Craig Wilson, managing director and vice president UK and Ireland for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Services, one of the biggest suppliers to the UK public sector, has seen a lot of things come and go in his 30 years in the public sector ICT market. His view on the current Coalition efforts to revamp the public sector technology landscape is cautiously optimistic:
“Although it is easy to criticise what the current government is trying to do, I have to say it is the most concerted attempt I’ve seen to better control IT spending at the centre. While we can always find things they could do better, they do deserve a bit of credit for this. ”
The most complete statement of direction for current policy came in the form of this year’s published ICT strategy, which includes the long awaited G-Cloud strategy document. Wilson has a mixed take on this:
“The strategy as a whole stands comparison with what we see amongst our big corporate clients. In terms of ambition it’s not that different; where we see a divergence is around the execution. The strategy comes in two parts. One is about making better use of the money that is already spent on ICT, getting better value for money and reducing duplication in what government buys with the idea of reinvesting some proportion of that in citizen centric services. On that latter piece, the strategy is really weak and stands in stark contrast to most corporates. Most corporates would say. because of what we want to do in the marketplace we must invest in A, B or C and then we are going to unlock the investment. The UK government is the other way around – it is saying “We are going to save the money but we are not quite sure what we are going to spend it on. What I am saying is that most corporates would have a very clear idea of how to spend the money and the rest of the strategy becomes an enabler to that ambition. ”
On the subject of the G-Cloud though, the government does seem to be on the right track, according to Wilson:
“I would say government has it almost right, but the bit it is right about is the least important bit. What I mean by that is that being able to procure a Cloud-based service is what they are trying to put in place. The issue that CIOs around the world are struggling with is not the question of ‘how do I procure a Cloud service’ but ‘how do I exploit it, how do I take the patchwork quilt of thousands of different applications - none of which is designed to run on the Cloud - and refactor those applications so I can run them in a virtualised world where services will be aggregated from lots of different places into a consistent seamless, secure customer experience?’ The rhetoric of Cloud and G-Cloud is very much focused on doing the shopping and has focused much less on the question of how do we fill the Cloud up with stuff that is really going to bring a benefit. The danger is that public sector CIOs could end up doing the shopping very effectively - and then realise they have not made any inroads into that question of how do I get my applications onto that fabric. ”
Wilson knows what kind of applications would give the Coalition a quick win:
“Email or messaging. It has traditionally been a Microsoft Exchange application and most corporate customers don’t see that changing. If they want to buy an off-the-shelf utility-based model, it won’t give them the sort of security they are looking for. What we will offer is those kinds of services inside an industrialised HP service. For the high levels of security that is not just a whiteboard exercise; the applications have to be in List X (high security) datacenters, with proper physical separation and internal controls, so you have to be careful. There is a big opportunity around the classification of data: too much data in government is classified at too high a level. ”
So what is the HP model for UK public sector Cloud services?
“Very straightforward. We already have working system we offer corporate clients that is a utility structure you can dial up and dial down. When it comes to governments, we take a clone of that and put it together in a way that meets their security requirements. ”
It’s important to make some distinctions, adds Wilson:
“We have to make a distinction. The G-Cloud we think of as a collective term which encompasses unclassified data public services and we provide a public version of our Cloud services that government can use just like anyone else can use. If you look at the G-Cloud procurement out there at the moment, I am quite sure you will see the generic solutions provided by people like Google, Amazon and HP on a list alongside lots of slightly more hardened solutions that meet the core requirements of major Departments. Where you are talking about classified data were security is tighter and they have to be operated in the UK and have much higher availability that can ever be guaranteed by Google or Amazon. So we will offer a government version of the Enterprise Cloud Service that meets the requirements of those higher levels of security sat in List X facilities. ”
