A senior executive at the largest IT supplier to central government, HP, has responded to continual attacks by government officials on the ‘oligopoly’ of large IT suppliers.
Richard Trevor, regional vice-president, UK public sector at Hewlett Packard, questioned the government’s approach of reducing IT spend ‘as an absolute.’
He said, "Taking the reduction of IT spend as an absolute target ignores the benefits that can be achieved through IT. There is a view that ‘complex IT’ means it will go wrong. But major IT suppliers are much better placed to tackle issues such as legacy and standardisation….and upgrading the existing infrastructure that is already in place."
He praised the development of solutions by the Government Digital Service, saying, "The Government Digital Service is doing a fantastic job of addressing user interaction with IT."
But he added, ‘digital’ is the ‘veneer’ on top of legacy IT systems that must be continually maintained to deliver the processing of transactions that are at the heart of government.
"When a benefit claim is made, for the foreseeable future it is the legacy IT that is at the heart of processing that claim. Typically between 70% and 95% of a CIO’s budget is spent on legacy IT, keeping the lights on. Depending on the organisation, between 10% and 30% of the budget is then spent in trying to transform the business. Ideally, you are always to trying to change that ratio."
Trevor indicted that one of the major challenges for suppliers continues to be the lack of a common approach to systems across central government departments.
"We need to agree on common standards. We have a number of contracts within government and in none of them have we been asked for the same service levels, for example. Rigorous standardisation of stated requirements would enable all IT suppliers to bring scale benefits to bear, and avoid customisation expense."
Trevor said there was a huge opportunity for major suppliers to work with the growing number of SME solutions now being introduced to government through frameworks such as the CloudStore. HP is increasingly working with SMEs through the trade body Intellect, he said.
HP, whose document management and printing solutions are used across the public sector, said it had spotted increasing occurrences of local councils faced with budget cuts increasingly turning to office solutions such as Google Docs without realising that putting their documents in the Cloud meant that their data was now being stored in the US.
