The UK government rolled out a new ICT strategy in March. At this week’s DatacenterDynamics conference in London Docklands, Mike Truran, customer service delivery director for the government’s Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) explained the plans basic tenets.

The plan is to fundamentally change the way IT services are being delivered to government agencies, the way the agencies buy these services and the way service providers compete for the government’s business, Truran said.

Goals of the plan include reduction of waste and project failure, creating a common shared IT infrastructure and using IT to enable change. A major part of the transition is maximizing the use of Cloud-based services, taking advantage of Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and IT as a Service.

Another part of the plan is reducing the cost of IT infrastructure through data center consolidation.

The government is changing the way departments procure IT services from having them go through individual channels to creating an open and cost-transparent marketplace that will become the first point of call for any public sector ICT requirements.

Openness of the marketplace is crucial to the plan’s success, as it seeks to expand the pool of providers selling services to the government.

In the transition, the government is also trying to prevent vendor lock-in. To this end, agencies are going to favor services for which the providers can be changed quickly and easily and without a lengthy procurement and implementation cycle.

“We need to make sure that what we’re looking for is commercial open systems,” Truran said. “That makes it an open market for people to bid into.”

Truran’s DWP has its own department-specific service characteristics it is looking for. One of the requirements is for services to be based on resources shared among departments. This way, services can be consumed by multiple customers.

DWP, for example, currently uses an HP private cloud for some services. HP also provides private cloud services to other departments – a separate agreement for each department.

The government wants to change that. One of Truran’s current projects is working with HP to provide services to the government, as opposed to providing them to a specific department.

Image: Mike Truran, customer service delivery director for the government’s Department of Work and Pensions, speaks at DatacenterDynamics London 2011