Speaking last week at a CSW conference on ICT across the public sector, McCluggage – who is soon to leave the civil service for a job with IT firm EMC – gave a round-up of progress against the government’s ICT strategy, published in March.
“The Government App Store is one area in which I’m fairly depressed we haven’t made as much progress as we could have,” he said. “We are seeing how best to move forwards in terms of robust funding.”
He also said that the App store will not be immediately interoperable with two other key managed services outlined in the ICT strategy. These are the Public Services Network (PSN), a government-wide voice and data network, and the G-Cloud, a shared public sector cloud computing infrastructure. When asked how best to overcome the challenge of
integrating these and similar services in future, McCluggage responded: “Bits are missing. We’re working on which bits. Getting it right to start with is unattainable – it’s an evolutionary journey.”
However, McCluggage also highlighted some important achievements since the launch of the strategy, including savings of £300m; the first roll-outs of the PSN; and the increasing use of an incremental ‘agile’ approach to software development.
McCluggage was speaking on the day before the official launch of the Government Digital Service (GDS), which has been operational since March. He is overseeing work to deliver services digitally, as well as developing a single website for all government information and services.
Meanwhile, as the GDS was officially launched the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report into government’s online infrastructure. The report considered the development of Directgov, Businesslink and the Government Gateway – a set of secure shared services supporting online transactions such as tax returns.
Government has spent an average of £90.3m a year over the past three years on these programmes, the report found, but it has not “generally measured the benefits of this spend, and therefore it does not know whether it has under- or over-invested in these services”. It is “likely” that the services have delivered cost savings and user benefits, the NAO said, but “without robust data to rely on we cannot conclude that the government has delivered value for money”.