Plans to consolidate Scotland's sprawling and outdated digital infrastructure are in doubt, with the Scottish Government unable to explain why it had failed to produce its promised action plan, writes Colin Donald.
Due in March, the "national plan" was a key part of the reforms urged by businessman John McClelland and intended to kickstart his recommendation "to consolidate and re-use the world-class data centres available in the public and private sectors across Scotland".
The McClelland Review claimed the consolidation of 120 data centres into about 10 could help deliver savings of £300 million per year.
Industry figures now fear that the plan may have been shelved indefinitely, as a spokeswoman for Infrastructure Minister Nicola Sturgeon refused to confirm whether the data centre plan would be part of an ICT (information and communications technology) update due in "the autumn".
The Scottish Government's repeated failure to meet its own deadlines for reducing Scotland's £1.6 billion annual ICT spend is a long-standing source of frustration to industry figures, reportedly including Mr McClelland himself.
In spring 2012, perceived inertia over the "shared services" agenda was said to be damaging Scotland's drive to attract the burgeoning international data-processing industry, generating unnecessary costs in a time of austerity and producing excess CO2 emissions.
Noting that plans were "running somewhat behind the original timetable", Polly Purvis, head of the industry group, ScotlandIS, last week urged ministers to "keep moving forward apace in order to exploit the opportunities for cost savings the McClelland Review identified".
The McClelland reforms, first suggested in June 2011 by the former IBM executive, were designed to promote savings through streamlining and sharing ICT haphazardly acquired over decades by all branches of the public sector.
Although the agenda was formally adopted by the Scottish Government in its response to the review in September 2011, spokesmen last week were unable to identify progress beyond the Scottish Wide Area Network, a widely praised network for public services, which accounts for only about 20% of public Scotland's ICT estate.
Last September, in Scotland's Digital Future: Delivery of Public Services, the Scottish Government pledged to "establish fully costed options for rationalising and consolidating the Scottish public-sector data centre landscape" by March this year, and to have "Prepare[d] a paper ... outlining the recommended approach to deliver efficiency savings, effectiveness improvements and environmental benefits". In reality, none of these goals have been achieved.
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