Richard Granger is the director general of NHS IT, responsible for the procurement, management and delivery of the £6bn, 10-year plan to create national electronic systems for the health service.
The trend is not new – Andrew Pinder, eEnvoy at the Cabinet Office from 2001 to 2004, came from a background at Citibank and Prudential. But it has gathered pace as the government, scarred by the IT disasters of the past, commits to bringing in people with proven experience.
Yet even with his background, Granger says nothing prepared him for the scale and complexity of running a major public sector programme.
‘The nature of what we do in the public sector is serious, and we are doing it with millions of people’s lives,’ he says.
‘The paradox is that people do not want anything to go wrong, but they want to pay the minimum amount of money for it, whereas if you are in an investment bank you build in triple redundancy, and price is not a primary criteria,’ he says.
It is the exposure, rather than any political pressure, that has the biggest impact on the Whitehall CIO.
Intensive scrutiny – from the press, from bodies such as the National Audit Office, through parliamentary questions and freedom of information regulations – can drive senior civil servants to follow the rules to a detrimental degree. Private sector firms in the same situation can take a rational, calculated risk.
‘Running the procurement for congestion charging, I had a greater degree of freedom as a partner of Deloitte on behalf of TfL, than as IT director for the NHS on behalf of the Secretary of State for Health,’ says Granger.
Getting the right combination of technology suppliers working together to deliver a large programme is a panda-mating exercise that sometimes needs that greater freedom, he says.
‘When you work for the private sector you can sit the suppliers down and explain in robust terms that either Chi-Chi and La-La get together or there won’t be any future,’ he says.
‘But when you are a public servant and suppliers are not doing things in a sensible way, you can’t intervene to the same extent because of probity issues. A public servant explaining to an organisation that it was doing the wrong thing could be seen as undue influence on the procurement process, even if it was in the taxpayers’ interest to do so.’
Perhaps surprisingly, Granger’s experience does not bear out the stereotype of indecisive civil servants and management by committee.
But public sector programmes do have more complex stakeholder management issues, and decision-making must be more subtle as different but inter-related priorities compete for resources.
‘Funding is time-limited; there are ministers with requirements driven by the electoral process; your end-users may have performance targets that militate against what you are being asked to deliver; and your suppliers may think of the public sector as a soft touch,’ says Granger.
So decisions tend to be made in parallel. For example, a decision on new arrangements for handling a medical condition such as cancer generates data-handling requirements that need to be interfaced with systems that are already being deployed for electronic patient records.
‘There is not a fear of making decisions in Whitehall, but the task of co-ordinating them is so much more complex and difficult,’ says Granger.
The skills needed to do the job are also different. As well as possessing a thicker skin, the public sector CIO needs an in-depth understanding of the constitutional process, the drafting talents of a lifelong mandarin, and the ability to handle vast quantities of correspondence.
And while it can be a problem finding the funds to lure the right calibre of recruit, the emotional commitment of public sector staff make for a different kind of team.
‘The public sector attracts people not primarily motivated by money but dedicated to delivering a public service,’ says Granger. ‘You can get the most amazing positive teamwork, whereas if you have a model relying on money you have a more transitory team.’
Autor: Sarah Arnott
Quelle: Computing, 19.10.2005
