Governement launch

Friday 10 September 2010

March 2010
Government launches new, open ICT strategy with apps

At the end of January, the Cabinet Office launched a new Government ICT Strategy, that applies across the whole public sector including education. Open source, open standards and re-use is one of the 14 strands for delivering the strategy, which promises £3.2 billion savings annually from  2013/14. This revisits last year’s Action Plan, but with new additions including G-Cloud (for Government).

It also has more teeth, for instance reiterating that open source should not be rejected because proprietary software has been purchased up front, but adding, "If [suppliers] are unable to provide evidence of fair consideration of open source solutions, their bid will be deemed non-compliant with government policy and the proposal is likely to be automatically delisted from the procurement."

The latter point should have big implications for Building For Schools and other managed service procurements.

Someone is on the ball with buzz words: part of the new strategy is a Government Application Store, but with knobs on. Instead of being able to drink virtual beer on your iPhone, this is for rather more substantial apps, such as the “sharing and reuse of online business applications, services and components across the public sector”.

The accompanying statement commented, “If applied to education as well as the rest of the public sector, this could bring big savings and provide a firm basis for interoperability. Given its popularity in schools, colleges and local authorities, Moodle must surely be a strong contender for the G-AS (Government Application Store), as perhaps are other important web-based apps popular with teachers and pupils, such as Drupal, Wordpress and Elgg.”

Back to latest news
Comment on this article