The Cabinet Office has just published a report on the state of the UK government’s IT and it makes for shocking reading.
The report ‘Organising for Digital Delivery’ found that the government spends half of its total IT budget each year patching up outdated systems.
This isn’t small change either. The total patching budget ran to a total £2.3bn last year, half of the government’s annual IT budget.
The report warns that without change, this maintenance spend could increase to between £13bn and £22bn over the next five years.
The most worrying line in the report is that some of the government’s IT systems fail to meet “even the minimum of cybersecurity standards”.
The report makes eight recommendations including building mechanisms that place citizen needs “at the centre of decision-making and product design”, making individual departments more accountable and hiring a government chief digital officer and head of function to work across departments.
A spokesperson from the Cabinet Office seems to have taken the recommendations on board. Speaking to the BBC, he said: “We are reducing our reliance on legacy IT, moving away from costly, insecure and unreliable technology and laying the foundations for future digital transformation.”
Read the full report here
