Digital, Data & Technology

UK standards body BSI has published a guide to help standardise data and systems to help local government guide the creation of “smart cities”.

Civil servants working in the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ’s) shared services centres face redundancies and office closures following a seven-year contract to outsource services to Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL), says Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). 

G-Cloud suppliers and services could be updated every three months, the government revealed yesterday in tender documents for the sixth iteration of the framework.

The Marketplace, designed to make it easier for government to do business with IT providers of all sizes, was launched today by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.

Cabinet Office digital director Mike Bracken and Open Data Institute chairman Nigel Shadbolt said that there is still more to do if the government, and UK, want to share and access meaningful open data, at the ODI’s 2014 summit on open innovation on 4, November.

Public sector ICT cloud services will account for more than half of worldwide software, server and storage spending growth by 2018, according to new analysis.

Public officials should be free to try new approaches without fear of being “hauled in front of ministers, the Public Accounts Committee or being investigated by the National Audit Office”, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) says in a report published today.

The government has announced that the G-Cloud 6 tender will be published next week.

The government has delayed publication of the tender for the next iteration of the G-Cloud framework until next month.

The Home Office’s system of recording and assessing immigration and customs allegations is improving Home Office results but needs further work, said the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration’s report last week. 

Labour’s Digital Government Review could recommend a regional model for a local version of the Government Digital Service, shadow Cabinet Office Chi Onwurah has hinted.

A Cabinet Office report released on Tuesday 21, October shows that nearly nine in ten people in England and Wales have been successfully added to the electoral register automatically through IER. 

Departments will “get absolutely nowhere” on reforming their services if they don’t have their own in-house digital capability, Paul Shetler, chief digital officer at the Ministry of Justice (furthest right), has warned.

John Manzoni, the chief executive of the Major Projects Authority, has been named as the new chief executive of the civil service.

A total of 200 18-21-year-olds are this week starting the government’s civil service Fast Track apprenticeship scheme.

Former Credit Suisse chief information officer Magnus Falk has this week started his new role as government deputy chief technology officer, one of 100 senior digital specialists brought into government over the past year.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) “should urgently invest in its operational, technical and commercial skills,” a report by the National Audit Office has found.

In the first of a series of articles examining digital services, Tim Gibson explains online voter registration – a new IT system lying at the very heart of our democracy.

The government’s controversial patient record-sharing programme care.data, paused in February after noisy opposition, will be restarted as a pilot this autumn, according to NHS England’s national director for patients and information Tim Kelsey.

An official responsible for an IT contracting error which cost the Ministry of Defence (MoD) £70m is no longer working for the department, its permanent secretary Jon Thompson told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on 16 June​.

Government spending on outsourcing contracts rose by 23% to £1.2bn between 2012 and 2013, bringing the two-year total to £2.3bn, while expenditure in most other sectors fell by between 1% and 20%, according to analysis of public sector transactions carried out by the Institute for Government (IfG).

The Civil Service Competency Framework should be updated to require all staff to have minimum skills in critical thinking, quantitative analysis and digital skills, according to think tank Policy Exchange.

The majority  (88%) of civil servants believe their department needs more training in order to be able to take advantage of cloud computing, according to a survey carried out by Civil Service World and cloud services provider Eduserv.

Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think-tank, has called on the government to spend £875m on digitally educating the 6.2m people who aren’t currently using the internet, bringing Britain’s entire population online by 2020.