Change is a-coming for central government IT – but don’t hold your breath

If we want to help get Smarter Working a real thing in the UK public sector, we need to stop thinking of HMG as “one thing” – and instead, that it’s really multiple little things which weren’t ever designed to be easily changed.

That is the realistic, albeit perhaps sobering, view of an ex-central government IT leader who has crossed the floor and now works at a major public sector IT vendor – Iain Patterson, former director of Common Technology Services at the Government Digital Service (GDS) but who now sits in UKCloud as its Chief Digital Officer.

Patterson was one of many representatives of major suppliers into public sector ICT figures were speaking at June 7th’s successful Think Smarter Working For Public Sector 2018 event in Westminster to an audience composed mainly composed of senior public sector tech professionals.

There, Patterson, in an on-stage ‘digital dialogue’ with the conference’s host, Government Computing Editor David Bicknell, noted that, “Government is designed to be operational, and a lot of the people who work in it don’t really want it to change, no matter what they say.”

Nonetheless Patterson does believe that, “While it’s hard to accept that you need to start all over again, you really do have to do that when it comes to fundamentally reforming the delivery of services.”

The UKCloud senior exec believes that large parts of Whitehall genuinely are “at the foothills of the right strategic thinking” about how to effect such change, an emerging fondness for brand-based solutions like Amazon sounds worryingly like older fetishes for Oracle or SAP, he warned: “Just moving from one supplier at a slightly lower cost for the same service is not transformational.”

Other suppliers taking the stage at the event echoed Patterson’s concerns, like Byron Calmonson, MD of The Resourcing Hub, worrying that, “Before you can start doing smart things, you really have to become a smart customer.”

Another, Kieron Murphy, Managing Director at Hub specialist Matrix Booking, noted that government clients were beginning to take advantage of flexible space solutions like hubs, but that it remains very early days for the market – while the head of Innopsis, a software defined network trade association, sees similar great promise – but for now, definite inertia – in the take up of that promising technology.

But a note of optimism was definitely provided by one of the last commercial partner speakers at the conference, John Glover of Kahootz, who reminded delegates that, “If government really does push for innovation, then its members will find the tools to really start with new ways of working.”