ICT experts criticise lack of savings in Holyrood's digital strategy

Business Editor, Sunday Herald

Sunday 23 September 2012

The author of a landmark report into excess information and communication technology (ICT) spending in local government has criticised the Scottish Government's latest strategy to modernise Scotland's £1.4 billion-per-year public ICT infrastructure for failing to show any progress towards substantial savings.

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Critics say document shows no progress since 2011 review By Colin Donald

The new document, Scotland's Digital Future – Delivery Of Public Services, was unveiled last week by Finance Secretary John Swinney, one year after he endorsed the findings of the June 2011 McClelland Review, which identified savings of up to £230 million per year.

However, industry figures are surprised by the omission of any mention of progress towards the efficiencies identified by businessman-turned-IT czar John McClelland.Richard Marsh of 4-consulting, whose own March 2010 report revealed that public-sector spending on ICT had doubled since 1998, in contrast to a 12% rise in business spending over the same period, told the Sunday Herald: "We are more than three-quarters into the first year in which McClelland hoped Scotland would have begun to realise substantial savings."The original McClelland Review outlined a series of 'quick wins' and produced detailed assessments of costs across a range of services. The current report is lighter on detail and the execution of those recommendations." In his report, McClelland wrote: "If the recommendations from this review are implemented, savings in ICT investments can start in 2012-13 and grow progressively over five years to between £230m to £300m per annum with a cumulative saving over five years of from £870m to £1bn. This excludes any further savings from shared services in other business operations which are facilitated through this transformation in ICT."Originally billed as an "action plan" and scheduled for June, last week's "vision for Scotland" is instead a statement of governing principles, governance structures and new "timelines", punctuated with case studies of potential applications.But the document notably lacks any quantification of potential savings or detail of substantive moves towards the "shared services agenda" – pooling of data-processing resources – that was a central theme of the McClelland Review. The omission has led industry observers to speculate on resistance to a radical overhaul of the public-sector ICT landscape from vested interests in public-sector bodies and their existing private-sector IT providers. The report also makes clear that no significant work has yet been done on consolidating and renewing the approximately 120 public-sector data centres identified by McClelland as ripe for rationalisation. Instead it lays out a new timetable to "develop a national strategy to consolidate and re-use the world-class data centres available in the public and private sectors across Scotland", starting with the "establishment of a core group" which will "prepare a paper for consideration by the public sector ICT national board" by March 2013. Richard Baker MSP, Labour's infrastructure spokesman, said: "We were expecting to see material changes but instead we have yet another strategy, something which seems to be happening in a number of other areas of Scottish Government activity. This should be the point when they tell us what savings have been made, rather than what they hope to do, and I don't think most people will find that good enough."4-consulting's March 2010 report, System Recovery: The Role of ICT in Local Government, noted that while business has pared back ICT spending by replacing rather than supplementing processes and system, the public sector has accrued new systems as technology has advanced. It said: "This may explain why consultants have focused heavily on public-sector clients in recent years."The report identified fear of "loss of identity and in-house ICT empires" mitigating against the elimination of wasteful spending in public sector ICT, and suggested that reducing operating costs to the level of the Netherlands, Finland or Sweden would curtail Scotland's annual public sector ICT spend by up to £820m per year. A Scottish Government spokesperson said: "Progress in achieving the efficiencies and improvements in value for money as recommended in John McClelland's report will be set out for the Scottish Parliament's finance committee at the end of the financial year in April 2013."Collaboration is a key theme of Scotland's digital future and the strategy includes services for shared use such as the Scottish Wide Area Network, the authentication and development of the DirectScot prototype. We have looked at the issue of public-sector data storage as part of the strategy and further work is ongoing as part of a fundamental examination of data management." John McClelland was not available for comment.

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ICT experts criticise lack of savings in Holyrood's digital strategy

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