Member Article

House of Parliament outages signal time for system overhaul

House of Parliament outages signal time for system overhaul

By Lori Williams, General Manager at cloud consultancy Appirio

This month we heard about the parliamentary offices of many MPs and ministers being hit by a series of IT outages over the last few months, leading to issues with connecting to critical services and email delivery delays.

This is another example of where government systems are becoming so antiquated that they’re starting to fail and are making it harder to adopt newer functionality that are critical to enabling these agencies to meet the growing demands of today’s digital environment.

Here are some of the key points to take away from these revelations:

On-premise server solutions cause organisations to invest significant time and energy in maintaining hardware, instead of running their core business. As in this case, many of those systems have become obsolete faster than the plan to overhaul them can accommodate.

One of the biggest impediments to success is not the systems we implement, but the IT standards and existing infrastructure in place. This is very much a ‘server-hugging’ mentality with outdated versions of operating systems and web browsers, and lack of ability to integrate or accept new cloud platforms.

The waterfall modelled governance required and expected by some government organisations can cost more than the project itself and result in an avoidance of issues resolution in favour of documentation. The biggest challenge is change management – not of end user acceptance, but rather of the organisation’s skills at moving quick enough to take advantage of the time to market allowed by more flexible cloud platforms.

Government procurement is still more comfortable buying from ‘old school’ systems integrators, who tend to have a vested interest in the legacy implementations as opposed to driving change to more nimble solutions.

The UK’s new G Cloud initiative will be key to overcoming these issues, as it aims to force buyers to review more nimble, value-based providers, rather than sticking with the ‘old breed’ of SIs that are synonymous with such IT failures.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lori Williams .