In December of last year, I said 2015 was going to be a “make or break” year for G-Cloud and it has certainly started the New Year with a bang.
Since its inception in 2012, the G-Cloud framework has achieved some remarkable things, but many of these have been overlooked in favour of the more negative stories to make the headlines.
Before G-Cloud, SME IT providers didn’t stand a chance in the public sector procurement race. It was near impossible to break the oligopoly created by the Systems Integrators (SIs) that had dominated the sector until then. G-Cloud levelled the playing field for providers like us.
Because of G-Cloud, we saw the introduction of the government’s first formal cloud-first policy, encouraging public sector organisations to properly consider and evaluate cloud solutions before considering any other option. It was a policy not only adopted in the UK, but all over the world as a result of its success.
It’s no secret that G-Cloud has had its issues, most notably in relation to poor search functionality and excessive red tape. A lot of the time, when public sector buyers were searching for IT services the quality and relevance of the search results they got were poor. When they took over the project, the Government Digital Service (GDS) invested a lot of money into a team of developers to revolutionise the way the platform worked.
And they did – the functionality of the new Digital Marketplace is far superior to that of the CloudStore. When you search for “backup”, the results you receive are for backup services, not just every service that mentions “backup” in its description.
By making the procurement process easier through the improved functionality of the Digital Marketplace, SMEs finally had the opportunity to showcase the more flexible and often cost-effective options available to the public sector through cloud computing. GDS seemed to be bringing back a bit of the excitement around G-Cloud that had been dwindling.
But it seems that by re-branding the framework, the GDS team have been the victim of much criticism for losing the true vision of the project. Some even say that by dissolving the @G_Cloud_UK Twitter handle into @GOVUKDigimkt the team are trying to sweep G-Cloud under the carpet and package it as part of a wider digital project moving forwards.
The passion of the original pre-GDS G-Cloud team is evident even now, some three years on. An anonymous blog posted recently, thought to be from an ex-G-Cloud team member, expresses the outrage and dismay at the demise of the former G-Cloud team, stating that he’s certain there is no longer a “G-Cloud team” left, as they would never give up the Twitter account.
For want of a better cliché, there are two sides to this story. GDS needed to address the functionality issues of the CloudStore that were damaging the framework – confidence in G-Cloud’s longevity was at an all-time low and something needed to be done. But it’s also important that we don’t lose the passion that started this whole thing off.
In the early days of G-Cloud, it was incredibly understaffed. The move to GDS gave them more resources but as the original team are saying, G-Cloud is about more than the online store, it’s about a “cloud-first” culture and making changes in procurement that are applicable to lots of areas of government.
The fact that anyone cares enough to kick up a fuss shows that G-Cloud was created by a team determined to bring positive change. It’s important that we stay focused on what G-Cloud is really about: driving change, promoting good cloud policies and improving standards within the public sector.
Peter Groucutt is managing director of Databarracks
