back to article £1bn in govt IT projects on slash list

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has said that more than 300 IT projects have been reviewed and projects worth £1bn will be stopped or "de-scoped". A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office told GC News that information about projects which will be axed or scaled back will be "available soon". "Since the creation of the …

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  1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Flame

    £1Bn across *300* projects is 3 1/3m each

    Are they having a laugh?

    Just another 1199Bn to go then

    Seriously procurement and contract reform is dull to outsiders but the *reason* why UK is stuck with buying 2 carriers the current government did not want but cannot afford to cancel is in the f£$%king con-tract (A technical term used when entering into a legally binding agreement with BAe).

    If this was serious they'd need to look at big ticket items. Dept wide support contracts.

    Splitting procurements into sections with *clearly* defined and documented interfaces so smaller developers would have a chance.

    In fact a special law to *forbid* governments accepting "Too expensive to cancel" clauses.

    BTW Someone mentioned that the UK government has c150 data centres. WTF.

    I know different departments run different hardware and of course we want redundancy but *why* that many. It's 1 land mass with fibre optic backbone telecomms.

    Unless the speed of light has dropped a *lot* since I last checked It would seem to make sense to co-locate as much of this stuff together as possible. Preferably near to large power sources and a ready supply of cooling water.

    I'll guess it'd be difficult to re host some apps (probably the ones built by con-tractors to use their favorite language/hardware combination (with its particular highly non standard extensions) for "performance" but putting more of them into 1 physical space should be within the state of the art. AFAIK in air conditioning bigger is *always* better. The same amount of electricity buys a good bit more cooling with larger systems.

    Flames because the idea *seems* good but the results so far seems pretty gutless.

  2. Pat 11

    Fox? Why?

    Tom Steinberg and the test of MySociety do more for digital britain in their lunch breaks than that travel agent has ever done.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Budgets

    I work with government and there is currently a big push to spend their remaining budgets on any old crap before they lose this money. What would make more sense is if the departments were allowed to retain their budget into the next financial year so they can make a better job of consolidating and streamlining themselves with a slightly bugger warchest. Rather than wasting their money now 'so they dont lose it'

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