Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Tories "get it" with IT Development

Am just reading the Tory Technology manifesto and, whilst they're high level policy announcements the two really really good things leap out at me.
We will create a level playing field for open source IT by implementing open standards across government IT systems. Open standards will also enable large contracts to be broken into small modular components, so reducing risk and enabling more small businesses to bid for government IT contracts.

To ensure that high tech small businesses are not locked out of the IT procurement process, a Conservative government will also introduce a presumption against government IT contracts worth over £100 million.
Excellent, no more Accidenture, Crapita etc but instead taking IT projects to a more granular modular level. And then there is this,

We will also create a small IT development team in government – a ‘government skunkworks’ – that can develop low cost IT applications in-house and advise on the procurement of large projects.

This is brilliantly good and something I've been saying should happen for bloody ages. Essentially a team of geeks that span Whitehall doing decent small scale development witht he hope of creating larger projects rather than a bunch of civil servants from different departments all being conned by different contractors.

Let's hope they can get Government IT being a little more Agile so we start to guarantee some sort of delivery.

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