Chris Chant is to be applauded for setting out some of the issues in Government IT and for seeking improvements through better systems integration skills.
However there is a whole herd of elephants sitting in the middle of the room, including: the political policy/ service fulfilment lag; fanatically policed organisational boundaries; privacy/ security/ legacy data issues; national and supra-national procurement regulation; ‘heritage’ contracts etc. etc.
I came to the conclusion some time ago that the most plausible approach is to create a NewGov.uk, founded on proper Systems (with a capital S) principles, in parallel to the legacy estate, rather than just hoping that GCloud technology will resolve the serious organisational inhibitors that have long created so much unexpected cost and disappointment in government IT.
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