Yay, all our data will be in a US data centre, and Amazon will have our government by the balls.
Early supplier on UK.gov's G-Cloud slams 'dying' framework
G-Cloud pioneer and small hosting biz Memset has slammed the framework as failing in its original vision to "punch through archaic government procurement requirements" with an online “App Store”. Founder of Memset Kate Craig-Wood got involved in the project in 2009 as technical architecture co-lead prior to the framework being …
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Wednesday 15th June 2016 16:39 GMT Bob Dole (tm)
Re: Problem?
You should understand that those regulations were established by the providers who managed to become friends with government people.
I'm in tech and we also sell to government entities. It's painful just how little the majority of government buyers understand about the kit they "ask for". It's far easier to just convince them that "we will make not only make your day to day easier but your bosses will think you are a rock star" and then give them the system specs so they can copy/paste that directly into an RFP. Of course, those system specs are very narrowly defined in certain areas in order to preclude as much competition as possible.
It's a rare day when we come across people who actually know exactly what it is they are trying to do and are smart about it. Also, I'd love to say that this is limited to government interaction, but it's not. Any large scale organization is filled with people that really don't have the faintest idea of what they are doing and so they rely on "trusted" vendors to lead them. As long as no one is yelling at them and they are able to get home in time to watch GoT then it's all good.
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Wednesday 15th June 2016 16:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
The usual way for a new company to get into the government market is to hire a couple of senior civil servants recently retired from the relevant department(s). Remember that most of these guys went to public school and they believe totally in the primacy of networking with the right kind of people as the only way to arrive at correct decisions.
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Wednesday 15th June 2016 17:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
With my evil IT Marketing hat on.
Sounds like they should leverage the effort they made to meet HMG standards and tell people
At trade shows, through their online blog, their linked in entries and other social media.
Otherwise they can go on being excellent in a corner. Their choice.
Now I have to go.
Orphan puppies don't just drown themselves.
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Wednesday 15th June 2016 23:43 GMT bep
Whatever it is
Their problem seems to be right here:
"We briefly tried hiring some 'traditional' salespeople, but their tactics were incompatible with our high integrity and our technical, introverted culture was at odds with their own."
What they needed was project manager types who could rein in the worst excesses of the extroverts while simultaneously succeeding in getting the introverts to actually deliver. This is a speciality but such people do exist and they should have hired a couple. The majority of government 'red tape' is actually the result of legislation intended to ensure public money isn't wasted (faint hope) while meeting environmental, probity and other requirements. You can't just wish this stuff away, it has to be taken into account and dealt with.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
