Government Digital Services Framework Spend at £2.3m

Figures released yesterday reveal that the government has awarded nine contracts via the Digital Services Framework (DSf), spending a total of £2.3m.

Of this amount, just 30% (£700,000) went to SMEs - despite 83% of the 175 suppliers on DSf falling into this category.

These figures contrast with recently published G-Cloud stats, which show that 60% of all sales via the framework have gone to small/medium companies.

Whitehall claims that it is committed to smaller businesses and 25% of its total spend will go to SMEs by 2015.

Launched in November last year, DSf intends to help the public sector deliver digital services with Agile methodology.

According to a recent blog post, the next iteration of the framework – DSf 2 – is in the final stages of being signed off.

After this, a notice will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) and submissions will open.

DSf And G-Cloud To Become One

However, the Government Digital Service (GDS) is currently in the process of combining DSf and G-Cloud to form one Digital Marketplace.

According to the GDS chief operating officer (COO), Tony Singleton, the new Marketplace is set to become a single store for buyers in autumn 2014.

The aim of this is to give public sector buyers the opportunity to buy both cloud-based commodities and digital capabilities from the same place.

This makes sense, claims Singleton, because these are often used as part of an overall project.

The fifth iteration of G-Cloud went live last week, however, there were problems that meant the CloudStore was not online until Tuesday morning.

© 24N.biz