Image source: Karl Hoods
The Integrated Corporate Services (ICS) team for Whitehall departments and agencies is looking to provide support for more organisations.
It currently provides full digital services for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and end user compute services to the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) and 10 arm’s length bodies.
Its group chief digital and information officer, Karl Hoods, told the UKAuthority Powering Digital Public Services conference this week that it has completed a change in its operations after Machinery of Government changes in early 2023 created the three departments. Previously it had provided a full service to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and end user compute services to other bodies including the Department for International Trade.
“We definitely see potential to scale up and exploring how we might do that with other government departments and other agencies across the ICS family,” he said. “Our initial analysis shows that if we were to double in size we would see at least a 25% saving for the current cost we are incurring, let alone what other agencies may be spending on those activities.
“A lot of work has gone on over the past 12 month in creating new organisatons. We are starting to settle down, and it feels like we are still driving a car and trying to change the wheels and see how we can do anything else. These are exciting times with lots of opportunity and we have a really good story in terms of re-use and commonality.
“We know it’s not going to fit everywhere but know there is something to be explored in terms of clustering end user compute, cloud services and common applications.”
Benefits
In his presentation to the conference, Hoods outlined the benefits of ICS operation in terms of economies of scale, efficiency savings, cost reductions and the potential scale up in the use of technologies.
He said there are three elements to its existing approach: the standardisation of commodity computing resources such as Office 365 and cloud hosting; more re-use and sharing of common applications such as platform for managing grants and data; and a recognition that some applications have to be bespoke due to the context of the operations in which they are used.
“We’ve learnt that most of problems we are trying to solve from a technology perspective are mostly the same, in generalised patterns,” he said. “The context tends to be different but it does not mean the solution has to be different. So how can we drive through more commonality and product mindset?”
He added that ICS is a small team that relies heavily on its partnerships with suppliers, but it is aiming to build up its in-house capability.
