A Day of TechnoVision

Andrew Stott, Deputy Government CIO, and Pierre Hessler, one of the Capgemini Executive, introduced today’s TechnoVision event at Capgemini’s offices in Woking. I thought the day enormously productive, was impressed by Andrew’s leadership, and enjoyed Pierre’s frequent articulate and amusing interventions. There is a short video of him talking about TechnoVision on the webpage I signposted yesterday, but which does not do him justice, in my view. (Today was his 42nd wedding anniversary, by the way!)

You’ll need to read the overview on the above webpage to appreciate the TechnoVision approach. In Teams, we considered what were the “must have” technologies versus the main business driver groups that had been selected – Professionalism, Efficiency, Citizen Centricity, Information Management & Security and Sustainability. I was in the Team considering the “You Experience” cluster. Results will be reported to the CIO Councils and, if I’m able to, I will provide a link from this Blog.

Later, separate Teams were formed to consider recommendations linked to the business driver groups. A late decision to set-up an “Overall” Team was taken, and I was co-opted into a Team that also included Andrew Stott and Pierre Hessler.

In terms of the Technology vision, the “Overall” Team decided that pan-Government network (unlike other corporate businesses, this doesn’t yet exist in Government) should support three key strategic pillars of security, collaboration and data management, enabling trust and the delivery of business vision.

Among the messages to the business are “we do understand the challenge – customer centricity – and we have the solutions provided we can address the above through strategic finance, enabling an effective delivery model backed by culture change”. As part of the Action Plan, we have a very specific and, I believe, pragmatic recommendation to make to the CIO Council as part of the Action Plan, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be knee-capped, or worse, if I report it here before the recommendations have been presented to the CIO Councils!

In the “Invisible Infostructure” technology cluster, it was noticeable that nearly all technologies listed under “Jericho (de-perimeterised) security” were identified as “must-haves”, but I was not particularly surprised to hear that what’s actually happening is pressure to “build the walls higher, and fill the moat with more crocodiles”. That, of course, is one of the major contradictions we have to reconcile if we are to make effective progress.

Other insights, for me, were emergent talk of a “G-Cloud” and “Civil Pages”.

Days like this can really help build consensus on the content of genuine public sector-wide vision and strategy (provided we can report them openly) and I certainly hope to be involved in more of them.


Apologies – publication of the Socitm Position Statement has been a little delayed. Vicky was unimpressed with the diagram I produced to try and exemplify the relationships between its constituent parts, and thought it may confuse more than it informed! She and Adrian have been working on an improved version, today, and I now hope the statement will be ready by the weekend. Vicky has already done a great job on editing the text, so I’m looking forward to seeing what magic she’s worked on the schematic.