Digital, Data & Technology

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has said that the civil service is moving away from an “old-fashioned” culture of “presenteeism”, and argued that remote working can increase productivity.

Civil servants support moves to increase the transparency of government and to devolve powers down to local government and communities, but are strongly opposed to outsourcing delivery to the private and voluntary sectors, an exclusive poll by CSW has found.

Unacceptable IT is "pervasive" across government and some people in the profession don't have the capability to bring about the changes required, the retiring head of the government's G-Cloud programme, Chris Chant, has written in a blog post on a government website.

Sir Bob Kerslake, the head of the civil service, has established a blog and an account on the social networking site Twitter, so that he can better engage with civil servants across the UK and the globe.

The recently published Cabinet Office tender to procure digital identity assurance (IDA) services for the DWP is to be used across the whole of government, Mike Bracken, executive director of digital at the Cabinet Office has said.

The NHS could host commercial advertising on its website in the near future, a deputy director at the Department of Health said on Monday at a seminar held by CSW in conjunction with the Post Office.

Departmental select committee chairs have provided mixed reviews of the departments they scrutinise for a Civil Service World Special Report, which has found that 40 per cent of them are dissatisfied with departments’ responses to their reports.

SMEs working in technology are to be invited to participate in a ‘product surgery’. The aim is to increase commissioners’ knowledge of products and services that could achieve the objectives laid out in the government’s ICT strategy.

Like his secretary of state Iain Duncan Smith, DWP permanent secretary Robert Devereux has a quiet manner. This cannot, however, conceal the vast scale and ambition of the organisational change and policy delivery projects that he’s pursuing. Matt Ross meets him.