Another day. And another report poring over the inadequacies in UK Government ICT. This time it’s from the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC). The report is entitled Government and IT - "A recipe for rip-offs": Time for a new approach. We have to admit that we haven’t yet had chance to digest the entire tome. However, the summary would indicate that time and money has been spent compiling a report to communicate issues that have been highlighted on numerous occasions before. And as the report states, the issues are largely already being dealt with in the UK Government’s ICT strategy. In addition, although all the points are valid (to a certain degree), it’s hard not to be irritated by the level of sensationalism.
We read the section on ‘Suppliers’ with great interest. We understand that HP (represented by Craig Wilson, MD, UK & Ireland, HP Enterprise Services) was the only large SI willing to participate in the Committee hearing. It’s a great shame that others didn’t put their cases forward. Unfortunately by not standing up to be counted, the impression given is that the big SIs have something to hide. And the end result is a report influenced heavily by highly vocal SMEs (such as Erudine – CEO, Martin Rice, always has something to say on the matter), “commentators” (such as Computer Weekly) and academics (from such obscure institutions as the Oxford Internet Institute), and showing immense bias. While we support the idea that SMEs have an important role to play in UK Government ICT, we long for the day when all parties, including the large SIs (which, whether you like it or not, continue to have an important role to play), can work together in a positive fashion to enable innovative companies to play a bigger part.
We’ll be taking a much more in-depth look at the trends in the UK public sector SITS market in our forthcoming PublicSectorViews Market Trends & Forecasts report.