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An organisation can only change what it controls. It's not clear just exactly how much of government computing remains in government hands. The moment for change occurs only when the major outsourcing contracts come up for renegotiation. This is not frequent and when it does come along it may not coincide with other events; a desire to embrace the cloud, for example.
It will also be the case that departments in this situation will not be fishing in an abundant pool and what few potential suppliers there are will be bidding their system, their way. This may not be cloud oriented to any degree, if at all.
This was typified by the HMRC situation where there were few bidders to replace the incumbent and money needed to change hands before additional bidders could be enticed to bid.
But if strategic change is untimely or too difficult, tactical change, nibbling at the edges of the outsourced systems monolith, can be achieved. This approach can pay dividends in the areas of office systems and services Microsoft Office, email and other similar non-transactional systems can all be moved to the cloud whenever the time is deemed to be right and in the development of extranets.
Government departments, as with any information processing organisation, need to interact with other bodies and, increasingly, staff work from home and other locations and on a variety of devices, (as we saw recently with the Olympics when they were basically told to do so). Achieving this from behind firewalls is usually almost impossible and probably not a good idea anyway.
Whereas setting up a cloud based extranet is quick, inexpensive and very tactical. All the things the Cabinet Office are trying to encourage through the g-Cloud.
Government departments should be looking to move their office systems onto the cloud and to integrate them with a cloud hosted extranet regardless of whatever situation or relationship they may be in regarding their line of business systems suppliers.

Brian Smith
www.kahootz.com