So many opportunities, so little time ...
So the summer in the UK has ended, as any of you Ryder Cup enthusiasts will have noted, and before I pack up my pen to end the official working week, TGIF, I thought I must blog. I've spent a good proportion of my time this year talking about Cloud Computing in general and Government Cloud in particular. In fact, I started work with the G-Cloud Phase II team at this time last year. We produced our final reports in February and have been waiting since. Although a General Election and new Government has intervened. After 12 months we are now awaiting the results of new Government's planning to determine what happens next. What is certainly the case, is that we are all agreed - in the IT community at least - at what the opportunity is, what the challenges are and that there is no more money to be spent on doing anything. A recipe for an hiatus, I hear you say! Yes, well in ordinary times, perhaps that is so. But these are far from ordinary times. We heard yesterday that Ireland is on the brink of returning to its unenviable situation of being a poor country. The UK is not in the same boat, yet there is so much potential for us to change the way we do things, release the potential of exciting new ideas and perhaps the people to work on them. So why don't we grasp the nettle and move on? After all, it's not as if our current jobs are safe, is it? Why not reach for the stars and grasp the challenge and see what we can accomplish. After many years of ups and downs in the IT industry, I can honestly say that making do with less is preferable to not being there at all. In fact, a wonderful article in Harvard Business Review by Gary Hamel and the late CK Prahalad,
"Strategy as Stretch and Leverage" pointed out that having insufficient resources will often lead to making choices and requiring innovation to get the job done. Why not capitalise on the genuine lack of resources and plan to deliver services differently? Share similar services with other organisations, outsource a large chunk of routine information processing to a SaaS vendor? Better still stop doing something which really doesn't matter or could be done elsewhere instead? After all, if the reasons for not doing so are rules written within the organisation, why not challenge the organisations own ability to manage change and do it anyway! You'll probably end up leaving anyway, why not try something new and see if it works? After all, your job is probably on the block anyway! How else would you wish to spend your life? Have a good weekend - at least!
Labels: Change, G-Cloud
UK Government and the Green Challenge
Things are moving at pace in the Cabinet Office in the area of Efficiency and Reform Group improvements. The latest being an incitement to work together with contractors to reduce energy usage by 10%. See
here . This is a call to arms from Government to their network of service providers to help to accomplish the targets for improvement. This specific call is to adopt the new Energy Efficiency Code. This states that all departments should:
- work with facilities management contractors to prepare plans to cut carbon by ten per cent by May 2011;
- give serious consideration to private sector ideas to cut carbon emissions; and
- agree to explore agreements, possibly through changes to existing contracts, which benefit government departments and private companies in their pursuit of reducing carbon emissions.
In response, contractors are asked to share their expertise with public bodies and actively identify opportunities to reduce energy emissions.
Could this be the pattern of things to come? I think so. Helping to achieve targets will move the government forwards and perhaps is the best portend of the opportunity ahead for the G-Cloud programme. Now headed by Chris Chant and Andy Tait in John Suffolk's team at the Cabinet Office.
To help with the reduction in Carbon Emissions, we have a number of tools in our armoury in the IT Industry, perhaps here is the opportunity to begin to show what they can accomplish. After all, didn't someone say that Green IT is free? I.e. we should be able fund investments to reduce energy consumption through savings on our energy bill and operating costs?
And once we accomplish improved efficiency in our own shops, we can use our capabilities to support collaboration and remove the need for travel and commuting, and thus really gain traction in saving carbon emissions. The Carbon Neutral Data Centre, a possibility?
Certainly investments such as Virtualisation and selective Technology refresh can make a positive return. See our
KTN website and the Green IT group for more!
Labels: Carbon Emissions, Energy Efficiency, G-Cloud, Green IT
Digital Britain, Building Britain's Digital Future and G-Cloud
So yesterday's
announcement of a General Election to be held on May 6th in the UK was extremely well trailed and predicted by all. Even the Queen was able to 'copter back to Buck House in time to see the Prime Minister as he requested the dissolution of Parliament. Now we have just one month to survive hostilities until its done and we move on.
However in the run up to the election several things of interest to the digirati have surfaced. Firstly, the Government published its
Government ICT Strategy in January and announced plans for a Government Cloud. This is a longer term strategy to enable the government with the capabilities to bring services to the web for citizens, of whom an estimated 71% are now online. The key issues are accessibility and scalability and the Cloud computing model works well to support both objectives with suitably designed applications and infrastructures. I myself managed to obtain Road Tax and a new Driving Licence on line this month. The latter being made possible by linkages to the Immigration and Passport Service. We've also seen new services offered by Ordnance Survey which take advantage of the Cloud to scale to meet demand from up to 9M users simultaneously. So there is potential.
Secondly, and probably more political was the Building Britain's Digital Future
announcement on March 22nd from Number 10, the web residence of the erstwhile Prime Minister, of plans to revolutionise the delivery of all government services (ex-Health Service and Dustbins one presumes) via the Internet. This is the logical consequence of following the advice of the recent notable advisers to government Sir Tim Berners Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt from the University of Southampton. Both of whom have already exercised their enthusiasms for the Web through the
data.gov.uk initiative. Which, by the way, if it was extended more broadly as the norm throughout government could probably yield the sort of savings the political parties are looking for in avoided Freedom of Information requests. Has anyone asked the price of that as yet? This was a bold vision and exciting prospect for those of us who have laboured over the G-Cloud project vision without much political involvement. Well worth a read, and you might expect it to pitch up during the hustings!
Which leaves us with the 3rd, and perhaps key enabler for the stool of Digital Services to the Citizen. Last night in the mad panic that is the final act of a dissolving government, the
Digital Economy Bill was passing through into legislation. The problem is that the strong lobby of the Creative Industries (cf copyright owners) have included measures which allow for undemocratic, if not immoral, powers to be exercised by Internet Service Providers where illegal file sharing is deemed to be taking place, without obvious recourse to law or appeal. The key remedies include removing internet access from locations deemed to have transgressed - by the copyright owner, one presumes. The unintended consequence may be that the current proliferation of wireless hot spots across the nation may be inhibited by those service operators wary of being caught in the middle of disputes. An half considered plan with far reaching consequences would be a tragic conclusion for a Government so keen to bring the UK into the 21st Century and certainly a wasted opportunity to move forwards. What price 2MB to the doorstep and a £.50 a month levy on wireline access?
Labels: data.gov.uk, Digital Economy, Digital Government, G-Cloud
