Suffolk, then the government's chief information officer, pointed out that 80% of government desktop machines could be supplied through a shared utility service. Powered by the cloud, Suffolk also suggested that government departments could share program code, creating an open source community inside government. Early estimates suggested that it could save £900m in the first five years, and £300m annually after that.
Research company TechMarketView, however, suggests that the G-Cloud project is growing fuzzier at the edges: "The measurements for success have altered. Whereas previous talk was of reducing the number of data centres (from 200-plus to about 10), the current strategy is to reduce the cost of data centres by 35% over the next five years."
The Efficiency and Reform Group inside the Cabinet Office – of which Maxwell became the new advisor in September – hopes to get the project back on track by focusing on what's important and affordable rather than "big bang" changes. But it needs to move quickly, TechMarketView says: "The pace … needs to pick up; not least because otherwise ICT market changes will outpace its progress … the UK government will only benefit from advances in technology if it can adapt its systems, processes and procedures quickly enough to cope with a new way of working."
A recent Public Administration Select Committee report into government IT recommended changes, but the Cloud Industry Forum's Andy Burton says: "Current procurement and governance practices struggle to handle ICT as a service rather than as a product. Cloud computing fundamentally enables and supports integrated cross-government procurement of ICT platforms while the pay-as-you-use approach allows for a far more flexible, innovative and competitive market for applications to meet public sector needs."
The G-Cloud project is now led by the MoJ chief information officer, Andy Nelson, and though it is still moving ahead, it is doing so cautiously. "There has been a change of emphasis away from 'the cloud' being about new technologies, to being about the commercial model," TechMarketView's analysts found. "When the cloud computing strategy is published later this year, we can expect it to explain what cloud computing means to UK government and how it will be structured, governed and implemented."
Hurry up and wait might seem like the constant refrain in government. But deep within Whitehall, change is happening.
Government IT
Busting budgets
The UK government is thought to have more than 200 data centres – nobody is quite sure how many. What is certain is that they consume a lot of energy and money, but individually they utilise only single figure percentages of their computing power.
The government's goal now is not necessarily to cut the number of centres, but to cut their total running cost by 35% over the next five years. Bill McCluggage, the government's deputy chief information officer, says there are lots of ways to measure expense: "Is it the price of computing, the power usage effectiveness, the energy cost? If it's just about planting pins in real estate, I don't think we've got it right."
Government IT spending *
HMRC: £805m
DWP: £947m
NHS: £1.42bn
Police: £1.2bn
MOD: £1.5bn
Local government: £7.6bn
* Government data from 2009
