The Cabinet Office has admitted that, despite its increased focus on G-Cloud and SMBs for outsourced projects, it still has "some pretty shoddy tech" - also in spite of acquiring "great people" in comparison to how it worked in the past.
Discussing the future role of the CIO in business at today's CIO Forum, hosted by the Economist, executive director of the government digital service, Mike Bracken, said of the Cabinet Office:
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"We've got great people, but we've got some pretty shoddy tech.
"We've got some good tech in some places, but the amount we spend on it is enormous."
Bracken put a large part of the problem down to long-term outsourcing contracts.
"If you have an ongoing outsourcing contract over time, they make their money on change control. So when we discover the system needs to change the cost per transaction goes up over time," he said.
Bracken cited a 17-year outsourcing deal the government still has, saying that the contract was so rigid both on the vendor's side for the service given, and on the government as the recipient, he was advised that changing anything would require "a completely new tax" to accommodate the changes.
"A tax on windows, or on moustaches," said Bracken. "So sometimes we're finding the contracts aren't what the vendor wants to deliver, either. So we find ourselves locked in this knot that we and companies want to change."
Bracken also revealed that, historically, transaction costs through inflexible systems have run so high as to negate running them at all.
"Some of those run extremely high, so for example it would cost £723 per head to pay a farmer [a subsidy]. It would be cheaper to go and rent a taxi, put the cash in the taxi, drive the taxi to the farm, and keep a manual record. That was the way our outsourced contracts have worked.
"We now have a fantastic department who said 'this can't go on and we'll change it'," said Bracken, adding that in the previous 10 years people in the public sector "would just be sitting round a table saying 'my budget's bigger than yours'. I've been at those conversations."
Bracken also said how, in his opinion, the government has been so far behind the curve with IT that it "has been pretty irrelevant to its citizens".
"If you think about how the country now lives digitally - most people under 45 have digital lives now," said Bracken.
"And for those people government has been irrelevant for years. People use PayPal, Amazon, and other online services as key parts of their lives. Government has not been there."
Bracken said it is this fear of being sidelined that is driving the government's "digital by default" strategy.
"Digital by default means the services you provide are so good that people will want to use the digital route, not a call centre or go into the office. And that's the fundamental thing we're driving," he said.
