Digital, Data & Technology

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.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is to open a second digital academy for its civil servants working in the North of England

Three quarters of British people view strong data security as the most important feature of government’s online services, according to a survey carried out by YouGov for Deloitte, and nearly one fifth of people avoid using digital services because they don’t want to share data online.