Editorial

Have we seen the last ‘government IT project failure’ headlines?

Delegates at Friday’s landmark Think Digital Government conference get clues to a very new central government ICT landscape

Posted 13 February 2017 by Gary Flood


Government really is getting better at tech delivery – even if it doesn’t really feel like it.

This were one of the main takeaways from Friday’s landmark Think Digital Government conference in London, with a range of stakeholders setting out the realities – and opportunities – for a public sector ICT ecosystem that’s starting to look very different from the one we had at the turn of the century.

For a start, said Jessica Figueras, Chief Analyst at the former Kable, now GlobalData, the trend away from massive outsourcing projects to more in-house control of ICT seems to be unstoppable – though her company’s data seems to suggest the move pre-dated the Coalition’s attack on the idea in 2010, and commenced instead around the start of Aspire five years before, with much of the money that used to be spent on System Integrators switching to internal staff and limited contractor wage bills.

In addition, she believes, the risk associated with “generational change” style big tech projects is diminishing, as central government gets better at project management.

The plus of all that is both less chance of “billions of pounds” wasted – and less chance for mandarins of “P45s and a roasting off Margaret Hodge at the Public Accounts Committee”.

“All the signs suggest that government is doing digital better than it was five years ago,” she told Think Digital Government, change she and her team attribute, at least partly, to the intervention of GDS.

“Expect fewer headlines in the Mail, as government gets better skilled at delivering projects,” she predicted.