Interview: BCS CEO David Clarke

The head of the IT industry's leading professional body gives his verdict on the coalition's ICT strategy and explains why he is generally optimistic about the future

David Clarke, chief executive of the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, arrived at the Computing offices on the first warm sunny day of the year, and we both remarked on the welcome change of season. The conversation that ensued, which focused on the government’s new ICT strategy and the state of the UK IT industry in general, followed a similar thread: after a long, dark period, things in the technology sector are beginning to look up.

When asked whether there was anything in the government’s ICT strategy that he would change, Clarke responded: “It’s quite amazing, but no, I don’t think there is.
It is certainly the most wide-ranging government IT report in recent history.”

Clarke believes the report addresses all the key problems the government has faced over the past decade or so.

“They have listened and appear to have learned from mistakes,” he said. “The report is quite revolutionary; this new government has been able to enact real change. It would have been very hard for the previous government to have done so. The coalition has also been forced to make real changes because of its financial situation.”

The first issue that the strategy attempts to tackle, and which has long been a thorn in the side of government, is the lengthy and costly IT procurement process.

“The government is looking at the whole process in a different way,” said Clarke. “At the moment it leans towards a few large systems integrators because there are very few organisations that can manage it. The process, which adheres closely to rules established by European courts, militates against small and medium-sized companies. The thing is though, no other European government sticks so closely to these rules – it simply isn’t necessary.”

Similarly, when Clarke sat on a Public Accounts Committee looking at governance and IT in the public sector, he said the main thing he took away from the debate was that to date the government had been looking to the supplier community to change the way they behaved with regard to big government IT contracts.

“But this is ridiculous,” he said. “If a supplier can get away with charging a fortune for their services they will, they are there to make money. The government needs to manage the change internally. And the government has become aware that it has huge buying power and needs to leverage that.”

But if the government is to end its reliance on large systems integrators and instead focus on more modest projects with the help of smaller service providers, it must build up its in-house project management expertise, Clarke said.

To this end, the government has adopted the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), a high-level IT skills standard developed by the BCS and partners 15 years ago. The framework describes the typical roles in IT and the skills needed to fulfil them.

But as Clarke pointed out, the success of this revolution in government IT provision will not be just about the strategy itself but rather the implementation.

“Twenty per cent of the work is setting out the strategy but 80 per cent of it is the implementation,” he said. “If the government does everything it says it is going to do, it will be a huge job. And the changes will take a while to be felt, particularly with regard to the procurement processes.”

A key overarching theme of the government’s strategy is the need to reduce complexity, encourage reuse of resources and increase efficiency, but details of how these aims will be achieved remain sketchy.

“There will be more detail to come in areas such as which standards the government will adopt, which applications will be put in the cloud and where it will use agile computing,” said Clarke. “These will be firmed up over the coming months and years.”

Outsourcing, or more specifically the indiscriminate use of outsourcing, has long been a bugbear of Clarke’s, who makes a strong case for limiting its use within the public sector.

“We outsource far more than other countries, partly because of traditional colonial links between the UK and India, but there is also the view that it saves money, and this might be true in the short term. But if you are not careful, you outsource skills that you really need, which removes the low to medium-skilled rung in the career ladder for IT professionals. Germany outsources far less than we do and look at that economy, it’s doing fine.

“I don’t believe that outsourcing is the right long-term strategy for the industry, or that it is the right strategy for the public sector,” he said.

Clarke was also pretty sanguine about the IT industry more generally, arguing that the IT professional’s situation has changed for the better compared with a year or so ago.

“The positioning of the IT profession as an enabler, to help and be part of a business, is now pretty clear and accepted. There are no longer IT projects within organisations, there are business change projects enabled by IT.

“We have all been banging on about this issue for years and now the message seems to have got through. It’s a good time for the industry.”

And the UK’s technology industry has real strengths compared with its international peers, said Clarke. “Look at the big global players – HP, Microsoft, IBM and Google – they have all put research and development hubs here. And they’ve done this not because we have a great financial environment but because we have really good people.

“We have a tradition of developing really good technical staff, with fantastic institutions such as Cambridge University, and several world-class technical sectors such as the computer games industry and Formula 1.

“We need more British companies to take advantage of these skill sets and develop them. Many of our people move to other countries. We need to change this.”

The recent Budget, with its focus on lowering corporation tax, increasing apprenticeships, nurturing start-ups and fostering entrepreneurship was
arguably a big step in this direction, and Clarke seems bullish.

“This is one battle we can win, if we develop the right climate for technologists to set up here,” he said.