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Current Position

10.  Modern government - both in policy making and in service delivery - relies on accurate and timely information about citizens, businesses, animals and assets. Information sharing, management of identity and of geographical information, and information assurance are therefore crucial.

11.  Across the whole public sector, government spends about £14 billion a year on new and existing information technology and related services, directly employs about 50,000 professionals in this field, and is one of the largest customers of the technology industry. The scale and complexity of government business means its deployment of technology is often pushing the boundaries of what has been achieved in public or private sectors globally.

12.  Behind the scenes virtually every public service depends upon large scale processes and technology, particularly the large and complex transactional systems that support individual front-line public services. Most public services would simply not function at all without their reliable operation.

13.  Yet many of these systems are also old and custom-built, use obsolete technologies, are relatively costly to maintain by modern standards, and hence stretch the capability of the whole technology industry when it comes to amending or replacing them.

14.  Moreover they increasingly fail to meet the needs of modern government and the rising expectations of customers:

• Many systems and processes are still paper-based and staff-intensive. The underlying assumption is that customers will fill in forms and that staff will process them by routine rather than by risk-managed exception. Telephone access, customer access over the web and other improvements have sometimes been grafted onto this base. This locks in high costs and difficulty in meeting changing customer or policy requirements. Choice is costly and slow to implement.
• Many systems are structured around the "product" or the underlying legislation rather than the customer (sometimes because, at the time, each system was big or difficult enough to do by itself). Often the customer experience is not joined up, especially when it crosses organisational boundaries.
• Many systems were designed as islands, with their own data, infrastructure and security and identity procedures. This means that it is difficult to work with other parts of government or the voluntary and community sector to leverage each other's capabilities and delivery channels. It also leads to customer frustration, duplication of effort (for instance on customer change of address) and failure to make timely interventions, as the Bichard Inquiry showed. Choice requires services to be able to talk to each other.

15.  In addition, until recently, most technology investment has been on transactional or back office functions and not on systems to support front line staff - doctors and nurses, teachers, police, social workers and many others. The availability of effective information technology to support those at the front line has been poor, as the Wanless and Woolf reports observed, where too often the systems have failed to provide the right information at the right time to the right person.

16.  The corporate services and infrastructure which government uses behind the scenes have been very much Cinderella areas - despite costing around £7 billion a year. The result is that the corporate services such as Human Resources and Finance are significantly behind the private sector in both effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover the Heads of Profession are demanding transformed corporate services to help them improve financial management, personnel management, policy making and operational delivery in core businesses.

17.  The number, scale and sheer difficulty of public sector projects means that public and private sector capacity to deliver this portfolio is constantly stretched. The capacity and capability of (particularly central) government organisations and their suppliers to deliver technology-enabled business change has been subject to severe criticism by Parliament and the press over the last decade. Public confidence in government's ability to deliver technology projects reached a low point by the late 1990s.

18.  Since then the Government has taken a consistent approach to improving performance in such projects. In the last five years progress has been made towards addressing some of these issues:

• Funding: In the last two spending reviews, substantial investment in technology has been made. Those programmes are starting to deliver real change.
• Customer centred delivery: Directgov and Business Link have started to introduce a different way of looking at online services, with the focus on customers rather than the service provider. Innovative local authorities have implemented customer relationship management systems, integrated contact centres and one stop shops to provide a similar focus on customers.
• Use of the internet: Responding to the Prime Minister's challenge, over 96% of government services will be "e-enabled" by the end of 2005. Over half of households have the internet at home, and broadband is available to almost all homes and businesses. There are also 6000 UK Online centres in place, providing internet access and free assistance to those who do not wish to go online at home.
• Leadership: Most major government departments have created Chief Information Officer (CIO) posts at or near their board level, and have recruited experienced IT professionals through open competition to fill them.
• Reliable project delivery: After the McCartney and Gershon reviews into procurement and project delivery in 2000, the Office of Government Commerce has led programmes to improve project delivery and supplier performance. These have included the Gateway Review process and the enhancement of professionalism in Procurement, and Programme & Project Management. The Office of Government Commerce and Intellect, the IT trade association, have introduced an IT Supplier Code of Best Practice, a Concept Viability process that allows industry to input to nascent projects, and clearer leadership of supplier teams on government projects.

19.  Nevertheless existing challenges remain. The UK is not yet seen in the global vanguard of those governments who achieve excellence through electronic service delivery. In addition, these challenges are joined by new ones:

• There are new information assurance risks: terrorists, organised criminals and hackers threaten information and services, and theft of identity and of personal data is of increasing concern to individuals and businesses.
• Technologies have emerged into widespread use - for instance the mobile phone and other mobile technologies - which government services have yet properly to exploit.
• Sophisticated, holistic policy solutions, such as those set out in the government's election manifesto, rely upon effective and pervasive technology systems across government and beyond - for instance to support offender management through offender profiling and managed rehabilitation plans and to deliver patient choice in the health service.
• Public use of the internet and telephone continues to rise. As people experience excellent services in parts of the private and public sector, so their expectations of public services rise across the board.

20.  So the challenge ahead is not just to "do IT better" in the context of the past models for delivery of public services. It is also about "doing IT differently" to support the next phase of public service reform - building services which are more joined-up, more personalised, more efficient and more effective in terms of policy outcome. This requires difficult, long-term, strategic change in the services of government, how they use technology, and how technology and skills are provided to support them.