No more mega IT contracts, UK Government tells suppliers

06 Dec 2010

Source: The Telegraph
Francis Maude, the UK’s Cabinet Office minister, told an audience of chief executives from 31 key government suppliers including BT, Hewlett Packard, IBM and CapGemini, that costly IT mistakes like the £12.7bn NHS national programme would not be repeated.
 
Instead future contracts would be cheaper, ‘smaller’ and ‘off the shelf’ rather than expensive, bespoke systems, he said.
"Government will no longer offer the easy margins of the past. We will open up the market to smaller suppliers and mutuals and we will expect you to partner with them as equals, not as sub-ordinates," Mr Maude said.
"The days of the mega IT contracts are over, we will need you to rethink the way you approach projects, making them smaller, off the shelf and open source where possible.

Mr Maude, who oversees £45bn of central government spending each year, revealed that some government purchases took 77 weeks from first publication to the award of a contract. He said on average public buyers took "twice as long" to agree deals as their private sector counterparts.

"This is just wasted time and money on both sides of the equation and it is something we urgently need to address," Mr Maude said.

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