The Eurovision Cloud Contest - douze points for which nation? (Part 1)
- Summary:
- The European Commission wants to standardise cloud computing policies across the various nation states. But looking at the progress of the UK, the Netherlands and Germany exposes massive societal and political differences of attitude to the cloud. In the first part of a two part report, the UK’s position is laid out.
Once a year in Europe there’s a major television event that is designed to celebrate the harmony of the European ideal, but which in reality exposes the glaring cultural differences between the nation states. Just as the Eurovision Song Contest demonstrates that what works for Moldavia doesn’t go down so well in Belgium, so too a crude parallel might be drawn with Europe’s cloud computing ambitions.
Between us Phil Wainewright and I have fairly exhaustively covered the ongoing efforts by the European Commission to create and impose a common ‘cloud for Europe’ set of strategies and initiatives in place of existing national programs which were notoriously dismissed by former Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes as not fit for purpose, that purpose being a single European, Brussels-centric cloud vision.
But what’s it really like on the front line of the nation states’ cloud efforts? This week the Public Sector Cloud World Forum presented an interesting chance to compare and contrast three countries achievements at national level - the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.
What emerges is a picture of one country taking a clear lead, another with some complementary approaches and a third that frankly hasn’t got its act in shape.
Rule Britannia?
Let’s kick off with the UK, where the national G-Cloud program is approaching its third anniversary. The country has a Cloud First mandate in place for central government procurement, a policy that is recommended but not enforced at local govenrment level.
Spend on G-Cloud has gone up from £8 million a month to around £25 million a month and as of the end of October, total sales were £346 million. That said, adoption hasn’t been as fast as might be hoped, most notably in the local government market which accounts for the smallest proportion of sales on £20.8 million to date.
There are reasons for the relatively slow adoption rates to date, argues Tony Singleton, Director G-Cloud and Digital Commercial, Government Digital Service:
User research we’ve done says it is a massive change program and change is scary on a number of levels. There’s a commercial team saying ‘I need to avoid legal challenge. There’s all these complex European procurement rules. “What do I do? How can I be sure of what I am doing?” The OJEU (Official Journal of the European Union) procurement process is a nightmare. You have to have 6, 9, 12 months to procure something, So what we have done in the UK with G-Cloud, partnered with the Digital Services Framework, we’ve done all the OEJU process on it so there is compliance.
Then there’s the other red herring of this thing called security. Every new service that comes through in the UK will have an IT health check done on it anyway so you can be sure that it is safe and fit for purpose.
It's also in the interests of the sell side to make sure their offerings pass muster:
All of the large cloud providers, that’s their business model. If I’m running a public sector service and I decide to put everyone’s personal data up on Google Docs and it gets hacked, I’m going to get sacked. In the same way, if Amazon delivers an insecure service, one major breach and they’re out of business. They do have a hell of a lot to lose in the same way that I do.
There’s also the problem of lack of internal skills to be addressed:
Why isn’t everyone leaping on the bandwagon and jumping up and down and saying ‘I want that’? The capability isn’t necessarily there in the public sector. We know that and we’re working with partners to try to bring that in. Continued outsourcing over the years means our capability has been completely stripped.
Communication challenge
Singleton has gone on record in the past admitting that there’s a lot of work to be done to raise the profile of G-Cloud and its benefits across the public sector landscape as a whole:
I can talk to buyers all day around the benefits of why we should do cloud - it’s cheaper, it’s faster, it’s simpler.
G-Cloud is fast. Wiltshire County Council went 6 months from wanting a new case management system to training the first people on using that new system. There is no way in the old way that you could have got anything in place that quickly.
And it is cheaper. On the comparisons that we’ve done there are potential efficiency savings of an average of 50%. We do have hard case studies where in some cases those savings have been up in the 90% region.
G-Cloud is also about bringing about a cultural change in attitude to project responsiblity and ownership. Old style multi-year IT procurment and deployment has resulted in lack of ownership or culpability when things don’t work out. Singleton explains:
If it’s a 10 year project that’s OK because by the time it all goes wrong and goes to the Public Accounts Committee, you’ve gone and changed jobs so that’s fine. If I’m going down a modular cloud approach and something starts to go wrong, I can stop straight away. I don’t have to keep going and going and going because I’m locked in to this big contract. I don’t have to follow a change control process. So you’ve spend £10,000, not £100,000. It is a big change program, it is scary, it is a brand new way of doing things for a lot of people.
For his own part, Singleton does admit to being uncomfortable with one aspect of the UK policy:
With Cloud First I inherited a target of 50% of all new government IT spend is to go through G-Cloud. Well, 50% of what? 50% of laptops? That’s not cloud services. So one of the things we’re working on now is to work out the wallet size. What’s the value of work across departments and wallet spending on work that could or should go through the cloud, then using the large IT contracts that are coming to an end to do that.
In the second part of this feature, the Netherlands and Germany come under scrutiny.
TONY SINGLETON IS SPEAKING AT