Follow my lead

Michael Cross

NHS managers struggling to keep up with their regime of Department of Health paperwork won’t welcome the idea, but it’s well worth getting to grips with the output of other Whitehall departments as well – the Cabinet Office and the Treasury. Gigantic as the NHS national programme for IT is, it is only a component of a gargantuan government-wide programme.

The Cabinet Office and the Treasury are the originators of NPfIT’s policy priorities – notably patient choice. Influence flows the other way, too: the decision to postpone the identity card programme was taken when it became apparent that NPfIT had failed in its promise to shift public perceptions about large-scale government IT projects.

The term “government-wide programme” may be misleading. It implies some kind of Napoleonic grand projet masterminded by a central team of crisp young technocrats. In the British government, the reality is more like the migration of a flock of starlings – hundreds of independent entities milling around in circles before striking out under their own wing power, more or less in the same direction.

Rounding up

Nonetheless, someone has chosen the overall direction, and is now fluttering round the flock trying to harry stragglers into more efficient formations. Step forward Ian Watmore, head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and formerly the government’s first chief information officer.

Watmore, still in his mid-forties, has much in common with Richard Granger. They both began their careers at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture); for a time, Watmore was Granger’s corporate mentor, though they are not now particularly close buddies. Unlike Granger, Watmore stayed on at Accenture, to become UK managing director. He was in this post when the firm negotiated its LSP contracts.

In summer 2004, Watmore joined the government, formally as head of the e-government unit, a Cabinet Office agency which replaced the old office of the e-envoy. Significantly, he preferred to use his unofficial title of chief information officer, and in this capacity drafted Britain’s first government-wide IT strategy.

The result, Transformational Government enabled by technology, was published last November. It sets out three big ideas

• Public services must be designed around the user, not the provider
• Public bodies must learn to share services (and data about individuals)
• Government should get better at running IT.

This spring, the Cabinet Office published an implementation plan setting deadlines for steps towards these goals. In health, the steps of interest include a statement of government’s position on data sharing, a November deadline to produce a “sector plan” on shared services across the NHS and “portfolio management” of IT projects. The idea of the last is to pace the government’s need for new systems with the industry’s ability to deliver them – not before time, perhaps. Four “portfolios” will be created:

• Big “mission critical” projects, including presumably the NPfIT.
• Work on shared services in finance and human resources. “The clear intention is that the number of operational centres for shared services should be measured in tens rather than hundreds.”
• Identification and data sharing programmes.
• Replacement of legacy VME systems; conspicuously, some wheezy mainframe PASs.

Strategic vision

The implication is that IT projects not fitting these portfolios will get low priority. Individual suppliers will also go under the microscope. Last week’s meeting of the government CIO council (another Watmore creation) was the first to discuss a six-monthly forward look at the demand and supply of IT services to government. By November, the 13 “most strategically important IT suppliers” will have been subjected to individual performance reviews.

Following Watmore’s move to the delivery unit (physically based in the Treasury, interestingly), we now have a new government CIO. John Suffolk was former chief of Criminal Justice IT, a programme analogous to NPfIT and facing some similar challenges. He is another product of the private sector – a career in financial services in which, he says, he went through a couple of dozen mergers and acquisitions.

There’s plenty of room for cynicism about the new strategic approach. It remains to be seen what happens when portfolio management clashes with a new high level government policy – the next child support agency or criminal records bureau. The shared services agenda is also difficult to square with government’s professed enthusiasm for “new localism”. It seems certain, however, that the days when the NHS could design and run its own systems in splendid isolation from the rest of the public sector are gone.

Link

Chief Information Officer Council