4.11 GDS has worked with the Crown Commercial Service to diversify the digital and technology supplier base. It has also aimed to reduce reliance on large suppliers whose long-term contracts have, it believes, locked out competition and reduced in-house skills and capability within departments. Through spending controls, GDS has restricted signing of technology contracts worth over £100 million and tried to reduce the length of departments' contracts.
4.12 As we noted in our report Managing and replacing the Aspire contract, government's new approach will require departments to recruit staff with skills in managing multiple suppliers and integrating services.26 Approaches to managing major IT contracts are evolving. GDS has had to clarify its guidance in response to confusion about requirements for adopting different contracting models.
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Figure 12
Technology standard and guidance
GDS has yet to develop a comprehensive approach
|
| Current arrangements |
Strategic architecture | Reference architecture | No overall cross-government organising framework for developing and maintaining solutions, products and patterns. |
Map of current systems | No detailed map of IT systems (including legacy arrangements). | |
Map of future state | No overall view of, or roadmap towards, a future state (taking account of legacy arrangements); but some new systems being built from the centre. | |
Roadmap to future | ||
Governance | Compliance | Technology governance is substantially operated through the spend controls process but the absence of a documented target state and roadmap limits the criteria that GDS can use to assess departments' proposals. |
Standards and interoperability | ||
Maintenance of roadmap | ||
Guidance | Principles | Guiding principles in the Technology Code of Practice. |
Standards | Some standards developed for open technical standards on GDS Standards Hub and blogs. | |
Good practice 'patterns' | Some specific developments linked to Government as a Platform. But information on 'patterns' and 'technical positions' is otherwise limited (and a lack of detailed guidance on updating legacy systems). |
Note
1 The Government as a Platform programme is referred to in paragraph 4.16. Platforms are a way of describing systems which can be shared.
Source: National Audit Office analysis of Government Digital Service information. Table derived from standard practice guidelines
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4.13 GDS has also tried to make it easier for departments to contract with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by implementing procurement frameworks such as G-Cloud and the Digital Services Framework, the latter now replaced by the Digital Outcomes and Specialists Framework.27 Both are hosted through the Digital Marketplace, an online catalogue of digital and technology services for the UK public sector. Government data show that up to November 2016, 64% of sales by volume were to SMEs via the G-Cloud framework.
4.14 While new digital and procurement frameworks targeting SMEs have had some impact, most government procurement with digital and technology suppliers continues to be with large organisations. In 2015-16, 94% of such spending was with large enterprises, a fall of less than one percentage point since 2012-13.28
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26 Comptroller and Auditor General, Managing and replacing the Aspire contract, Session 2014-15, HC 444, National Audit Office. July 2014.
27 See also: Comptroller and Auditor General, Government's spending with small and medium-sized enterprises, Session 2015-16, HC 884, National Audit Office, March 2016.
28 Government data. The Crown Commercial Service collects data on procurement spending using a third-party system called Bravo. Bravo collects data from departments' invoices, identifies SMEs within the data using Dun & Bradstreet classifications. The data in Bravo are known to be incomplete but this is gradually improving as more government departments are added to it and inconsistencies resolved.