Government lambasted by Databarracks MD

Here is an interesting observation by Peter Groucutt, Managing Director of Databarracks, which highlights what is probably quite a double-ended argument.

In his opinion, if the Government is to meet its proposed target of spending 50 percent of its ICT procurement budget through SMEs, it must start making the most of the initiatives it has available.  

Groucutt cited a recent Cabinet Office report on improving government procurement and the impact of government's ICT savings initiatives from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which stated that the government is not doing enough to provide SMEs with the opportunity to win public sector business. It suggests that currently only 10 percent of Government spending is going through SMEs.

In his view, if the Government is serious about achieving its targets, it must directly assess the weaknesses preventing it from reaching its goals.

"The report from the PAC has highlighted the need for action. With targets quite clearly failing to be met, why are definitive actions not being taken to ensure more IT procurement is going through SMEs?

"Historically, cloud adoption amongst public sector organisations has been slow due to concerns around security. Cloud services represent a major change to way we provision and procure IT, and naturally adoption of these services can lead to some disruption. The Government recognised this and sought to introduce a framework that eases, or in some cases bypasses, these early exploratory phases by qualifying providers according to a certain standard. As a result, the G-Cloud framework was born."

Groucutt makes the point strongly that the establishment of G-Cloud had as its primary target the embedded position of the major IT vendors in the hearts and minds of the Government procurement departments. By opening up procurement to over 800 pre-approved suppliers; 80 percent of which are innovative SMEs who can provide agile and flexible IT solutions, faster, more flexible, cost-effective and agile solutions to business problems could be engineered.

And hereby lies, perhaps, some of the problem. Historically, the SME community has been exiled from selling to the Public Sector, so it can be argued that not only does the Government procurement arm have little experience of dealing with such companies, but those SME also have very little experience of dealing with Public Sector procurement processes and attitudes.

In short, neither side has too much understanding of the terms of reference of the other. The fact that sales messages are effective for SMEs when selling into the private sector does not mean they are in anyway effective when talking to a Government Ministry procurement department. And those procurement officials perhaps need to learn that talking five year development cycles and fifteen year application lifecycle requirements is no longer appropriate to what SMEs and cloud services can best offer.  

"On paper the benefits are obvious but the report from PAC suggests that in reality, many people still aren’t aware of them,” he said. “It has to be a priority for the Government to identify why this is. The framework has proven to be sufficiently robust but many government departments are still unwilling to leave the comfort and safety of legacy contracts with big SIs. G-Cloud is reducing costs for IT services and increasing spend with SMEs. The easiest way to drive public sector IT spend to SMEs is to increase the use of G-Cloud from £44.7m in sales to really make a dent in the estimated £7bn central government annual spend.”

And perhaps one answer here is that both sides need to be given the right to `crow’ about new contracts, the benefits that should derive from them and, over time, the actual benefits delivered. That could benenfit not just both sides of the procurement equation, but also the end users – us - as well. 

"We need to set a firm deadline - the original target of spending 25 percent on SMEs by 2015 has changed to 50 percent, without a new deadline for reaching that target being set. We need to stop moving the goal posts and make a concerted effort to change the way the sector consumes it’s IT.

"We also need to see a real push towards educating public sector departments about initiatives like G-Cloud, increasing awareness of the possible cost savings and efficiencies without the need to compromise front line services. Figures show that those procuring their IT through the CloudStore are realising the benefits of working with SMEs – we need to make sure everyone else realises this too.”