Holmes Attempts To Clarify Previous Blog Post

Deputy director in the Office of the CTO Alex Holmes has written a new blog post following one earlier this month which sparked concern in the technology sector.

In the offending posting, Holmes claimed that the IT Tower Model, adopted by many government Departments, was not condoned and is not in line with government policy.

The blog post immediately sparked criticism, most notably from techUK, the representative body for the country’s technology firms, which claimed it was unacceptable to make a significant change in policy without consulting industry first.

Holmes has now sought to clear the waters in a new blog post, claiming that the conversation needs to be focused on IT services that meet user needs rather than on procurement models.

Interpretation Is The Issue

The deputy director believes that much of the debate surrounding his earlier blog post comes from different interpretations of what a tower model actually is.

He claims this indicates the problems of following specifically named models rather than entirely focusing on what is needed and working out the right way to buy it.

“Cutting things into arbitrary ‘towers’ is unlikely to get you to the right result, in the same way that cutting things into arbitrary small pieces won’t work either,” Holmes claimed.

“The right size and model will be different for different components. I’m probably repeating myself here but for some things you might want to purchase them as outsourced services, for example infrastructure, others might be bought as off-the shelf solutions and some you may want to pay to be developed.

“The debate shouldn’t be about different fixed models and certainly not what is the government model, but how do we, like any other service-orientated organisation, build and buy services to meet the needs of our users? IT based around services, not Departmental of contract silos,” he added.  

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