There has been much talk and many rumours throughout the Scottish IT community in recent months of shared services and new national governance arrangement for the provision of ICT services to Scotland’s public bodies. This opinion-piece is my personal opinion on what the approach might mean and reflects my own personal views; and I should point out that it  is not necessarily representative of the position of my employers.

Looked at from the outside, the provision of ICT within the public sector might appear to the casual observer to be an unnecessarily complex and multifarious, almost haphazard collection of systems:  rife with duplication and wasteful practice across too-many similar but independent organisations and infrastructures.

From within one of these organisations however the picture is different. From the perspective of an ICT manager in a council for example, the solutions that have been devised to enable the council to progress its business are appropriate and best-value to the organisation and have been developed in spite of resource and other external pressures.

The current situation as characterised by the external view is generally a result not of unsafe investments in ICT causing a disparity, but of ICT investments being driven by the structures of the public sector. Each organisation may or may not be getting best value from their ICT, but it is not possible to arrive at an across-the-sector, broad conclusion as to the efficacy of ICT provisions. Each organisation has had its own initial parameters and local priorities. The ICT solutions have addressed – and continue to address – these local needs.

When looked at from outside – and questionably viewing the public sector as a single entity – it is tempting to see the potential for congruence going unrealised as resulting from an almost deliberate even self-protectionist desire to fragment. To do so however is to ignore the historical perspective and the political reality. ICT support departments have responded to the demands of the business / service departments. Indeed, where cooperation has been attempted it has often been ICT managers that have initiated and sustained the drive, a case in point being the Modernising Government programme.

Where these programmes do not deliver it is very rarely as a result of ICT failure, nor that of the management of business / front line service departments. Instead it is due to the inability to converge business processes, priorities and practices into a common specification of requirements.  This is generally possible under a single democratically elected imperative, but is not easy in cases where several organisations come together.

The result is Programme, not Project management. Programme Management is in perpetual danger of being used as a way to deflect away responsibility for delivery, while maintaining the illusion of progress. The local solutions to local problems end up waiting interminably for the centre to progress and the centre is frustrated by the inability of local partners to advance their delegated responsibilities to the programme.

The danger in establishing a national governance function for ICT is that this becomes a layer of stifling bureaucracy, squeezing out innovation and hindering local service delivery.

So – how to proceed?

First of all, realise that ICT is not the place to start. ICT is always one important element of a project, not the driver. It is an enabler for a business need. Start therefore, with the business need: redesign the structures of organisations and then analyse what ICT provision will suit this new structure.

There is a sense in emulating for example the Northern Irish model, that sets ICT standards and supports interoperability and cost savings where practical. Within the current set-up throughout Scotland however we would have to dismantle a lot of good work and useful infrastructure to achieve the theoretical blank slate that is required to get there.

Although there is a tempting long-term saving opportunity, in the short to medium period over the next 5 or 10 years, to treat ICT in isolation without  a stand-back business analysis will be costly and potentially disastrous at a time when we should be saving money.

The problem of course is that doing it right takes a long time – a 10 year plan – and does not provide the immediate short-term savings that this time of austerity demands. In fact it will cost more in the short term as additional resources and experienced staff are required in the design and implementation phases.There is also the ‘elephant in the data centre’: that is, restructuring of goverment and public bodies – a political decision which would determine the course ahead more than any intermediate planning that might be undertaken. This would solve the problems surrounding local democratic accountability and provide the desire and funding to proceed.

My conclusion is that the ICT functions of public sector organisations are not self-contained units that can be considered as candidates for immediate sharing of services or for the introduction of a new governance arrangement. This is a project that should be carefully planned to ensure that Scotland has the best possible (and best-value) ICT provision into the future. Using the current financial crisis as a convenient excuse for a broad-sweep rationalisation with the dubious promise of savings would be selling snake-oil.

There is the suspicion, too, that such a move would be politically motivated, driven by the desire to privatise for profit rather than to improve service or best value.

While the principles of convergence and simplification make sense and we should plan in a more joined up fashion to achieve a better future picture, getting there is a complex and costly manouevre and is dependant on non-ICT drivers.