Government departments fear legal challenges resulting from procuring IT through G-Cloud, the director of the framework today warned.
Tony Singleton, who heads up the cloud procurement framework started by Whitehall in 2012, said government must address staff fears over procurement lawsuits if it's to increase take-up of the initiative.
Speaking at Cloud Expo Europe, he said: “One thing that scares public sector buyers more than anything else is doing something wrong, getting something wrong on the framework, and then being open to a legal challenge, that legal challenge being successful and then them seeing that as the end of their careers.”
He said a team, including legal experts, is working hard to make sure that never happens. “What we want to do is make sure the marketplace is fully compliant,” he added. “There's a multidisciplinary team delivering it: ourselves, Crown Commercial Service, and Treasury solicitors.
“So the buyers can be reassured that if they use the marketplace, they use it in the right way, they are fully compliant, there's nothing to worry about on their side,” he added.
His keynote at the annual event follows 14 organisations - including public bodies - signing an open letter on the matter addressed to Whitehall's Government Digital Service (GDS - which has responsibility for G-Cloud) last February.
It read: “As opportunities through the framework become larger (and more valuable to suppliers), there is an increased risk of challenge from those suppliers who are losing revenues to G-Cloud. A successful challenge could potentially damage the integrity of the initiative, and all that it promises to deliver to the UK public sector.”
G-Cloud now sees public sector buyers regularly spend £30 million a month through it, and total spend now stands at £467 million.
Singleton outlined other improvements he wants to make to the framework as the GDS plans future iterations of the service. One is the “crazy” process which sees buyers who have found their preferred bidder in G-Cloud have to go offline to manually complete the paperwork to end the process.
“You then have to stop, go into a Word document or whatever software you're using, to then produce a call-off contract,” he said. “It's crazy. One of the things we're working on, is what's the end to end process for buying and for supplying, and how do we increase the functionality to make that happen?”
The director of the framework also wants to improve communication between buyers and suppliers to help buyers through the complex process of cloud migration.
He said: “If you're a buyer moving something to the cloud in the first instance, there's a lot of concern, a lot of worry about 'am I doing the right thing, have I got it right?' We want to build those communities to get them to start speaking to each other.”
