Think G-Cloud: Collaborate and become `Intelligent Buyers and Sellers’

Perhaps one of the most telling signs of change going on in the way Government and Public Sector bodies view IT generally, and the cloud in particular, was the panel session held at the recent Think G-Cloud conference in London on how the Cabinet Office and the suppliers can collaborate to make G-Cloud work.

A core part of that collaboration, the panel suggested, is that Government departments and Public Sector organisations need to become `Intelligent Buyers’.

Moderated by Andrew Hawkins, Business Development Director at Eduserv, it featured the opinions of Peter Middleton of the G-Cloud Team; Tonio Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets ast Wwarwickshire County Council; and Tim Wright of Isolate Consulting, and former CIO of the Department for Education.

It is a mark of how far the cloud has started to penetrate the thinking for Public Sector circles that such subject as collaboration even come up as a subject for discussion. And perhaps something of an object lesson for much of the Private Sector as well as the cloud and service consumption, rather than IT product acquisition, starts to become the mainstream approach for building solutions to business information management problems.

The most important finding of the panel was the acknowledgement that there is still a long way to go if Government is to streamline its procurement processes and make them more effective in the cloud era. The most important factor here, and one which certainly applies equally in the Private Sector, is that the organisation acquiring any service needs to be clear in its own collective mind as to what it wants to procure, and why it is needed.

There was more than a hint from the panel that may Public Sector bodies are currently too lazy on this point and too prone to leaving such decision making to the large systems integrators that have traditionally serviced their IT needs. There was also the suggestion that there is now a growing opportunity for smaller, specialist consultancies to help Government departments with such tasks.

On the supply side of the equation, the panel suggested there is still a need for Service Providers (SPs) to work much harder on defining and clarifying their pricing structures. While that old adage of `charge what the market will stand’ may hold up well amongst Private Sector customers – at least for now – it was noted that Public Sector customers can be far more picky about the details of pricing. This can, of course, be no bad thing, but it can come to dominate purchase decision making and, particularly with cloud services, over-ride other important issues or attributes. 

So there is a need for Public Sector organisations to develop skills as `Intelligent Buyers’. This, the panel suggested, includes such thinking as a readiness to consider shared services and resources, such as the financial team in County Council `A’ sharing services with County Council `B’ as they are both doing the same tasks.

The common defence against this is that `B’ will claim it needs to do things differently from `A’ and therefore needs a completely different solution. This is where the potential of real collaboration between SP and customer can come into play.

As the panel suggested, this is where the SPs should push back on the customers to provide justification for any differences.  This may at first appear counter-intuitive to them, and may even be so in the short-term. But to appear as the SP which can manage shared resource effectively, thus lowering customer costs, is very likely to prove a popular attraction with other potential customers.

In addition, the standardisation of the underlying technology, and in particular the APIs which can be used to integrate services and point-solution applications into finely granulated, targeted services, can give the SPs the opportunity to build specifically tailored solutions on top of a standardised, shared service. This would give both customer and service provider the best of both worlds.

The session ended with some words of advice that are pertinent to all businesses, not just the Public Sector. Get started.

One of the important aspects of the cloud is its inherent flexibility, so it does not demand a specific start point. As was pointed out, every Government department or Public Sector organisation will be on a different `journey’ through their operational development, so there is no official entry point when it comes to starting the cloud adoption process, so it is just a case of jumping in.