GSA: Cloud apps not clouded thinking for the US
You know, I’m mightily impressed with the Obama administration so far. He possesses that one great quality for a leader. Vision.
I don’t pretend to like all his policies, nor to even understand as a UK citizen what logic may lie behind them, but he’s doing some things right. His IT decisions, for example.
President Obama has appointed one shrewd guy in Vivek Kundra to fill the vital role of Federal CIO. This guy knows his way around IT. Quite a novelty for your average CIO. And he recognises the Cloud holds the key to efficiency, lower costs and better services.
But its no good just saying something needs to be done. Things need to actually happen. May I present the US Government’s Cloud App Store…
Services on demand, not on-site
I’m sure everyone understands the arguments for a service based offering as opposed to a dedicated, local server-based infrastructure. But its when the benefits of scale apply that the greatest savings can be found. And when you consider the need to cap public spending, the focus on this becomes very sharp indeed.
The Cloud gives us the ability to only pay for what we use, rather than having to build our infrastructure before we can use it. Think about a journey, say a trip to Paris.
You could buy a plane, hire a pilot and crew and buy fuel, licenses and whatever else you would need. Or you could just buy a ticket to take a commercial flight. Same result, but a vast difference in cost. That’s what the Cloud, or Software as a Service (SaaS) provides.
Reinventing the wheel, many times over
We know the public sector provide the same services all over the country. There is a uniform requirement, standard of compliance, performance and hopefully, delivery.
Providing the means to deliver this from one point, or Cloud seems obvious, why should each local authority try to build something that they don’t need to?
So that’s the argument, now lets look what the GSA has done. here’s the GSA Apps store. Aimed at US Federal departments, its possible to select and buy – rather, rent applications written, approved, hosted ready to go for a wide range of tasks and situations.
So while elsewhere, banks and enterprises around the commercial world lick their wounds and stay frozen in shock after the crash, the US Government does something positive to kick-start the public sector by helping them reduce their $75 Billion annual IT costs.
A global lesson for us all
While strategists like me have been evangelising for so long that The Cloud is our future, it was quite a shock to see that it should be a public sector – in fact a government led initiative that takes up the baton and runs with it.
Remember, this is an area everyone associates with waste, inefficiency overspend and that no one would expect to take a lead in anything, yet overnight, it shows us all the way. What about the UK. What is DirectGov, the UK’s unified services initiative doing for us?
Well let’s take a look. Welcome to DirectGov. This website is funded by the UK’s Central Office of Information, the COI. The COI has decided that instead of the hundreds – possibly thousands of local websites, it would provide one site for everything.
Not a Cloud in site…
No doubt about it. Providing a one-stop shop is a great idea. But the UK’s public sector’s reputation for performance isn’t good, as we all know. Think the DWP, CSA, Passport Agency or Central Police Firearms Database. All late, overspent and still not delivering.
But then again, can you imagine the UK’s public sector, with its dogma, vested interests and pension chasers ever considering anything like the US GSA initiative?
Why not over here?
The usual excuse is a lack of public funding. But the COI, who is behind DirectGov isn’t short of money; it’s PR spend is about to eclipse even the global giant Proctor & Gamble.
But why spend so much – its citizen’s have no choice about who provides their services!
In addition, this vastly overspent department, with it’s frankly, downright laughable attempt to integrate every major public service is struggling; it can’t even agree terms of reference or formats and is weakly chasing local government to meet targets for public access set years ago and still nowhere near being met.
It wouldn’t be fair to ignore DirectGov’s attempt to provide applications. But low rent mash-ups by enthusiastic amateurs, plucked unfinished and bug-ridden then presented as “solutions” on DirectGov’s website is hardly in the same league as the GSA.
Public sector IT Spend
Just how much is being spent on services per head of population, within the UK compared to the United States, ignoring the UK’s giant NHS?
Let’s take a look at that. The 2007 US Official Census shows the US has 301.6 million people. The UK’s last census, on the other hand, lists 59.3 million people.
The US Federal IT spend is $75 Billion, or $247 per head. Here in the UK, we can’t agree on our IT spend. It is reported as £16 or £18 Billion, so let’s say £17 Billion, $27.82 Billion. That means the UK’s Public Sector IT spend is nearly double at nearly $470 per head!
Surely, with such a mammoth overspend, we have the greater problem. Yet while the US is concerned about their federal spend and is looking to the Cloud to radically reduce the cost, the UK hasn’t woken up to that reality yet.
Time for the UK to stop empire building
Here in the UK, we have a massive public spending problem, that everyone agrees about. As in any enterprise, there is tremendous capacity to reduce costs by efficient use of technology to reduce operational overhead and unnecessary duplication.
We don’t need hundreds of local government IT departments all doing the same thing. We need strategic and innovative thinking for public service delivery, it needs fixing not fudging. Oh, how we need a Vivek Kundra and the GSA!
on September 22nd, 2009 at 6:52 am
You might like to check out the blog of John Suffolk, the UK’s CIO. We’re behind the US, but the thinking and planning is well under way.
on September 22nd, 2009 at 8:32 am
Hi, James, good to hear from you.
For anyone who doesn’t know James, he was until recently an innovation director for a major high-street bank, a published author and writer of the excellent, insightful and highly thought-provoking Bankervision blog. He’s now working at IT director level in the public sector.
That said, I am amazed that you should point to John Suffolk’s blog as a good example of current public sector thinking. If that’s the best we’ve got, let’s all give thanks that the incumbent CIO will be out of a job come the next election.
There are so many laughable, idiotic statements and examples of meaningless spin (”joined up networking” – am I alone in seeing the hidden humour in that expression?) that his blog is worthy of an entire post in itself.
Thanks James, again a stimulating comment. You’ve just given me the basis for an entire new post!
on September 22nd, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Neil – I am not clear about what you are suggesting here. Are you saying that public services should be delivered by a central body, removing local service altogether?
on September 22nd, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Hi, Graham,
No, this isn’t what I’m saying at all!
I’m saying that local services can and should still be delivered locally, but instead of employing expensive local IT hardware infrastructures to do it, at high cost to the taxpayer, Cloud-based infrastructures be used instead.
This leaves local authorities able to provide better services and roll them out quicker without the heavy burden of creating the back-end systems themselves.
The beauty of the Cloud is the service exists wherever there is a need to deliver it. The bonus being one of consistency of design and lower software costs through the benefits of scale. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear!
on September 24th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
An excellent response to Graham, Neil. I think you have summarized in a couple of paragraphs the specific advantages that I have been struggling to quantify about “The Cloud” for quite a while.
Well done to you!
on December 26th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Neil,we have never met, and to my knowledge we have never briefed you on the UK Government IT Strategy. As we live only 30 minutes apart, I am very happy to arrange something.
At this point you will at least be working from detailed knowledge.
John
UK Government CIO
on December 26th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Hi, John,
Thanks for responding – I’m very impressed to hear from someone in perhaps the most important, key IT role in the UK – I can’t imagine Sir Fred Goodwin responding to one of my posts about RBS.
I’d be delighted to meet with you. Unlike many of your peers, your previous experience as head of the Britannia uniquely qualifies you to fill your role and I’d be very interested for you to share whatever you feel appropriate with me. I’ll approach this now with a very open mind!
Just let me know when and where!
on January 6th, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Great post, although I’m a little late to the party.
UK Gov IT projects are generally *way* too big. A friend spent 2 years in the employ of EDS on the NHS IT thingamajig. He reckons he did about 30 – 40 days of real work in that time. The only thing they were interested in was billing hours.
I *really* like the sound of a government app store. You’d probably need 2 clouds in practice. A very secure “internal” cloud for running the in house functions and a web facing “external” cloud for running the customer interaction elements.
Joe
on January 6th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Hey, Joe.
Thanks for commenting, its much appreciated. I agree, public sector IT projects are far too big.
Add to this the fact that the majority of the people running them are unlikely to have worked in an environment where they’ve had to compete to provide efficient or quality solutions.
The usually-outsourced teams within the Public Sector are generally incompetent and often disillusioned, managed by people with poor IT management skills who often fail to specify requirements properly, so its no wonder just about all have failed to deliver.
The DWP, the UK’s biggest such environment has a long history of failure to deliver, overspend and damning Audit Commission reports only matched in their ineptitude by the NHS. All that is public record, not just opinion.
In fact, add together the DWP project delays and the time comes to over 14 years. Each day of overrun coming out of taxpayer’s pockets. That’s scandalous.
The biggest eye opener I ever received was working with EDS. I was brought in as part of a rescue team to try to sort out the mess they were making of a large financial system upgrade to 50,000 users. To use EDS’s own expression, it was like herding cats.
Every time you asked EDS to change anything, they charged for a “change request” and added it to a growing lists of tasks they would never actually get around to doing. It was management by attrition – you just gave up asking.
In the end the execs simply asked me to design them a new environment for them to move into while they extricated themselves from the entire EDS contract.
What EDS are good at is writing contracts. Its incredibly difficult to get them out. If only 10% of their technical staff were half as good as their lawyers, they would be an amazing partner!
DWP will never improve until they kick EDS out. And that’s not going to happen.
But the point of the post was the Cloud. I agree, the US are doing amazing things and there are valuable lessons to be learned there.
Let’s hope a change of government brings a change of attitude in the Public sector, but I’m not hopeful.