Whitehall has outlined an action plan to define the future of public sector IT procurement.
The Cabinet Office's Digital Marketplace Strategy, released in a blog post earlier this month, reveals how the government's cloud procurement storefront, Digital Marketplace, will develop under the Government Digital Service (GDS), the team responsible for digital transformation.
The Digital Marketplace currently consists of two frameworks, G-Cloud - for commodity cloud services - and the Digital Services Framework (DSF), a place to buy in outside cloud expertise to help with projects.
Under the action plan, more procurement frameworks will be added to the Marketplace to expand its offerings, while the GDS will try to boost local authority take-up.
Meanwhile, the team will bring additional functionality to the frameworks to make life easier for buyers and suppliers, and a focus will also be put on establishing communities to share best practice, advice and experiences to increase use.
But the strategy follows a period of controversy for Digital Marketplace and its frameworks, despite all its successes.
While G-Cloud has broken the £500 million barrier, DSF has seen just £12 million pass through to suppliers it lists, following criticism from suppliers that DSF was unfit for purpose.
This didn't stop Crown Commercial Services (CCS) from informing suppliers last month that the agile services category, which lets buyers outsource digital skills, would be removed from G-Cloud 5.
That's because it clashed with the DSF framework, but the decision prompted a backlash from SMBs, who complained that public sector buyers used DSF to “body-shop” their existing IT skills.
CCS and GDS subsequently reversed the decision, and G-Cloud and Digital Commercial Programme director Tony Singleton published a blog post promising to improve the next DSF iteration.
We spoke with Singleton about the questions thrown up by this incident, and about the Digital Marketplace strategy to find out exactly how the GDS sees it improving, and how it expects to achieve the necessary changes.
Could you outline the overall aim of this new strategy to boost users by spreading the word about the Digital Marketplace among the public sector?
It’s a desire that’s been around for quite a while: the need to educate and get the message out there to buyers and the public sector that there is a marketplace out there, there are real benefits to using it, and it is legally compliant.
If you’re talking about 20,000 or 30,000 public sector organisations, for any one team to try and do it its pretty impossible. What we want to do is build up this community so if you’re a new buyer or new to transforming or just moving into the cloud, you can speak to somebody else to learn about what’s the best way to go, what issues did others encounter, and so on.
There are people there that are willing to help. We’re looking at how to make that even easier with a discussion forum for buyers and public sector and so on. Where we are lucky I think is with the fantastic set of suppliers who are on G-Cloud, who are also willing to take up the mantel. One of our aims is just to build that community out.
We've seen far more take-up of G-Cloud in central government than in local government, which has complained about the framework being less suitable for them. Are you looking to tackle any of these issues to improve adoption?
We’re still talking to local authorities and we want to start talking to the Department for Communities and Local Government, plus any other stakeholders within that local authority area, to really get to the heart of what the real reasons are for local authorities not wanting to use G-Cloud.
Is it because it’s a central government initiative? Is it because people prefer to use their own things? There doesn’t seem to be any major show stoppers.
The strategy talks about boosting local government adoption rates - how do you plan to do this?
My aim is that there’s one cross-public sector commissioning platform that’s offering the cheapest and best way of doing things. On that score, for example, we are going to be talking to Camden Council with Crown Commercial Services at the end of April and we were down in Bristol recently with a mix of central and local government.
We plan to make case studies available by video and so on, from both local authorities and central government. It’s only by reading what others have done that you can see how it could benefit you, and there are some really fantastic stories out there – Windsor [Windsor and Maidenhead Borough Council] moved everything to the cloud in 14 months for £140,000 – you think what would that have taken in the past. It’s really about getting those benefits out there so people know about them.
One issue cited by local government representative body Socitm was the two-year limit to contract lengths - would you change the nature of the framework to suit councils more?
If there was an overwhelming desire from everybody using G-Cloud for the contracts to be longer than two years then that’s something we’d obviously look at. We have to make sure we’re meeting users’ needs.
Some of the suggestions I’ve had when talking to local authorities was that at the end of two years they have to change supplier and move and they can’t do that because it’s a mission-critical system, where that’s not the case at all. Yes you have to go back and re-run the [tender process] you were doing through G-Cloud in the first place, but to be honest that's normally a bit of search and filtering to make sure you’re still getting the most economic price.
If you can move to a different supplier, and save a significant amount of money, why wouldn’t you want to do that? If you’re not going to save a significant amount of money then obviously the business case needs to weigh up the pros and cons of cost savings against changes or risks to that service. But it doesn't mean that you’ve got to quickly change suppliers.
After the backlash against the decision to withdraw agile from G-Cloud 5, do you still see a future in which G-Cloud and DSF serve distinctly different needs?
One of the big things I want to achieve with the Digital Marketplace is it becomes framework-agnostic. People just go on it and it’s completely open, completely transparent, so it’s easy to supply digital services. A bit like in the same way if you’re on Amazon Marketplace, or wherever, where you say I’m happy with that service, so I’ll buy that.
Up until recently it was very much about telling people, this is the G-Cloud, these are the benefits, you save lots of money, etcetera. That’s absolutely important that grabs the attention, but what we want to do now is raise awareness of both G-Cloud and the widening out to this Marketplace with DSF and everything else.
This is part of a much, much bigger transformation of public services, so yesterday we were talking about how to use agile to develop services, how Bristol Council has used it and how it brought what it wanted to to the marketplace. It’s much much more of a rounded story now instead of going out with a story around G-Cloud itself.
One of the things that came out of the decision to remove agile services was that CCS was blamed for sending the letters, and GDS were seen to have stepped in to resolve the situation. Is that how it happened?
The decision to leave agile on G5, that was a joint decision we both sat down and made. There wasn’t a rift.
When we were starting to get the feedback saying 'no, that wasn’t the right thing to do', that’s when we sat down, listened to customers, took account of the new views coming in, and we decided let’s leave it where it is for now. I like to see it more like we listened to the users than we made a U-turn. We had to make a decision, it was a joint decision, we just decided what’s best for buyers, what’s best for suppliers, and decided to leave G5 as it is for the time being.
But is it fair to say the GDS and CCS don't see eye to eye on every issue?
Reading some of the stuff [published at the time], my reaction was ‘hang on a minute, where did that come from?’ We’ve actually got a very, very good working relationship with CCS. For example, we’ve now formed a new digital services team, made up of the right people who've got the right skils from GDS, CCS and also Treasury Solicitors.
The relationship between us is what I would call a creative tension, so there may be things I want to do, that seem to make sense, that I want to push the boundaries on things, so again it just works having somebody there who’s got that commercial background to say 'yeah okay, well this is the risk challenge if you do that'.
So we can then make a joint decision; should we take that risk or not? Obviously if I'm going to end up in court next week I don’t really want to do that, but I want to start taking business decisions around what’s the risk of legal challenge.
CCS are completely aligned with that view, and in the same way Sarah Hurrell [commercial director of technology at CCS] will push me and say 'under the new procurement rules do you know you can such-and-such a thing'?
The strategy really suggests an expansion of what the Digital Marketplace offers - for instance, the inclusion of the Public Services Network and other GDS frameworks. What's the thinking behind this?
We’re talking to Sarah about those now. Certainly the GDS ones we hope would be there. It will be G-Cloud, it will be DSF, and hopefully Crown Hosting Service and so on. It’s really thinking about if I’m transferring services, what frameworks would I want to use, even not thinking about the frameworks, what is it I need to find to make that transformation a success? Then working to see ok how practical is it to bring these things onto the marketplace, particularly if they’re catalogue-type services.
What’s also important is as and when the new digital-type frameworks are being designed, they also meet the GDS design principles. Sarah has done a lot of work on that area already, just reducing the size of contracts. One she was talking about the other day had gone down from 1,500 pages - which is totally insane - to 800. She’s still not satisfied with it and I don’t think she should be, either.
It’s about looking at that G-Cloud model of doing things, how we apply that with the design principles to other frameworks and move them across onto the Marketplace.
How might these new services be presented to buyers? G-Cloud's success has garnered it a lot of praise, but now its Twitter account has been changed to reflect the Digital Marketplace branding.
It just seems anathema to have seven or eight different [Twitter] accounts for all the frameworks. It’s all about having a single place to go. That I think is really the biggest benefit from this. One of my main measures of success with this is that buyers don’t care or don’t need to worry or don’t even think about what framework they’re using, they’re just heading to the Digital Marketplace to meet their needs.
The strategy also stresses your desire to improve the functionality of the Marketplace - can you expand on that?
We’re working on building out the functionality of [G-Cloud] so it’s an end to end commissioning platform. It would be great if we could even include payments but we’re not sure on that. There’s two priorities – one is to make sure there are audit trails in place, so when buyers go through and select digital services on G-Cloud, there is an audit trail they can save. So in a legal challenge you can demonstrate that you properly followed the procurement process.
There could also be some sort of call-off contract agreement builder on there so when you have filtered down and selected one supplier, that information should be able to be automatically transferred across to the call-off agreement documentation. At the moment you’re opening up your second screen and entering all the details into a Word document.
Finally, now G-Cloud's surpassed the £500 million mark, what do you see as the true potential for the Digital Marketplace in influencing government IT procurement?
It's great to quote big numbers, but for me it’s much much more about getting the other frameworks onto the Marketplace, and providing that single joined-up journey for buyers to be able to buy what they want, to see what’s available, to build up that community and so on, so it becomes that true cross-government platform.
The G-Cloud framework is here to stay, and we have reduced those barriers to entry so it’s about continuing to attract innovative suppliers. One of the things I want to do now though is to start to match supply to demand. That's why we’re working with technology leaders, with others, to try and work out what the demand’s going to be over the next couple of years so we can make sure the market’s aware of that and make sure we supply what buyers want to buy.
