‘The UK Government is way behind on Cloud services and needs to get more aggressive…’ – so said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at its London Cloudforce event on September 14th. Reported by TechMarketView, they highlight their own previous reports on the UK Government’s limited progress.

Unfortunately, I tend to agree with them both. I personally supported the UK government cloud strategy (then termed “G-Cloud”) in 2009 but saw nothing beneficial come out of it. In my opinion, there were a number of key issues:

  • Politics.  There were large number of stakeholders involved in the strategy including private sector suppliers and large central government departments – each with their own agenda
  • FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt – I saw a lot of very senior department heads attend the UK Cabinet Office’s G-Cloud events – from all parts of government – but also heard a lot of admissions that whilst they believed it was important, they had little idea of what it meant for them.
  • The Procurement Barrier – EU procurement legislation prevented the use of SaaS-type cloud based vendors except through formal procurements, which – let’s face it – were and are mostly still being run as traditional on-premise procurements (in the UK).
  • Confusion – Like many “zeitgeist” words, “cloud” means many different things to different people.  For UK government, this covers both infrastructure services and software for government, including online government software with the result that this confuses people.

So G-Cloud quietly died a death in early 2011 and so we now await the new “re-energized” cloud computing strategy due to be published later this year (see ITPRO’s ‘Government cloud programme is a ‘re-energised’ G-Cloud’).

I wonder what will be different this time. The change in color from red (Labour) to blue (Conservative) – G-Cloud was an initiative of the previous Labour government – probably won’t make much of a difference, even though I know Cameron is very supportive of anything that can save money. Time will tell and of course KANA will continue to be supportive in whatever way we can. Part of this will be by continuing to expand on our existing cloud-based services (both infrastructure and software) that many of our customers, both in the commercial and public sector, are already enjoying the benefits of.

Learn more about how KANA and Lagan cloud based products are helping commercial and government organizations across the world.

By the way, the title of this blog is inspired by a recent movie title. If you don’t recognize it, you must be over 30. I pretend not to be.

 

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