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G-Cloud - Vision or Nightmare?

Governments are not good at procuring IT systems for a variety of well-documented reasons, one of which is a tragic failure to engage end-users who understand the underlying process in the design; another is to attempt heroic scale and complexity, rather than incrementally evolve functionality and deployment (anyone remember Tom Gilb?). Finally once the project is "off the desk" few Senior Civil Servants pay attention to smoke-screened reporting of problems until it is too late to correct the course.

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The UK government's IT gurus have developed a seductive strategy to save money on future IT services by using a number of cloud principles. It is seductive because:

it keeps the geeks happy by allowing them to play with the latest technology (and central government alone employs more IT geeks than FaceBook)
it keeps Francis Maude and others in the Cabinet Office happy as it promises to save money and brings spending into smaller chunks
it keeps government procurement happy because it avoids confrontation with suppliers claiming additional fees because the specification changed every day
it keeps SMEs happy because it promises to include many more of them than before

As ever with government policies there are risks of unintended negative consequences:

as pressure builds to accept "good enough" recycled solutions, products that were barely acceptable initially are deployed more widely reducing end-user productivity
as pressure builds to seek out the cheaper options, "almost good enough" products will emerge, further reducing end-user productivity
as these pressures build, the citizen's experience of interacting with government will diminish further, favouring the time-rich if they persist
communications coverage weaknesses and costs will prevent many cloud-based solutions being applied to mobile workers
government IT geeks who thought they would be engaged in open source in the cloud will find their productivity reduced as they patch around their end-user issues
suppliers, especially the new entrants will soon realise that, just like other AppStores, presence on the deck is no guarantee of business and support pressures will be high
and these new Apps are likely to become targets of cyber-crime

Governments, however pressed, should never be early-adopters, especially at-scale. Many systems will still need to be procured "in the old way"

Procurers, Technical Buyers and Decision Makers must understand that their obligations to specify and procure systems that are fit for purpose will be harder to meet in this new environment

Mobility solutions, even generic messaging and work-flow applications, must be field-proven in the private sector before adoption in the public sector.

And a communications blackout, however unlikely, is a scenario to be taken into account when lives and citizen well-being are at risk.

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