IT's Green Paper: The Muse At 10

Inspired by the internet, the government has set its own bit of poetry in motion with the launch of an IT green paper that could mean business for dealers. Dave Evans reports

Peers given to the muse have been around at least since Byron?s day, but when Viscount Chelmsford had a stab at poetry recently, romantic symbolism was the last thing on his mind. ?Government, dot, direct or not, will its service improve my lot?? he demanded, before answering his own question like a participant in some bizarre Socratic antiphon: ?Government, dash, leaders brash, will re-engineer and save some cash.?

The occasion for this bit of morse-ridden doggerel was the launch of a green paper at a conference in London. Its purpose was to outline how deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine intended to revolutionise Whitehall information services, using IT to create ? among other things ? an internet shopping mall in which the public would be online customers.

Viscount Chelsmford, as president of the Electronic Commerce Association and head of the Visions of Electronic Government quango, was official harbinger. And for those in the audience who hadn?t latched on, his dot and dash references were merely the punctuation in the government?s new open Web site. As for the saving of cash ? well, that was the scheme?s raison d?etre.

In short, beneath the objective of keeping the public better informed of what it is up to, what the government really sought, and is still seeking, is to minimise Whitehall?s use of paper ? an activity that must account for a fair chunk of any rain forest.

If the government can simultaneously reduce general admin, so much the better. All that?s necessary is for Joe Public to be trained in the use of the internet, touchscreen kiosks and Web TVs when they come about, and ? hey presto ? you have Surf City Stateside.

The green paper is, of course, merely a discussion document. But if its proposals are rolled out as planned over the next five to 10 years, it could represent one of the biggest collective state spends on IT ever. Even Labour is said to be broadly committed to the idea, so the demise of a Tory government ? or otherwise ? should not affect its implementation.

Not surprisingly, the London launch conference was sponsored by those old stalwarts of public sector IT supply IBM and ICL, doubtless licking their lips in anticipation of what contracts are up for grabs. But even though ? and again hardly surprisingly ? few other IT suppliers were invited to the gathering, it does not mean that others will be unable to grab a piece of the action once tenders go out.

So what is on offer? In a nutshell, the green paper paints a vision of a society that interacts directly with the government?s 20-odd departments and myriad agencies, using a variety of means from internet-hooked PCs through to the new generation of Web TVs or kiosk terminals sited at public venues such as libraries, citizen advice bureaux or even banks.

Ultimately it?s envisaged that Pin-encoded smart cards will play a key part in the technology, primarily to safeguard citizen confidentiality, but also to provide government computers with a common means to identify who is tapping into records.

At the government end, meanwhile, the aim is to build an online one-stop shop for all departmental services, which in turn would necessitate the electronic integration of computers across a backbone network. Much the same would apply to the business sector, allowing more firms to file tax returns via EDI networks to the Inland Revenue, for instance.

Also envisaged is a new second network between the disparate bits of Whitehall, but this time for pooling confidential information between departments, as opposed to providing a public access gateway. The plan is that this too will be installed and run by the private sector, perhaps across some of the existing Lans and Wans operated by banks and building societies for secure transactions.

For some observers, much of this must seem like just another puff from the usual political dream factory. Nevertheless, there is all-party support for the idea, if only because of the savings such an initiative might generate. For the channel, though, more significant is the fact that the vast bulk of the work ? should it come about ? will be contracted out to the private sector. The catch is that the government hopes to do it under the private finance initiative, in which it stumps up money only once the system is complete and running.

Either way, a whole raft of contracts ? from installing networks and Web servers through to building electronic kiosks and integrating and protecting Whitehall systems ? could soon be up for grabs. And providing the nature of the work is not likely to compromise state security, there is no reason why invites to tender should not be placed in the European Journal, the bible for anyone pitching for public sector work in the EU.

None the less, Graham Jordan, author of the green paper and director of CITU, the government?s IT advisory body, readily admits that implementing the strategy will involve ?very large capital investment?. But, he insists, ?the government is determined to protect the taxpayer from technical and programme risks by placing responsibility for them in the private sector.

?Contractors, selected by competitive tendering, will be expected to provide the necessary capital investment, in return for payment only when services of an acceptable standard are delivered,? he says.

Preliminary soundings from the IT industry, Jordan suggests, indicate a readiness to accept the challenge. If all goes to plan, individual departments and agencies would enter into contracts with the private sector. The former would be individually answerable to the Cabinet on how the respective projects fared and their costs.

He adds: ?Money to pay the contractors would come partly from the savings in the cost of government administration; the balance borne by the taxpayer.? Nor, posits Jordan, would he expect departments or agencies to use the same contractor for the duration of a large project.

?Most probably, implementation of the strategy would begin with the delivery of simpler services, such as information provision, before going on to secure transactions,? he says.

So far so good. But over at the Computer Software & Services Association, concern has already been aired about how the private finance initiative favours big players and alienates ? if not scares the living day lights out of ? smaller firms. After all, what average-sized network specialist could afford to risk perhaps millions of its own money without certainty of payment?

Projects can go wrong for countless reasons, not least of which might be the hostility of an existing computer workforce whose section may be downsized once a more efficient IT system is up and running. Even so, such is the ambitious vision of the green paper that even private sector computers will be harnessed to the state machinery, creating even more integration opportunities for the channel.

One suggestion is to create a network of data donors ? for example, integrating the IT systems of car insurance companies and MoT test centres with those of the vehicle excise duty division, so documents can be authenticated electronically whenever a car owner applies for a new tax disk. Similarly, forging links between welfare sector computers and those of banks might help corroborate a claimant?s need for benefit ? a political hot potato if ever there was one.

Jordan says: ?Clearly such institutions cannot send information about their customers to government on a regular basis. But an arrangement might be put in place whereby customers could authorise government, using their smart cards, to request specific data from financial institutions.?

Vars themselves have mixed feelings about just how much of this contractual windfall will blow their way. At networking specialist Wick Hill, group MD Ian Kilpatrick believes that while the ministers may, like so many others, believe the internet could herald a brave new world of information accessibility, more crucial to the government?s case is confidentiality.

He argues that it means using tested, secure networking protocols such as X.400 so that if data has been tampered with en route to a member of the public an alert is flashed.

Wick Hill itself has just built an X.400 system for the Inland Revenue?s new self-assessment project, allowing firms of accountants to submit clients? tax returns electronically. Its networking software provides the glue between any standard accountancy package and the Revenue?s own computer systems ? a concept that could be applied to countless other areas if the government?s quest to open up its computer databases comes to fruition.

?If X.400 is chosen by a number of other departments and agencies then there are huge opportunities for resellers,? predicts Kilpatrick. But this, he suggests, is because there has been an explosion of X.400 public access services in the past 18 months anyway, leading to a plethora of new products from remote user software to PC mail boxes.

Wearing its project integrator hat, Wick Hill is already in separate discussions with resellers on how to seize advantage of this growing market. If the government went down the same route in its green paper, then Vars could harvest a bumper crop.

One problem, though, is how Vars get wind that government business is up for grabs in the first place. The European Journal doesn?t bother to list contracts of less than #140,000, yet for smaller channel members such contracts are bread and butter.

One of the pilot projects under the green paper, known as Direct Access Government, went to Oxford-based Micro Transfer and involved using Lotus Domino technology so that forms from government departments such as Customs & Excise could be filed ? and returned ? by businesses using the Web. Yet under civil service etiquette, the project leader can?t even be named ? let alone contacted ? making life just that bit more difficult for Vars who want to get a foot in the Whitehall door.

As the CITU project leader himself candidly admits: ?If the investments outlined in the green paper are to benefit smaller computer suppliers, then there will have to be a serious culture change at our end.?

Meanwhile, Kilpatrick believes that, short of acting as a subcontractor to one of the big integrators at the hub of government work, the opportunities for the channel are more likely to be found on a local level ? perhaps by helping a local council to get its Web site up and running. ?The trick is to understand the grand scale of these things, and then get your own handle,? he says.

Failing that, try filing a bit of morse to Viscount Chelmsford: ?Dealer, dot, direct or not. Any chance of you nobs improving our lot??