Devil's Advocate: "If I ruled the world..."

The biggest single IT budget in the land is yours to spend. What would you do? Martin Brampton, director at consultancy Black Sheep, gets all hypothetical...

If I ruled the world, what would be my IT strategy? Maybe the world is just a bit too large, even for a megalomaniac. So let's aim a little lower and try to set the IT strategy for the UK. The government of one of the world's major economies must have a fair amount of buying power.

First of all, what sort of budget do we have to play with? A rough calculation would go as follows. The UK public sector turns over round about £400bn a year. Maybe we have to spend six or seven per cent of that on IT. That gives us a budget of about £25bn, or a good £100m every working day. What shall we buy today?

Before we spend too much, we could compare our situation with some well-known companies. Exxon is a big company. It has a turnover of about £150bn a year. Even that is not very impressive against UK Plc. If we look more closely we find that although Exxon turns over quite a lot of money, it has only about 125,000 employees.

Or, we could think about an example within the IT industry. IBM is the biggest company in the sector, and its turnover for 2001 was about £60bn. Yet it has over 300,000 employees.

I'm getting just a bit nervous now. Running the IT for Exxon was a piece of cake - after all, there is only one basic product. Doing it for IBM was just a bit more difficult, given the complexity of the company and its spread across many different IT sectors. But the UK government has millions of employees and a huge diversity of activities.

Perhaps we can tackle some of the big issues and delegate all the complicated details. Are we going to have a single supplier for each identified requirement? There are some obvious reasons why we should. It makes no sense for many different branches of government to set up teams to decide on the most suitable product when we could do it once for everyone.

No sooner have we decided on our favoured supplier than a problem becomes apparent. How will we maintain a competitive market if we award all our business to just one supplier? UK Plc is a big enough customer for its order to matter even to the largest IT companies. In specialised areas, selecting a single supplier could leave us with no competitors.

In fact, this has happened with the Inland Revenue, which has EDS as its incumbent provider. Other companies are unwilling to go to the trouble of tendering against them. The Inland Revenue is being forced to consider paying companies to pitch for its business, in order to inject some competition into the process.

Maybe we can apply a generic policy that avoids giving everything to just one supplier. How about the current policy of pushing ahead with broadband? The idea is to promote a technology that is thought to benefit the whole country, while spreading the business across many different broadband providers. This neglects the problem that nearly all the contenders are simply resellers of the basic BT service but leave that issue aside for now.

The bigger worry is that if we encourage massive take up of broadband, problems with the technology are liable to emerge. Domestic ADSL is based on 50 users contending for bandwidth but existing services are well below the design limit. Encourage large numbers of subscribers and we may have a lot of disappointed users.

Even with that tempting budget of £100bn a day, the job is already looking less tempting. And salaries are usually higher in the commercial sector. Perhaps I've gone off the idea of running IT for the UK government.

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** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He is a frequent contributor to silicon.com's Behind the Headlines TV programme and can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk