GDS has no real strategy for £450m budget pot, internal plan reveals Concerns are mounting that the Government Digital Service has no real plan for spending its £450m budget - following a leaked strategy document obtained by The Register. In November GDS was awarded the additional funding in the Spending Review to digitally transform Whitehall over this Parliament. Its previous annual budget …
The first e-government strategy was written by Des Vincent and his colleagues in the NI civil service, and then taken up by England and Wales. That worked - at least as far in providing useful information on web sites happened. It also got some people working with other departments in NI, Wales and Scotland. But getting different departments to work together in London is nearly impossible.
That worked because putting some information up on websites is a small scope. Why do government always think full transformation is the answer. How about identify one need and work on that. If you pull it off we'll give you some more budget.
We just need to accept that actually "rework with experience" is ALWAYS cheaper than "planning but never starting work in the first place".
The key to successful IT is often to stop writing documents and just get on with it. Just like every other industry.
Far too many in the civil service playing the game of musical chairs without the music. 1) Get moved to the latest high profile scheme. 2) Produce lots of mindless bullshit. 3) Get budget increase. 4) Grow department. 5) Spend like mad. 6) Get moved to next high flying scheme just before the audit. 7) Repeat....
If only that were true. Trouble with GDS is that this was a Cabinet Office initiative bringing in "experts" from outside the Civil Service to provide expert advice on how IT dev should be done. So althought a number of these are now CS they are not old stream....who have got their hands dirty by keeping legacy systems running and trying to do things on a shoestring as all the funding appears to go to new web functions with "cool" fonts.
£450m given to Depts would result in a lot of infrastructure improvements...but to GDS?!!!
I am shocked.
Re this: Department for Work and Pensions, "which will lead work on a tool to pay money out from government."
Government has one. It's called a bank. NS&I, to be exact. It operates over two times more cost-effectively than any commercial retail bank. So, GDS, we all know you like to build new platforms (or at least the web front-ends - platforms seem a bit beyond you just yet) but maybe part of your strategy could be to take a closer look at what already exists within government. Or is that too dull for you?
Once again, I recommend the NAO report on the DEFRA debacle for a most enjoyable skewering of the GDS's institutional culture of arrogance backed by ignorance.
Tossers.
Politicians are just not very good at letting incremental improvements happen because a need is identified.
Instead there has to be a big project.They can't just agree to a small scale project, especially in a time of " austerity" and spend a couple of million quid making a service available (in this case) on-line. Instead they have to allocate a few billion on changing everything all at once.
Or to put it another way, politicians don't want to put a new engine in the lifeboat. They have to have a new boat, and a new lifeboat station and a new ramp and a new communication network - or nothing. Often it's nothing.
an approach that involves developing a common core infrastructure of shared components, technology and standards on which it’s easy to build brilliant, user-centred government services.
Yah, I can see where you're coming from matey, but how about you stop fucking about and just get the ageing back office IT infrastructure updated first, eh? You know, where the actual work is done? I'm sick and fucking tired of watching that little Outlook icon disconnecting every bloody five minutes, or getting a sudden barrage of emails towards the end of the day because your network has "parked" them. And why does it take 3 minutes for Word to load? fuck.
Or are you so far up the backside of your IT supplier that you couldn't worm your way out with £30m cheque, even if you wanted to?
From the article:
"...with each transformation push reinventing and rediscovering the same things."
Now that you mention it, the GDS report has a certain rancid musk. At times it sounds as if they're recycling the reports from earlier cycles, adding some buzzwords, changing the design and colour of the book covers ...
They're probably working under the assumption that anybody who reads one of these reports won't be willing or able to read the next. :-)
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