UK Government Fails Its First Big Procurement Test

As regular readers of Computerworld UK know, the UK government has repeatedly said that it wishes to move on from the past patterns of procurement that have seen the UK spending far more on IT than comparable governments elsewhere. For years the UK has been the IT industry's dream: a rich but gormless customer that believes everything it is told by suppliers, and happy to pay through the nose for projects that consistently fail to deliver, assuming they are even completed. Indeed, the UK government has become proverbial in the IT world for its inefficiency and incompetence in this area.

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Government Open Standards: The Great Betrayal of 2012

Back in February of this year, I wrote about PPN 3/11, a Cabinet Office “Procurement Policy Note - Use of Open Standards when specifying ICT requirements” [.pdf], which contained the following excellent definition of open standards:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Does Computacenter Fear Openness?

One of the key recent shifts in government policy has been a move towards openness. But this is not from some deeply-held belief that “it's good to share”; it is simply a recognition of the fact that the public has a right to know how its money is being spent. It also flows from the fact that when people are aware that their decisions will be scrutinised, and that they may have to justify their assumptions and logic, they tend to think a little harder and more deeply about what action to take.

On Open Enterprise blog.

When in Romania...

Last year, one of the key themes of this blog was the battle over version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework, and its definition of open standards. As I noted in December, that battle was essentially lost, thanks to the following sentence:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Time to Adopt the Brazilian Model of Public Software?

A couple of weeks ago, the innocuously-named “Public Administration Committee” of the House of Commons published a rather more surprisingly-named report entitled “Government and IT- "A Recipe For Rip-Offs": Time For A New Approach”. That's pretty much all you need to know - it basically says most of the things many of us have been moaning about in the field of UK IT procurement for years, but with rather more authority.

On Open Enterprise blog.

No, Minister

It is - alas - not often that the relative merits of open and closed source get debated in the House of Commons, but yesterday was such a (frabjous) day. The hero of the piece, as so often in this context, was John Pugh, Lib Dem MP for Southport. The villain - well, I'll leave that for you to decide from the following comment, which as was made by Angela Eagle, The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, in reply to John's questions:

It is often suggested that open source solutions offer better value because they are cheaper to buy. In fact, the total cost of ownership is considered in procurement, and it is not always the case that the open source solutions are the cheapest. Although they are free of licence charges, because they can involve high levels of support and training costs, they sometimes do not provide the best value for money. External studies have not shown a consistent cost advantage to open source solutions over proprietary solutions.

Now, where have I heard this old TCO argument before? And what a coincidence that a UK minister should be using it, no? I wonder how she, er, happened upon it...?

What's (Open) Source for the Goose...

A report suggesting that the Chinese military has hacked into German government computers could have a negative impact on the prospects in Western markets of Chinese equipment vendors Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp. (Shenzhen: 000063 - message board; Hong Kong: 0763), believes an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort .

...

"The ability of Huawei and ZTE to participate in, let alone win, telecom infrastructure tenders in the Western hemisphere may have lessened considerably following last week's shock report," writes Lindberg in a research note issued Monday. "It could trigger a return to national security clearance when it comes to procurement of telecom networks," he adds.

OK, so this may be pure paranoia, not least because it's not clear that the alleged Chinese spyware has anything to do with the Chinese telecom equipment.

But there's a more general principle: if it ain't open, you don't know what's going on, so all this kind of stuff could be going on, unbeknownst to you. Of course, it also applies to Chinese procurement as well, which is one reason why I think open source is bound to win out there, as elsewhere.

After all, if you are a (paranoid) government flunky, do you really want to risk national security (and your post) on that black box? No, I thought not. (Via GigaOm.)