IT sector must not look to the Treasury for help
The party is over, the money gone, and it could be a long time before it comes back again. The well of government spending that has sustained so many IT vendors and suppliers over the past 15 years has finally dried up.
Just as individual government departments are left to fight over the few scraps of investment left to feed their IT growth, ravenous vendors are circling overhead ready to pick their bones clean of everything they can get.
That is perhaps an overly dismal picture, but talk to any civil servant or local government officer these days and the lament is the same: budget cuts, high-spending projects scrapped or put on hold, and successive waves of consolidation designed to trim operational costs, including job losses, are widely anticipated.
Prior to last year, public-sector IT enjoyed a decade of continuous and substantial investment in new hardware and software, with vendors supping from a trough overflowing with seemingly unlimited Treasury cash. Now Gordon Brown has promised to make £9bn-worth of efficiency savings per year by 2013/14, and with a huge hole blown in the Treasury cash reserves by propping up the banks, money for IT upgrades is likely to remain scarce for a long time.
A recent meeting of public-sector chief information officers, vendors and consultants in the House of Commons highlighted the extent of the problem, where even politically correct investment in green IT has slowed to a halt. Because it does not matter how much sense green IT makes and it does from both return on investment and a moral perspective it still takes a lot of money up front to implement new energy-efficient systems that use less power. And money is what most public-sector organisations do not have right now.
The salesmen in the room tried desperately to lighten the mood, reiterating that the focus of new hardware and software is to eliminate waste, while simultaneously improving productivity and services, and eventually cost savings.
Which may or may not be true it certainly sounds too good to be, as sales talk often does but it remains an argument that makes little or no headway against the buttress of a frozen budget.
Another approach, which appeared to hold more water, is shared services, whereby individual local authorities or central government departments are being encouraged to pool scarce IT resources to increase use and split costs. Sounds good in theory, but in practice this strategy has so far produced only limited results.
The trouble is that the machinery of government is often too big and too inflexible to support this type of close co-operation. Too many civil servants are too protective of their own small patch to foster effective harmony and collaboration on such a grand scale.
So while those assembled were keen to lend their support for the idea, and point out the many problems which prevent its inception, there was little in the way of agreeing practical steps to make it happen. As often happens within the civil service at least in my experience a lot of time was spent in a meeting talking about what should be done, before going away to mull things over, at which point another meeting might be called.
But in the absence of a motivated central organisational entity to take responsibility for pushing things forward, it is unlikely that anything like concerted action will occur any time soon.
As for the vendors in attendance CA, IBM, Cisco and Logicalis who nervously scanned the prospective customers gathered in the House of Commons meeting room like starving vultures looking for their next meal, their best hope may be that the private sector makes a solid recovery sooner rather than later.
By Martin Courtney