Public Sector IT

Transport for London has spent £100m on a temporary contract that is still running after five and half years and will be clocking up more costs until 2014.

TfL gave a temporary IT contract to Computer Sciences Corporation in December 2006 after terminating an existing deal with Capgemini, claiming the stop-gap would be for just a year. But the temporary arrangement has been refreshed at least three times already.

TfL revealed the full cost of the temporary contract under coalition government orders to publish all contracts above £25m. TfL has like other departments not published its contract. But it did disclose a budget of £100m+ for CSC's "Marathon", the name of the temporary desktop computer contract.

A TfL spokeswoman said £100m was the total TfL had paid CSC under the temporary contract since 2006. The bill was inflated in January with another £21m for what the spokeswoman said was another temporary contract with CSC. This one would last until 2014.

She said TfL had extended its CSC contract again in 2011 while it conducted another IT review. Called "Project Horizon", it was completed in January. But TfL still needed more time to work out how it should organize its contracts. In 2007, TfL said it needed just a few months to work out how to organize its IT contracts. Then it stalled for more time until 2009 when it launched Project Horizon.

The spokeswoman said: "In August 2011, TfL had a contract providing a single point of contact for all IT incidents, the central helpdesk was provided by CSC. Following the completion of project Horizon in January 2012, the decision was made to extend the CSC contract to 2014 in order to provide time for us to complete the sourcing review and undertake and award any resultant procurement."

"Since the structural changes to TfL under Project Horizon, the information management team now operates for the whole organisation. In light of the new structure and emerging commercial and technological supply models we are in the process of reviewing the multi-sourcing arrangements to ensure they fully meet our business needs and provide the best service," she said.

CSC revealed January's temporary contract renewal in April, one week before its new CEO Mike Lawrie made his first presentation to Wall Street after joining the company in March. CSC had not had any good news in the UK since its 2009 cloud contract renewal with Royal Mail.

Liz Benison, CSC UK president, said in a press release: "We are delighted to be extending our relationship with TFL."

The temporary contract was set up by Phil Pavitt. Now chief information officer at HM Revenue & Customs, Pavitt is locked into a £multi-billion contract with Capgemini until 2017.

After Pavitt left TfL for HMRC, the transport body claimed to save money on its IT by bringing services back in-house from CSC. This is known only to have amounted to £6.7m over 2007 and 2009, according to TfL's board minutes.

Other budgeted TfL IT expenditure includes £100m+ with IBM for the congestion charge "enforcement" system, another £100m+ to Siemens for other congestion charge systems, £50-100m to NSL Limited for information systems and taxi licensing services, up to £25m to BT for an Automatic Vehicle Location system, up to £25m for SAP software licences and "maintenance", £25m for SAP managed services and application hosting and £25m to Computacenter for other hardware and software.

Public bodies have sacked at least 120 staff for abusing their access rights to the Department for Work and Pensions' Customer Information System, a government database containing details of every citizen in the country that will be at the heart of the coalition government's Universal Credit benefits system.

DWP admitted the latest sackings to Computer Weekly as Channel4 closed a year-long investigation into cowboy private investigators who steal private data from government databases for cash. A Channel4 Dispatches documentary, aired last night, revealed how the rogue operators in the burgeoning security industry were getting illegal access to personal data stored in government databases. Undercover reporter Chris Atkins bought with just a few hundred pounds data about people's state benefits, health complaints and criminal records.

Local Authorities sacked 46 staff between January 2010 and March 2012 after they were caught abusing their rights to access the DWP database, Computer Weekly can reveal exclusively.

DWP itself sacked 57 staff in the two years to March 2012 after they were caught snooping for personal data in their own system, the department told Computer Weekly in answer to a Freedom of Information request.

Snoops

The revelations bring to 120 the total known DWP database sackings since 2007. But this could be just the tip of the iceberg. DWP has disclosed information about only a small portion of those staff with access to the CIS. Having previously ignored requests for information about members of its own staff caught snooping, it has now revealed only those who were caught in the last two years.

The DWP citizen database is used by at least 200,000 people across almost the whole of central and local government. The DWP told Computer Weekly, as it has repeatedly since 2009, that it cannot reveal the full extent of data breaches on its national database because it does not "keep central records". HM Revenue & Customs, which employs a staggering 80,000 people, has refused access to information about any of its staff caught abusing their rights to access the DWP database.

Channel4's investigation found in response to another FOI that the DWP had, aside from sackings, disciplined 992 of its own staff in 10 months for breaching security of the CIS - five people every day. Full exposure of breaches and sackings at DWP and HMRC, which are merging their computer systems to form the Universal Credit benefits system, might damage the credibility of the flagship coalition programme.

Three years after Computer Weekly exposed the problem, local councils are still sacking people at the same rate. They have been forced to sack five staff on average every three months for snooping on on the CIS. Between January and March 2012, they sacked seven. Those sacked have been caught looking up celebrities, neighbours, family members, colleagues and acquaintances.

Spooks

The Channel4 documentary exposed a private investigator who bragged and then followed through on a claim that he could use an "internal contact" to get people's personal data for cash.

Stephen Anderson, director of Crown Intelligence and Security Limited, dredged up personal information about activists the undercover reporter said were causing a nuisance for a retail corporation. For £500, Anderson retrieved detailed records about claims for state benefits made by James Leadbitter, a climate change and anti-capitalist activist from Burnley.

On discovering illegal data breach, Leadbitter told the programme: "I feel sick. Why don't they just break into my flat and go through my stuff...I would struggle to get that information out of the DWP."

The source of the data was unconfirmed. The investigator did not reveal whether he used his inside contact or blagged the information by pretending to be someone he wasn't. The benefits data may have come from local authority databases or the DWP CIS. Further investigation not shown in the programme revealed that someone had been trying to blag data from a DWP call centre. It looked like the investigators were testing various well-trod routes to the data.

DWP claims the sackings prove its security checks are adequate: they catch staff who look up information they shouldn't. It records and tracks details of staff accesses on the system. It said the benefits data obtained by Channel4 did not come from DWP.

Software heavyweights filled the first meeting of the UK's extended public consultation on open standards last Friday, closing down telecoms patent advocates whose arguments had threatened to derail government policy.

Deputy government CIO Liam Maxwell had the night before extended the consultation for a month after discovering Microsoft, lead opponent of the UK's open standards policy, had been paying an independent Cabinet Office facilitator to help formulate its case. Government supporters had till then shown a lacklustre response to the consultation, while the policy, and open standards, had looked lost for the UK.

By Friday lunchtime the tables had turned.

Linda Humphries, Cabinet Office official, told a meeting of around 30 mostly software experts that the fields from which the government's opponents had been drawing their evidence was out of bounds for the consultation.

"The consultation is focusing on open standards in specifications for software interoperability, data and document formats," she said, with Maxwell looking on.

"It doesn't go into hardware, telecoms or software IP. There are some people concerned we are trying to run away with [their] IP. That's not the point at all. What we are talking about is standards," she said.

The meeting nevertheless dwelt for a significant time on just those things as the software industry staked its territory in what seemed like a pivotal moment for both it and the coalition government's ICT strategy.

Empty lobby

Microsoft's opposition to UK policy had been predicated on standards derived from hardware and telecoms. Representatives of those industries had dominated the last and now discredited consultation meeting. On Friday they were vastly outnumbered.

Steve Mustkoski, the Microsoft worldwide policy director who had led the vendor's lobbying effort in London, was registered but did not appear. Likewise his colleague, OASIS director Peter Brown. Andrew Hopkirk, the Microsoft consultant whose conflict of interest had been the cause of this sudden change in fortunes, did take his place at the table, even as stories about him broke in the trade press. He introduced himself as an independent advising Microsoft on the consultation and otherwise remained silent.

The meeting heard instead, for two hours, a relentless case for open standards. A handful of telecoms experts tried to sustain their industry's case for patents in software standards. But their arguments did not stand to scrutiny nor the onslaught of statements made by software heavyweights mustered by the open source software industry, who included a Queen's Counsel and a former counsel for the US government.

Iain Mitchell QC, representing Open Forum Europe, an open source campaign group collaborating with government, gave two examples of situations the government's open standards policy sought to debar: democratic lock-out and commercial lock-in, created in both cases by proprietary software.

Slovakian tax payers had been ordered to file their returns online using a system that would only work for people who used Microsoft software, said Mitchell. While an unnamed public authority in Scotland might become a test case for European law over its inability to choose any system for a £25m procurement but the one designed by a prior software supplier.

Open lobby

There was no debate on these points, though Humphries had said they were what the government's policy was all about - that and creating a level playing field for open source software, an election commitment to which the government intended to stick.

John Newton, chairman and chief technology officer of Alfresco Software, one of the larger open source suppliers, illustrated the Cabinet Office case for a level playing field.

Alfresco had sought to make its content management system interoperate with Microsoft's "monopoly" Office software but was scared off by it's patent-encumbered FRAND licence terms. Their assurances were both too complex and too vague to give an open source supplier enough legal certainty to take them up.

It would "completely screw up" Alfresco's open source business model, he said.

FRAND - the patent-bearing, 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory' licence terms at the heart of Microsoft's case against UK policy - was about the only matter over which the room heard any disagreement.

Keith Mallinson, a telecoms consultant, said the majority of the world's standards exacted royalty payments under FRAND terms. Mallinson believed UK policy excluded FRAND. It was therefore to be assumed it would exclude just about any standard you cared to mention, and to be deduced that it was hair-brained.

Except that the British Standards Organisation had told Computer Weekly the vast majority of standards it and the International Standards Organisation authorised did not exact royalties at all.

Royalty-free

Andrew Watson, technology director of the Object Management Group, a software engineering standards body, had attended the meeting to make exactly that point.

"We have a policy that in theory allows either free licences or reasonable and non-discriminatory licences," he said.

"In practice, in almost 20 years we have almost never published a specification that requires any money to be paid for a licence.

"We maintain about 177 specifications. One of them is encumbered by two patents. The holders agreed to licence them royalty free," he added.

Mark Bohannon, vice president of public policy at Red Hat, said he had the same experience when previously he was chief technology counsel for the US government's National Institute for Standards and Technology.

"We were involved in everything from toilet seats to encryption," he said. "On the whole, most standards do not have encumbrances that are relevant to this discussion. In our experience in software, most standards are not encumbered."

The telecoms experts, however, would not heed Humphries' request that patents were out of bounds. This was because Exhibit A for the patent lobby's case against open standards has been the patent-encumbered Mpeg audio and video compression formats.

Paul Jenkins, head of Strategic Programmes at BT, who professed a background in telecoms hardware, brought the topic up. It had been centre-piece in Microsoft's backroom lobbying of the Cabinet Office last year. The story goes that Mpeg is an example of how well a patent-encumbered standard can support a thriving market.

Yet the reason the patent lobby thinks government should embrace Mpeg is the same one for which the open software movement condemns it. Mpeg had originally been specified with hardware patents. When its compression algorithms were later implemented in software the patents stuck.

Hardware patents

Hence, said Mallinson, if UK government used open standards it would discriminate against hardware patent holders who happened to have gained a beachhead in software. This was particularly true of Mpeg, he said, in which the patented algorithms were inseparable from the standard.

The meeting was being drawn into a debate about software patents, another can of worms entirely. Move on to the next paragraph, quickly. Or otherwise, for a slithering taster, consider creating an open standard to govern the interoperation of software implementations using fundamental algorithms that are not only inseparable from their envelope, and which are not only patented under a US regime that permits mathematical formulas to be treated as property, but are also sanctioned in Europe (where patents are permissible only in software that is inseparable from specific underlying hardware) by virtue of their hardware heritage, even though they are now imposed on software running on general hardware over which patents would not normally be permitted at all. It's not possible, not an open standard.

Just as well the consultation was not about patents. It was, as IBM technical policy lead Chris Francis and others noted repeatedly, about how government could best exercise its prerogative as a customer buying software.

That was not however simply a matter of buying systems that employed open standards. As Open Source Consortium chairman Gerry Gavigan alluded, the government is a very large customer that can't adjust its seat without creating a gust with enough power to move markets. Hence government's concern for level playing fields and Slovakian democratic participation, as well as Scottish tax payers.

Hence also the patent lobby's complaints that an open standards policy would exclude them. UK policy wouldn't actually exclude them. But ignoring that fact, as the patent lobby did, the central question for the consultation meeting was therefore, what is a level playing field. That is, what is a free market for software, as opposed to a market for free software. Was it one sculpted by open standards or patented standards?

Mpeg

Fortunately for UK government, software experts with first-hand experience of Mpeg and telecoms patents had come from as far afield as Silicon Valley to state their case.

"The patent thicket around video has prevented progress in that for at least 20 years," said Kevin Marks, vice president of open cloud standards at Salesforce.com, who had implemented Mpeg4 in Apple's QuickTime player while working there at the turn of the millennium.

Marks said he had wanted to endow Apple's software with the means to handle open source alternatives to Mpeg. Mpeg's FRAND patent policy had prevented him.

"I was told by the VP at Apple, 'No we cannot do that because we've already taken licences to these other patents - they will withdraw that from us if we try and do that'," he said.

It was to be taken as an example of how patents could erect unhealthy barriers in a free market. Apple had continued having the same problem, said Marks.

"If you read the discussions about video codecs for HTML5, this is pretty much Apple's position. Apple said we cannot ship these codecs because we may get our licences to Mpeg withdrawn and that will effect our ability to sell iPods that play video," he said.

Notwithstanding that Apple had also been lobbying against the UK government's open standards policy, Phil Archer, eGovernment consultant for the World Wide Web Consortium, told the meeting confirmed its HTML5 standard had that problem.

"HTML5 has a video tag in it. And there have been arguments back and forward about which standard we should choose. We ended up deciding to choose none of them. Because we can't," he said.

Hamstrung

Their point was that patents had hamstrung even the most successful of open standards bodies. The hamstrings would tighten round the UK too if government wasn't resolute about open standards.

The problem was that standards defined in FRAND terms allowed patent holders to claim royalties on anyone who wanted to play. It is the equivalent in software of Aston Martin being permitted to sell its sports cars in the European single market only through Renault dealerships, and for a fee.

Playing fields like the W3C's World Wide Web and the Object Management Group's Unified Modelling Language had thrived because they were defined using open standards that ensured everyone competed on the same terms.

Archer said companies contributed to the Web standards process without expecting to charge an internet toll. They understood "they get money back by the fact that the Web exists and we can all make money out of it."

This was the unanimous opinion of those standards experts present.

"People who claim open standards but make proprietary claims prevent the standard from working," said Bohannon. Things worked different in the hardware industry, he said. Things worked the opposite way around.

The debate had found a roundabout way of clarifying Humphries' opening statement that hardware, telecoms and patents were out of bounds for the UK's software consultation.

It was a necessary digression. Because the meeting was held in the shadow of the immense patent dispute being fought by the larger telecoms and software corporations in international courts. The hardware patent brigade has been making a land grab for the software domain. It has whipped up a storm that has rattled at the cage where the Cabinet Office keeps its policy team, just as it rattled at the doors of its consultation meeting on Friday.

The UK had with its open standards policy promised to create a place of sanctuary for software producers harried by bullyboy patent holders. Those software multinationals that have been trying to disturb the peace are the very same that have been using patents to crush Android, Google's open source mobile operating system: Microsoft, Oracle and Apple. Their big-booted mates in the telecoms industry have now barged through the door of the UK's open standards consultation. They want to call the shots. They want to extract fees at the points where software producers make their programmes talk to one another. They have laid down terms. Their terms are FRAND.

Tanks > lawn

Simon Phipps, head of Sun Microsystems' open source programme until it was sold to Oracle, effectively told the telecoms experts, you are not wanted here.

"Their counsel is inapplicable to this consultation because this consultation is about the software market not the mobile phone market," he said.

The mobile and software markets worked on different terms, said Phipps, who had been a founder member of the Open Mobile Alliance, a telecoms standards body.

The mobile industry had sunk high capital costs into hardware it tried to recoup by claiming royalties over standards. The software industry did not. It co-operated in standards bodies like OASIS and the W3C to produce royalty free standards for the sake of the market. When the mobile industry veered into software territory, it tried to deal on its own terms. But the terms of competition in software were more subtle, he implied. Tolls where inapplicable.

Phipps accused the telecoms industry of running standards bodies that were "effectively a legally-arranged cartel". Gavigan said US legal precedent had created a possibility that they could be defined as such: they colluded, or co-operated, or whatever, for the purpose of locking out competitors.

Mallinson conceded Mpeg LA, a 'patent pool', was trolling software producers it might hit with patent fees. That effectively meant open source software producers.

Mpeg LA were not there to speak for themselves. But the outcome of the meeting would have been no different. They do not belong here. That's what the Cabinet Office said.

That is the way it will be unless the patent lobby manages to encumber UK software policy in a patent thicket as well.

Standards institutions persisted in their opposition to the UK's open standards policy after Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude reassured them their fears about it were unfounded, according to letters released to Computer Weekly under Freedom of Information.

The revelation raises questions about the minister's subsequent withdrawal of the UK policy, on 30 November, which was by then under no substantial pressure bar lobbying from large US software companies and, bizarrely, the record industry.

A letter sent by Maude in June last year, and obtained by Computer Weekly, showed how he had even then already extinguished threats and fears raised by opponents of the UK open standards policy in official standards bodies in Chiswick and Geneva.

The International Standards Organisation and its UK franchise, the British Standards Organisation, had threatened that the coalition government would be in breach of international agreements if it persisted with the policy. This would have meant expulsion from the international standards community, a threat so severe that it sent the Cabinet Office into a tailspin of public consultations.

But the standards bodies had got it all wrong - and this they later admitted.

The letters now obtained by Computer Weekly suggest they either misunderstood the policy because their executive officers did not understand software standards issues, or they wilfully misinterpreted it to protect their business interests. Neither organisation was available for comment.

ISO had written to Maude on 18 May to protest UK policy amounted to a bar on its standards, which were protected by law.

It said the UK was otherwise seeking to distribute ISO standards free of charge.

Letter

Maude's reply in June told ISO it was mistaken. UK policy would require public procurement officials to specify open standards only "wherever possible". It recognised that not all technology the government required would satisfy its preference for open standards.

The upshot was that ISO standards might not be listed among those the UK recognised as open and mandated for use in public systems. The list was a measure to avoid problems like that experienced at Bristol City Council, which said it was locked-in to using proprietary Microsoft systems against its wishes.

But, Maude assured: "We do not plan to preclude their inclusion if they are the most fit for purpose in delivering our business needs. Therefore ISO, IEC and BSI standards may be included in the catalogue and in UK procurements."

The rules would have meant standards like the Open Document Format were mandated for use in government systems, while proprietary formats like, say, Adobe's pdf were approved for limited purposes in recognition of the fact that they had cornered a specific market in which there were no known alternatives.

It is not clear why ISO and BSI persist in lobbying against this policy on those points which the minister had assured them were misunderstood.

Meeting

Maude met with Mike Low, BSI director of standards, in the week of 23 July to discuss the matter. But Lowe, a civil engineer who has held his post since 2003, was not satisfied.

Low said in an email to Maude on 27 July that he and the minister agreed UK policy should not rely on so narrow a definition of an open standard that it excluded other standards deemed important.

Speaking as UK representative of ISO, and in apparent ignorance of Maude's May letter, he said the government would "allay their fears" if it revised its definition of an open standard in a way that would encompass ISO standards.

He went on: "We recommend you clarify that the term open is not regarding the pricing/licensing models but the fact they must have been produced through an open process."

The sticking point for ISO was that part of UK policy said an open standard was one that prevented anyone from restricting its use through patent fees or licence terms.

Since Maude later retracted the policy (on 30 November) and put the question of what is an open standard out to public consultation, it looked like the minister had caved in on an IT policy that defined his party's position on matters as wide as open source software and how best to avoid Labour IT disasters like the NHS National Programme for IT.

Tea-cup

BSI later confirmed that it had been assured by Maude's explanation. But only after Liam Maxwell, Cabinet Office director of ICT futures, had gone over it again with David Bell, BSI head of policy, in October. Maxwell gave the same assurances Maude had given in June and, presumably, July. This time, BSI said later, "We were reassured". Yet it still maintained its opposition to UK policy, only now without apparent justification.

In January, ISO said its 18 May letter had sought clarification on UK policy, expressing its fear that its standards "might no longer be eligible" for public systems in the UK because they didn't meet the UK definition of an open standard.

"In a reply in June 2011 the Minister of Cabinet Office noted the concerns raised and indicated these would be considered along with the results of the survey. We understand the UK Government is further considering actions it will take on the matter. In view of this we want to see what the UK Government's response will be to the analysis of survey results," said ISO.

It gave no indication that its concerns had already been addressed in a manner that had "reassured" its UK representative.

The last Labour government's "Transformational Government" project has been rebirthed in California as a plan for world-wide reform of seismic proportions.

Four leading emissaries of the initiative teamed up in London this month to argue against the UK's open standards policy and have tried to persuade the Cabinet Office to adopt their policy instead.

The group, convened as the Transformation Government Framework Technical Committee of the OASIS standards organisation, was formed in collaboration with Microsoft by officials of a government that became synonymous with IT disasters. It has recruited the World Bank and other international institutions to persuade governments around the world to adopt its transformational policy.

The TGF Committee has told governments they should drop policies that address technology directly - policies like the UK's open standards policy. It has discussed instead a plan for a world-wide technical standards body and its members have expressed a preference for the controversial FRAND standards the UK has been trying to purge from its computing infrastructure.

Having been launched at a December 2010 World Bank meeting on the premise that the market had already settled all standards dilemmas of any importance, the OASIS TGF proposed in its first official publications this Spring a reform programme that incorporated privatization, civil service job cuts and a hegemonous computing architecture that all governments must follow.

Close-knit

Former deputy e-Envoy Chris Parker formulated the plan with the help of Microsoft worldwide policy director Steve Mutkoski. It was published by his company CS Transform, which had been paid by Microsoft to do work on the theme.

John Borras, a consultant for CS Transform and a senior member of OASIS, convened the OASIS TGF committee around the CS Transform plans. Borras had worked under Parker in Labour's Cabinet Office as director of technology. Other founding members of the committee included Peter Brown, managing director of a Brussels-based software consultancy called Pensive SA, where Borras also worked as chairman, and Andy Hopkirk, who as a director of the UK National Computing Centre in 2000 had helped Borras and Parker implement the Labour government's IT strategy.

Brown, Hopkirk, Mutkoski and Parker argued against the UK coalition government's policy at the first meeting of the Cabinet Office's open standards consultation on 4 April. This was the same team that had launched the TGF with Borras at the World Bank.

Ajit Joakar, another opponent of government policy at the Cabinet Office meeting, was notable for support he gave Mutkoski and Parker when they first elaborated early ideas for the TGF committee in 2009. Linda Humphries, the Cabinet Office policy official who convened the April meeting, was a junior official when Borras, Parker and Hopkirk held their senior posts there.

Denials

Borras told Computer Weekly the World Bank, European Commission and the European Regional Information Society Association were all "keen" to implement the committee's plans. The World Bank is currently formulating an ICT strategy for developing countries, while ERISA represents local governments across Europe.

He denied the plans had been formulated from narrow interests. "There's no chumminess," he said. The OASIS committee was "open and transparent".

"I've worked with many of these people over the years. Working for the UK government, I built a network of contacts around the world.

"We feel technology is not a barrier any more. So the focus has moved to business change. Governments are not organised in a way that is conducive to delivering online services. They need to restructure the way they do business. We are trying to help them on the best way of doing that," said Borras.

He denied his group was promoting a political agenda. He said TGF had not proposed privatisation and job cuts - described in his committee's Framework as "mixed economy service provision" and "restructuring of the public labour market". He said the plan was for "restructuring of operations to maximise the delivery of services...in the most efficient way". His committee had met with Cabinet Office officials who were considering its proposals.

Connections

Chris Parker told Computer Weekly Borras had known nothing about the Transformational Government plans being formulated at CS Transform until they were sent to him in 2010. He said Borras had merely been a consultant at CS Transform on a project basis. Parker said the original transformation plan had been formulated by Parker himself and Bill Edwards, a CS Transform director who also worked with Borras and Parker at the Labour e-Envoy Office as director of e-Communications, and also as managing director of Directgov. Edwards also joined their OASIS TGF committee.

Parker also played down Microsoft's involvement. He said CS Transform earned most of its income from governments. It had been paid by Microsoft but not specifically to produce the TGF proposals.

The TGF proposals were however formulated in collaboration Microsoft and CS Transform has co-branded a Microsoft brochure on the topic. Parker refused to discuss specific work CS Transform had done for Microsoft and whether the work had been supplied by Mutkoski, his colleague on the OASIS TGF.

Borras had in fact also worked for Parker at Gov3, the consulting firm the latter formed with Edwards on leaving the Labour Cabinet Office in 2004. Andrew Pinder, who as UK e-Envoy had been their ultimate boss in Labour's Cabinet Office, had launched Gov3 with them. Their work at the Cabinet Office had controversially produced a government system that forced people to use Microsoft technology.

Gov3 had similar proposals to those CS Transform adapted with the help of Microsoft to form the OASIS TGF committee. It was similar to their work at the Labour Cabinet Office. Borras said it was in fact an "evolution" of that work. The Gov3 work was also supported by the World Bank, where Borras, Edwards and Parker are official e-government advisers.

Borras said the OASIS TGF proposals did not require governments to adopt specific standards. But it was a topic the committee would address. It currently required government's to implement their computing infrastructure using the OASIS Service Oriented Architecture Reference Model.

Software patent heavyweights piled into the first public meeting of the Cabinet Office consultation on open standards on 4 April, conquering the meeting ballot with a resounding call to scrap the government's policy on open standards.

Open source and open standards campaigners complained they hadn't been invited to the Round Table event, the proceedings of which Cabinet Office will use to decide the fate of its beleaguered open standards policy.

Government supporters felt a growing sense of urgency over the consultation. Scattered and underfunded, they looked incapable of standing up to the big business interests that induced the consultation with backroom lobbying and have stepped forward now the debate has been brought out into the open.

Computer Weekly understands Cabinet Office officials regretted they hadn't got the meeting call out to a wider audience. Open standards supporters who attended complained it was stacked with opponents who easily dominated a meeting motion against the government's open standards policy.

Linda Humphries, Cabinet Office open standards official, said yesterday in a blogged report of the meeting: "The consensus was that the... proposed policy would be detrimental to competition and innovation."

Graham Taylor, chief executive of Open Forum Europe, which has worked closely with Cabinet Office IT policy makers, said he was "disappointed" the meeting hadn't been "representative".

Malcolm Newbury, consultant director at Guildfoss, said: "It was me and Graham against the rest. The patent lawyers had the most to say and they definitely wanted to include royalties on standards. They don't want the government to maintain its current position."

Heavyweights at the meeting included Steve Mutkoski, Microsoft's global head of standards, who flew in from Seattle. He was backed in debate by patent lawyers and experts from the telecoms industry that holds many of the patents being wielded against government policy.

Matthew Heim, senior director and legal counsel for $16bn US telecoms corporation Qualcomm, was present. As was Timothy Cowen, partner with Sidley Austin LLP, former general counsel for BT and founder of the Microsoft-backed Open Computing Alliance.

Behind them was Richard Kemp, senior partner at Kemp Little LLP, the "global top 10" ranked lawyer who represents numerous telecoms firms as well as record industry royalty collectors; Keith Mallinson, founder of WiseHarbor, a telecoms industry consultant; and Harshad Karadbhajne, a paralegal patent expert with Innovate Legal.

The debate swung wide of the truth as heavyweights complained government policy would exclude the patented software standards supported by their preferred software licence, known as FRAND - Fair, Reasonable, and non-Discriminatory.

Government policy, withdrawn under organized pressure from the patent lobby last year, had however not excluded FRAND. It had proposed giving preference to royalty-free software standards in government systems, but conceded FRAND standards might be used when there was no alternative.

That is the matter now in consultation. The patent lobby swiped the initiative with arguments that will feed those who accused it of using misinformation to win similar debates in other places, most notably Brussels, where a significant huddle of the heavyweights cut their teeth.

If they failed to expose genuine flaws in government policy, they at least focused attention on the points where government justification has appeared weakest. Cabinet Office's proposal for a mandatory list of open standards was unfair, they argued, because it would forbid standards encumbered with patents. This was however the whole point of the open standards policy, notwithstanding that it had, again, conceded patent-encumbered standards would be tolerated where no open standards where available.

These are the arguments with which the patent lobby induced government to withdraw its open standards policy last year and put it to consultation.

Open source campaigners said they had been left out. Gerry Gavigan, chairman of the Open Standards Consortium complained the meeting had been held without his knowledge. Linda Humphries had just days before attended a British Computer Society meeting where Gavigan delivered a talk about her policy consultation. Gavigan had locked antler's with Microsoft's Mutkoski at the meeting. But Humphries had not brought the Cabinet Office event to people's attention.

Richard Melville, a member of the BCS Open Source specialist group, said: "No-one seemed to know about the meeting at all."

Simon Phipps, former head of open source at Sun Microsystems, and who also regretted missing the meeting said: "I'm hearing from sources that the Cabinet Office hasn't had much input from open source interests and is being lobbied extremely heavily by the forces of monopoly."

Other people at the meeting included Peter Brown, secretary to the board of standards body Oasis, who argued forcefully in favour of patent-encumbered standards. And also Ajit Jaokar, founder of research company Futuretext, a telecoms expert with a self-professed leaning for open systems; Dr Andrew Hopkirk, an independent consultant, formerly of the National Computing Centre; and Aingaran Pillai, open source software engineer and founder of Zaizi, an Alfresco systems integrator.

There was no remorse from Computer Sciences Corporation last night as it told investors about another breakdown of talks with the National Health Service.

While hospitals across England wait for CSC to deliver patient information systems due five years ago, CSC said it was launching its health software in the US.

Talks broke up on 31 March, when CSC and the NHS failed again to find a contractual resolution to the computing giant's broken 2003 promise to deliver its iSoft Lorenzo software to the NHS.

CSC admitted in a conference call with Wall Street analysts last night that the NHS had still not been satisfied. Yet the computing giant had used its UK experience to build a healthcare business fit for rolling out round the world.

"It's an active part of our plan, to take iSoft to the US market," said Guy Hains, the CSC UK boss recently appointed as global president of healthcare systems.

"We see significant potential in applying this experience to other country health markets. There isn't a market globally that doesn't have considerable interest it learning from the UK NHS, both good and bad."

CSC was apparently best placed to dispense this learning. It had its sights on Spain. It was already busy in Holland, Australia, South Asia and South America.

But from whence had its chutzpah come? Not only had CSC still not satisfied its NHS contract, it hadn't even finished writing the software. Initial roll-out was due in 2007. Complete delivery was due this year. Hains told Wall Street CSC was now at last ready to roll out phase one but for a contractual settlement with the UK's coalition government.

But this was okay. Because CSC had a plan. This was not a plan for the reparation of 10 years of time and money the NHS has wasted on CSC. Nor was it a plan to recompense for the opportunity cost the NHS incurred while CSC dawdled over its clinicians' request for better patient information. It was a plan to get its own finances in order, negotiate a firm settlement with the NHS and dazzle Wall Street with a come-back launch into what is tipped to be one of the few global growth markets: healthcare IT.

Wall Street analysts privileged with the opportunity to ask Hains about this glorious transformation neglected to get his estimation of the value the British public subsidy had added to his corporation's healthcare business in the last 10 years. British tax payers are due a share of this tremulous global growth machine, no?

Waffle

Neither did Wall Street get to the bottom of the latest delay. Hains explained it away with waffle and claimed the details were not for public ears.

"I would say the delay reflects the complexity of the change being undertaken and the need for very detailed agreements," he said.

This was what they call a win-win, apparently. Hains reckoned that since the coalition government's NHS reforms involved devolving power to regional bodies, CSC was having to "consult very widely on this agreement".

That wide consultation did not as usual involve consulting with the British public, or even allowing them to know what the details of those consultations were. Ours is not to know. But it wasn't important anyway. There were "no specific roadblocks" to a contractual resolution, said Hains, who is personally conducting the negotiations for CSC. It was just taking time to settle the details.

We are not to worry our pretty little heads with man's talk about such things as public expenditure, mortality rates and what CSC has still to agree before British hospitals can start getting the software they were promised in 2003.

The NHS refused as usual to answer questions about it today. These mysterious details have meanwhile led talks to drag on for more than two years. It has led to an agreement in principle being torn up on at least two occasions.

Yet there will be no throwing of rotten tomatoes. The coalition government has no choice but to make a tidy deal with CSC. It's electioneering made NHS IT into such a gargoyle that it would not live down continued failure. CSC is, after 10 years of public nurture and a government-sanctioned monopoly kept in stasis while it did its R&D, one of the few suppliers that can deliver the goods.

Indeed, said Hains last night, "the timing is perfect".

"The key customer contact will now move, as indeed the government has stated as policy, much more towards the [NHS] Trusts.

"The major change is, we are not building a monolithic system to address the back-office through a large-structure, fixed price development programme with a central agency. The central agency will play a key part in the tripartite relationship. But a key focus of our activity will be working closely with the trusts," he said.

Pleased

The coalition government's health IT policy was, in corporate words, in synergy with CSC's latest business model. They had happened to be in synergy in 2003 when CSC was into doing monolithic deals and a Labour government wanted to improve the nation's health systems. But there was never going to be any monolithic system. That's the bogeyman. It was just a handful of monolithic deals for companies like CSC to install vapourware like Lorenzo in Trusts across the country.

CSC's failure to deliver was the main reason for the failure of that policy. The coalition used it to significant effect in kicking Labour out. It will now re-purpose Labour's legacy in its own image. It's what you call a win-win for CSC and the coalition. But mostly for CSC.

Hains pointed out that its strength in health IT had come last year from its acquiring iSoft, the troubled software supplier that had ultimately failed to deliver. iSoft had other business besides its yet unfinished NHS Lorenzo system. It had given CSC a business relationship with 85 per cent of NHS Trusts.

It had perhaps also given Hains reason to boast as he did to Wall Street last night, about 2,000 systems he said CSC had installed in the NHS to date.

On 18 May last year the National Audit Office reported that CSC had installed just 15 of what by a rough calculation was 112 contracted NHS Trust systems. If you count the SME systems it had put into local doctor's surgeries as well, it had installed 1,392 of 4,441 systems due in 2007.

He did not clarify if his 2,000 installs included doctor's surgeries as well as those innumerable "legacy" installs it acquired with iSoft. Neither would the NHS confirm what tangible progress had been made since last May. Best not speak of such details, lest it upsets investors.

The Cabinet Office has shaved about a fiver off the cost of an Oracle licence after high powered negotiations in which minister Francis Maude pressed the flesh with Oracle president Safra Catz.

The minister claimed a coup for tax payers on Wednesday after concluding negotiations over a memorandum of understanding that sets prices central government departments will pay for Oracle software.

But while Maude's office claimed the deal gave British citizens more transparency over government business, it refused to clarify the dubious source of the £75m saving the minister claimed he had made with the deal.

The deal is supposed to save £75m over three years. But only a portion of the headline number came from an actual discount you could spit and shake on.

The rest came from shared services and licence sharing. That meant that some of £75m was derived from government offices buying fewer Oracle licences. This imaginary number was inflated by extrapolating its value over three further years when these non-Oracle licences would not be bought and therefore the money not spent and never even earmarked for spending could be accounted as a saving.

Licence sharing was similarly swizzed up as a saving for tax payers by making it sound as though Oracle had conferred on the government the special privilege of taking software bought but no longer needed by one department and sticking it in another department.

Cabinet Office refused to say what the actual discount was. A spokeswoman said it was "commercial in confidence". Yet it had been happy to trot out the £75m "saving" in a press release and claim it a boon for tax payers.

Pennies

It is doubtful the government made any saving worth talking about, if at all. A disgruntled government officer complained in November about Oracle's hold over public sector IT. 70 per cent of all software licences bought by central government departments were for Oracle software. That was 10 million licences.

The deal Maude parped about this week was for more licenses than those in central government. It covered emergency services as well. But his department couldn't say how many licences the deal concerned. Lets say for argument's sake it was just those 10m in central government. And lets assume for now the entire £75m "saving" was derived from a spit'n'shake discount. That would mean the government had saved £7.50 per Oracle licence over three years. That's £2.50 per licence per year.

But since the material discount was just one portion of the claimed saving, it would be generous to assume the government had saved even as much as a fiver on the cost of a licence. That's £1.60 per licence per year.

There may not, however, have been even that much of a saving to shout about.

The Office of Government Commerce (now called the Government Procurement Service) has had a similar MOU with Oracle since 2003. It started its last major round of MOU negotiations in 2009. The current discount arrangement sounds similar to the last. It is likely derived from the standard cost-price of Oracle software, similar to the MOU it has with Microsoft, not the actual current government spend on Oracle. That would make three imaginary numbers contributing to the £75m total.

So what has HM Maude really done for us?

The Oracle MOU might be such a poor deal that no-one takes it up, thus helping Maude achieve his promise to cut government's unhealthy dependency on a few suppliers, and so save real money and promote innovation.

The aforementioned disgruntled officer - the then outgoing deputy government chief information officer Bill McLuggage - had complained about the stifling effect government's Oracle dependence had on the market, on innovation and prices.

The Cabinet Office was today unable to say what it had done to reduce its Oracle dependency. CW has been waiting for Cabinet Office to clarify its numbers since Wednesday.

McLuggage had derived his Oracle numbers from a long promised survey of government ICT spending, which is yet in its infancy. This Assets and Services Knowledge Base (ASS KIT) is supposed to tell government what it's spending and what discount it's actually getting, something it's been promising to do for more than a decade.

Cabinet Office is not making the ASS KIT data available to the public - only to its suppliers. So much for transparency.

Microsoft has been trying to persuade the British government to break its promise to back a single document format, Computer Weekly has learned.

If Microsoft's lobbying succeeds it will require the Cabinet Office to erase yet another crucial element of its flagship ICT Strategy, giving the software giant trump cards over the standard that set the terms of competition for its competitors.

Microsoft advised the UK Cabinet Office to appoint two official document standards, one of which should be its own Microsoft Office Open XML format. The other, Microsoft said in private lobbying, should be the one government officials have favoured and has been widely assumed to be the one sure thing in the coalition government's technology policy: the Open Document Format.

The government's ICT strategy made a single, open document format the primary objective of its open standards policy when it was published last year.

"The first wave of compulsory open standards will determine, through open consultation, the relevant open standard for all government documents," it said.

Though Cabinet Office since retracted its open standards policy after lobbying from Microsoft on another issue, putting it out to public consultation, it has given no sign that its promised official document standard may also be up for grabs.

Make or break

The government is now faced with a decision of apparently insignificant proportions that but goes to the heart of a technology policy the Conservatives said would solve the problems that had apparently beset Labour's big IT systems: most particularly, they said, the NHS National Programme for IT.

That decision is whether on the one hand to sanction an open document standard: the sort of standard the government said it would use to break big IT projects into manageable chunks and promote innovation by preventing a single powerful company from controlling the market. Or whether on the other hand to use Microsoft's standard.

It sounds straightforward because it is. But the details are so murky that the government might yet drop its principle and opt for Microsoft's standard instead.

Microsoft competitors began work on the original open document format in 2001 in an effort to breach its office software monopoly. Simon Phipps, who led the effort as the then head of open source at Sun Microsystems, said they invited Microsoft to take part and held the standard setting forum at the OASIS industry consortium. Microsoft refused, he says.

By the time ISO had accredited the Open Document Format as an official standard in 2006, policy makers were beginning to realise how important open standards were in preventing monopolies like Microsoft's forming in the first place. Microsoft retaliated by steam-rolling its document format through the ISO approval process and making it available free of charge and without royalty claims or restrictions: it made it open.

On that basis alone, Microsoft might now convince the Cabinet Office that there is no harm sanctioning both document formats. Both are open. But it would be a grubby compromise that would breach the principle of the government's election promises as well as the trust of those who believed it was serious about technology reform.

Market singular

The compromise has already tainted ISO's reputation as standards authority. There was already a document standard when Microsoft asked ISO to approve its format. ISO justified its decision by claiming the market had called for another document standard. But the market that called for Microsoft's standard was Microsoft itself, Microsoft's supply chain, and Microsoft's customers.

As ISO gave its approval controversially in February 2008, the European Commission issued Microsoft with a record €899m fine for abusing its dominant market position by restricting competitors through the use of its ubiquitous software standards.

It seemed absurd to have two standards for one thing. Phipps says it's like having different sorts of railway tracks. Trains designed for tracks of one gauge won't easily travel along tracks of another. David Bell, head of policy at the British Standards Institution, told Computer Weekly last month he knew of no other instances of different standards approved for the same thing.

In 2008, ISO's then president Rob Bryden told your correspondent the market would eventually have to decide between the two because there could ultimately be only one document standard.

Except that Microsoft was the market.

By 2010, local authorities with close ties to the team that drafted the government's open standards policy were complaining that Microsoft's hold over document standards was preventing them using competing software. The standards were incompatible, allowing Microsoft to retain possession of the market, charge monopoly rents, and keep innovative competitors at bay.

That was the point of the government's open standards policy: to regulate failed technology markets by removing barriers such as those inherent in proprietary standards like Microsoft's.

Microsoft still is the market. Francis Cave, a publishing consultant and ISO document standards expert, says his clients all use Microsoft software and have no interest in open document formats. They care only that they can create, edit and share documents. Neither he nor they give much thought to market issues. Only large companies care about ODF because they handle such large amounts of money that they have a keener appreciation of what the Microsoft monopoly costs them.

Much the same may be said of ISO, a body which has no interest in markets. It may wash its hands of any responsibility for the consequences of its decisions, but the market will not deliver the justice Bryden assumed it would when his organisation approved a second document standard in 2008.

EU market regulators demonstrated just how injudicious ISO's stewardship of standards could be. It is now up to policy makers to set the rules of the game so another Microsoft doesn't create another stifling monopoly as the market moves into the cloud.

Tellingly, Cave says there had been a call for an "über-standard" to unite Microsoft's document standard and the open format. But the market hasn't got behind it.

The International Standards Organisation has admitted it doesn't know what an open standard is, despite trying to have the UK's open standards policy quashed.

The situation has left ISO and its franchise partners, such as the UK's British Standards Institution, looking a lot less authoritative. While open standards are being branded onto statutes around Europe, and after more than half a decade of controversies so great it caused street protests against ISO's treatment of the open standards issue, the legal authority on standards now refuses even to acknowledge its existence.

Yet ISO and its partners had so successfully lobbied against the UK open standards policy last year that the Cabinet Office withdrew it. And its lobbying, like that of all those who opposed the policy, concerned one specific question: what is an open standard.

ISO and its partners said the UK had got the answer wrong. So what then should it be? That's what Computer Weekly has been pressing ISO to say since January.

"ISO does not have a definition of 'open standard'," is what ISO said finally this week.

It sounded incredible. But it exposed how frail ISO's position had become.

Last year it had, along with other standards bodies and the software patent lobby, been trying to get the UK to change its definition of an open standard from one that forbade anyone claiming patent royalties on an interface or protocol to one that permitted them. But the redefinition would have made the official definition of open standards indistinguishable from the definition of a proprietary standard that just so happened to be the sort of standard favoured by ISO & co.

ISO and the rest of the standards and patent establishment has subsequently been unable to define an open standard because what they have been telling the UK government an open standard should be is indistinguishable from their proprietary model. They have been found out: they are in fact opposed to open standards, though they have not been as bold to say so; if it is not that ISO is too blockheaded to see it, it is then too artful to admit it.

The blockhead theory would be no surprise. The kernel of ISO's standards policy is the patent accord it struck in 2007 with the International Electrotechnical Commission and the International Telecommunication Union. It is a blanket policy to be applied to standards for everything from knob sizes and widget mechanisms to software interfaces. It sounds like a fudge because that's what it is.

Malcolm Johnson, director of standards at the ITU, said when the accord was struck that it was a compromise between patent holders and "the interests of end-users".

It was an act by which old-world standards bodies steeped in hardware patent traditions sought, in sweeping disregard of the differing modus operandi of software, to hold software producers to their old-world terms - like an overbearing parent, or an outmoded establishment fearful of losing its grip on power.

This lack of an open standards definition, let alone policy, is telling. It was formulated, or not, by the international network of ISO franchise bodies such as the BSI, whose seniors form the main constituent parts of the ISO governing council, its general assembly, and its technical advisory board. These members have in common a business model that is at odds with UK policy. The UK would have open standards that, like the standards maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, are free at the point of use. ISO members use charges at that very point as a source of income. Their opposition to open standards must thus be couched in terms of their own financial interests as well as the financial interests of patent holders or they cannot be fully understood.

It is tempting in light of all this to look at the collective curriculum vitae of ISO's governing officers and conclude, blockheads one and all: either too old, too fat or too comfortable; what do they know of software?

ISO president Dr. Boris Aleshin, former Russian deputy prime minister, is an aviation electronics expert. Vice president Sadao Takeda, former IT mandarin at the Japanese Ministry of Economy and Trade (Japan's equivalent to the UK's blockhead Department of Business, Innovation and Skills) is a former engineering academic. Technical vice president Dr. Elisabeth Stampfl-Blaha, a lawyer by training, is a career, old-world standards wonk. ISO treasurer Julien Pitton is a former Swiss investment banker and likely wearer of bow-ties. Rob Steele, ISO secretary general, is a chartered accountant.

(It is only how it looks, but that is how they look: like the Adam's Family had landed cushy jobs in Geneva; or a recasting of the Soprano's: Rob Steele is probably in therapy over his inability to come to terms with the progressive turn the world has taken since he took up the administrator's cummerbund.)

The BSI has already admitted it did not know why it was lobbying against the UK's open standards policy, only that is what it had been told to do by ISO in Geneva. ISO in turn says its policy is formed by constituents like BSI. Does anyone know what's going on? BSI's resident standards experts are from non-IT, engineering fields. It's public policy expert is a career standards wonk who cannot explain its software policy either.

It was no surprise this week therefore when ISO was also unable to give Computer Weekly any examples of when it's policy might be justified. That is, when it might be justified for a patent holder to make a claim on a software standard. Neither could BSI.

While technocrats in Westminster and Brussels cringe over the question of open document formats, the US military is planning a generation of open source helicopters.

This is not just a generation of helicopters. It is the next generation of US military helicopter. It'll be built on open standards, and will actively court open source systems suppliers.

The US Army issued a request for information on the proposal last week, formally kick-starting a procurement that will make the pedestrian kerfuffle over document formats in civvy street seem, well, pedestrian.

It has already shone an unforgiving light on the question of royalties - one that has undermined every civil administration that has attempted to implement an open standards policy in Europe.

Weapons manufacturers and US forces made an unequivocal declaration for royalty-free standards in January through the FACE (Future Airborne Capabilities Environment) Consortium they formed in response to US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's call for a "common aircraft architecture and subsystems".

"The FACE Standard is an open, nonproprietary technical specification that is publicly available without restrictive contracts, licensing terms, or royalties," the Consortium announced from its base at The Open Group, the industry association responsible for the POSIX open Unix specification.

"In business terms, the open standards specified for FACE mean that programmers are freely able to use them without monetary remuneration or other obligation to the standards owner," it said.

(Then we heard a hum)

While business software producers have opposed governments that have tried to implement identical open standards policies with the claim it will handicap innovation and dampen competition, the US military is embracing open standards for precisely the opposite reasons.

It is doing it in other words precisely for those reasons European administrations have tried to implement identical policies and failed: to prevent an unhealthy concentration of market power in the hands of a small number of private interests. It wants, it says, to prevent "lock-in" being achieved by a few powerful suppliers.

But business software producers have mesmerised administrations with the idea that proprietary claims over open standards preserve their moral right to the vigorous pursuit of individual excellence: being denied that right would force their engineers to compromise with second-rate interlopers who would stull their wits and steal their ideas; and condemn them to spend the rest of their days staring out from the windows of tedious conference rooms over Geneva, of all places, while the rest of the world hurtled on its way without them.

In few places are do such concerns press more keenly than the schemes of a weapons manufacturer; certainly not the headquarters of a producer of word processors, where the consequences of failure are measured in numbers of seats not bodies.

Yet civil suppliers will not be shaken from the proprietary confidence they draw from the righteous giving properties of hardware.

The software establishment's recent lobbying of the British government cited the usual hardware-dependent standards as justification for proprietary claims on all standards. It cited mp3, the audio compression software standard encumbered with patents held by the electronics industry, and gsm and umts, mobile telecoms standards.

It went hmmmm

Here, said the proprietary lobby, are examples of how successful a proprietary standard can be. Open standards are lame in comparison, they said: open standards are for quiche eaters.

The US military intervention has broken this illusion insisting that Future Aircraft systems must be implemented independent of hardware.

Kill-or-be-killed stakes intensify the relationship between hardware and software in military systems. The military has consequently been held by ransom to its hardware manufacturers, whose warfighting electronics have granted them a proprietary hold over the software domain. It tends not to upgrade aircraft until they are replaced by sole-source contractors with everything to gain by having their proprietary domain extend to the specification of every component and interface.

Denouncing the "immaturity" of the business model, FACE harks to a day when IBM broke the hardware dependence of civil software with the IBM PC specification.

The military has already made some progress in, for example, common cockpit displays that can be shared between F-22 fighter planes and Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters. The idea is that a green box can be ripped out of one killing machine and put in another. Or the old one might be upgraded with a model from a different supplier without the underlying electronics manufacturer claiming special mooring rights. Likewise a better control system can be slipped on like a new coat. That's the idea.

(Maybe it's helicopters)

But it also proposes making a long jump past the present state of evolutionary cramp the civil IT industry has got itself in over standards, where people are forced to use software designed ultimately in the interests not of the hardware platform but of whoever owns the rights to the software platform.

Software systems have become the most important aspect of military aviation, said the FACE consortium in January. Electronics acquisitions were increasingly being "implemented via software". It imagined a "mature" software environment in which implementations were modular and comprised of components already battle-hardened in other implementations. It would cut unit costs by 20 per cent, reckoned the Government Accountability Office. As part of an open aircraft architecture it would cut costs by 50 per cent, reckoned FACE.

The FACE Consortium spelled it out for the bozos and dissemblers: it doesn't mean green box and code producers can't plug in patented systems - it doesn't matter if what's swapped in is open source - as long as it doesn't try to claim a toll on the interfaces everyone else has to use.

(Or foreigners eating quiche)

The international race for informational dominance makes this something more than an IBM PC specification for aeroplanes. It is appropriately housed at The Open Group, where the POSIX standard that concluded the Unix wars provides an object lesson for the military. That is, it may act to avoid being engulfed by the fog of an internecine standards war between its defence contractors while some foreign peril rolls out a swarm of death-dealing hardware with the collective intelligence of the Borg.

Meanwhile in Brussels, European digital commissioner Neelie Kroes has ducked a call for an official open document standards mandate. That's all - just documents.

But no: her administration is still locked in to buying a Microsoft applications infrastructure for 36,000 users - without a public call for competition because there is no officially recognised competition - and will still be locked in next year when the arrangement has its 20th anniversary.

Proprietary systems suppliers have been trying to convince administrators their unnatural privileges must be preserved if the European software industry is to be protected from foreign competition. It seems the opposite may be true.

Next year is also the 50th anniversary of the day Niklaus Wirth, grandfather of modular software, graduated with a Ph.D from Berkeley University.

It has taken the world a long time to come round to his way of thinking. But the quiche eaters may not have their day if civil administrators don't do something about their pitifully unambitious policies.

Failed IBM outsourcing venture Southwest One became a cause célèbre in Somerset last week, with the council leader damning it so loudly he almost sounded like he might do something about it.

But it was all hot air. And it had the stink of opportunism, what with Somerset being in the middle of renegotiations over its 10-year Southwest One contract. Southwest One was nevertheless forced to respond. But when it did, it merely gave a blast of hot air as well: giving the same assurances that it has been giving Somerset for the last four and a half years. Yes, there was a right pong hanging over Somerset last week.

It all started letting off after Computer Weekly exposed the terrible state of the IBM venture's finances.

Southwest One had appeared on the verge of bankruptcy in the 2010 accounts that Chairman Derek Pretty signed off just last month.

CW asked SW1 whether IBM had saved it from bankruptcy with the £10m mortgage it extended last month. It ignored our questions.

Council leader Ken Maddock had meanwhile used his annual budget statement before a full council meeting last Wednesday to give SW1 a dressing down.

SW1 had been a failure, he repeatedly told councillors. His words reverberated around the county. He called SW1 a failure no fewer than eight times in his brief speech. SW1 had failed to give the people of Somerset value for money, good prices or flexibility, he said.

So he was presumably going to cancel the contract or at least do something more convincing than what Somerset had been doing over the four years in which SW1 consistently failed to deliver on the promises IBM made on its behalf in 2007? No, actually.

"We [will] continue to do all we can to make Southwest One work," he said.

But there is one thing Maddock will be doing after his speech. He'll be back to renegotiations over the SW1 contract. The media squall that followed his outburst will have done Somerset's negotiating position no harm at all.

And there was something else he would do: more outsourcing. He had embarked on a review of what other things the council could outsource to joint ventures like SW1.

"Almost half our most vital services are carried out by private sector or not for profit organisations - we will look to increase this where appropriate," he said, failing to note the unbelievable irony of it.

SW1 answered Maddock by claiming it was still on track to make savings for the council.

"We have negotiated contracts that will deliver savings of at least £71m for the partners over the next few years, of which they have implemented £15m to date," it said.

But it had been repeating this statement during the four years that its directors were forced in January to write-off as an accounting loss.

IBM had in 2007 promised £192m of over 10 years. SW1's failure to deliver these savings had been apparent to critics in 2009. It answered them by claiming it had "identified" savings of £65m.

"It has claimed an early success in procurement, identifying £65m in savings and declaring that it is on course to deliver £200m over the 10 year life of the contract," said The Guardian after an interview with Somerset chief executive Alan Jones in 2009.

An internal review commissioned by then newly elected Somerset council leader Ken Maddock found in 2010 that SW1 had delivered just £2m of its promised savings. The earlier identified £65m savings were nowhere to be seen.

SW1 reassured councillors in 2010 it had identified savings of £45m. It had accumulatively identified savings now of £110m.

But SW1 admitted in its statement last week it had actually delivered just £15m. Identified savings were now £71m.

Little appears to have changed, apart the now wide acknowledgement of SW1's failure. SW1 may refuse to admit it in statements to the press, but its directors were forced to admit it in not so many words in its 2010 accounts. They had been forced to tear up its business model and start again.

Its bankruptcy was also apparent. It couldn't pay its debts. Its directors doubted it would cover them by the time it had reached the end of the 10-year outsourcing contract into which it had been spun-off from Somerset County Council in 2007. It was about half-way through its £0.5bn term and its directors couldn't even foresee how to cover its £17m start-up costs.

SW1 directors had been so embroiled with their troubles they were four months late filing their accounts. They only did so after IBM had given them a £10m mortgage. They said they had a new business model. This time it would deliver. They didn't say what it was.

The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has dissolved the Public Data Corporation while its confused policy Cabinet joint Office initiative team works out how to make open data workable.

Cabinet Office rushed out a revamped Open Data strategy on 29 November, "delivering on its commitment to establish a Public Data Corporation".

BIS had already established the Public Data Corporation as a private company on 11 November 2010. But the company had laid dormant for a year while the departments and the Local Public Data Panel worked out how to get an HM data-set free-for-all round the vast bellies of such comfortable institutions as the Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Met Office*.

Then BIS struck the Public Data Corporation off the company register on 31 January, the day the Cabinet Office failed to publish responses to its Public Data Corporation consultation, an initiative that drew flack over plans to charge the public for access to public data.

What it did do on that day was publish responses to the less substantial Making Open Data Real consultation, while Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told big knobs at the World Bank how vested interests made transparency tricky but that people power was ensuring the future would be open.

But what would ensure government data would be open? Cue Sir Tim Berners Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, poster boys for all things webby, whose association can be assured to guarantee a warm reception for any government initiative, no matter how hastily drawn.

Maude effectively promised the compelling duo an Open Data Institute (sort of like a semantic web thing) a little more than a year after he binned the Semantic Web Institute (sort of like an open data thing) they had been hastily promised by the last Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Rhinoceroses

But the Open Data Institute will have nothing to do with the Public Data Corporation, which is now closed, and to which the Cabinet Office still has a firm commitment though BIS is still working out the detail of how exactly it will be constituted when it is again reconstituted.

The Institute will apparently do research into the sorts of technologies and issues that will ultimately define the parameters with which the Public Data Corporation will work. It may consider such thorny questions as how to deal with the money grabbers who threaten to undermine not only the government's Public Open Data policy but the very World Wide Web our dear, dear Sir Tim invented.

That still leaves the grubby business of open data - the money matters - to be worked out at BIS. With Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Met Office round the table it will be like negotiating reduced grazing rights with Rhinoceroses.

The open data ITerati has been working on the question of what to do about these heavies under the official tutelage of the Cabinet Office ever since the last government set up the Data Panel in January 2010. A big question has always been whether BIS even "gets IT", and even if it does whether the heavies leave it any room for manoeuvre.

The same question has slowed up progress of the Cabinet Office's other radically liberalising IT initiative, that of open standards. In that case vested interests at the BIS-owned British Standards Institution have been trying to block progress.

Dieting rhinoceroses

The most recent thinking on the open data plans suggest there is very little room for manoeuvre. BIS plans to host a Data Strategy Board that will commission a Public Data Group to act as an umbrella to the heavies - known as trading funds.

Depending on who you talk to, PDG will be knocking these Rhinoceroses into shape - getting them used to more meagre diets - or paying them for public data the government then makes available to the public for free. The latter is the official BIS line.

Only in Whitehall could such a clever arrangement of patronage have been devised: Cabinet Office gets to say it has delivered on its open data strategy by making public data free to the public, the heavies get to make more money, while BIS successfully fortifies them against reality as constituted rather inconveniently for vested interests in Sir Tim's World Wide Web.

The government will presumably also now be paying the trading funds in addition to funding them. This is apparently designed to help them get used to working more efficiently in a digitized world. What it more likely means is they still plan to make more money flogging public data than they get paid by the government to liberate it.

As for exactly how the Public Data Corporation, or Group or whatever, will be constituted, no-one yet knows. We will at least be told before BIS/Cabinet Office publish the responses they received to the Public Data Corporation Consultation, which might just complicate matters too much were they to get out sooner.

* And Companies House, which is also one of the official Trading Funds. Until BIS dissolved the company, if you want to look in its filings for information on what the department was doing to make public data free for the public you had to pay Companies House for it.

The power of large software corporations is demonstrated by the immense trouble an elected government has when it attempts to act in a way that doesn't put their interests before the public good.

That's been the UK experience this last year since the Cabinet Office introduced its open standards policy.

The way the rights holders were acting, anyone would think the government was trying to outlaw proprietary standards. Microsoft and Oracle threatened trade wars with China. The British Standards Institution and ISO threatened the UK with expulsion from their powerful club.

Never mind that the government was elected on a promise that it would promote open standards. When Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude pulled his open standards policy, his lieutenants said the matter was going to public consultation so they could avoid being sued by those "vested interests" who were opposed to it. Those vested interests were Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and the Business Software Alliance. What do they care about Britain's public good?

There might be a case for outlawing proprietary standards, but that is not what the government is trying to do. It is merely trying to implement a procurement policy.

This means it's trying to make a purchasing decision. You know, like Mercedes does when choosing a gear stick or an ash tray. It whips its supply chain into fawning submission. The customer is King.

UK.gov might similarly choose whether to buy Microsoft Windows or... Microsoft Windows or... okay, sometimes the market offers little choice. But it might choose between Oracle and, say... okay, not the best example.

But least our public servants can still choose the colour of their Microsoft desktops. Now remind me again, why is the government trying to purchase technology that uses open standards?

IBM's flagship local government outsourcing deal is still failing to deliver savings it promised in 2007. The problems have dragged on so long that one council has been forced to reschedule debt it took out to cover its cost of doing the deal in the first place.

Southwest One, a private/public partnership IBM set up with three public authorities, has delivered little more than a third of the savings it originally promised to Taunton Deane Borough Council, said a report to it's executive committee on 18 January. That's still exponentially lot more than the £400m deal delivered overall.

"Procurement savings have been delivered at a lower rate than originally anticipated in 2007," said the report.

"Back then it was estimated by IBM that £3.376m savings would have been generated by close of 2011/12," wrote Paul Harding, performance & client manager for Taunton Deane.

IBM had estimated its outsourcing deal would have paid back its costs within four years. Taunton Deane spent £3.65m on it in 2007. But it has been unable to repay £2.87m of loans it took out to finance the deal. The deal had delivered the council only £1.25m of its savings, forcing the council to reschedule its debt.

Cllr John Williams, Conservative leader of Taunton Deane Borough Council told Computer Weekly it was "purely a coincidence" that a £2.1m shortfall in the council's 2012-13 budget matched the £2.12m shortfall in savings IBM promised its outsourcing deal would deliver by 2012.

"It is unlikely we will meet the original targets," the majority of which were promised procurement savings, said Williams.

Land of plenty

"We are looking at a whole different world from when this contract was conceived. Back then we were in a land of plenty. Councils were awash with money. Government was spending like there was no tomorrow. But unfortunately since 2008, the money isn't there. Spending has been cut.

"Because we are not spending as much, there are not the purchases we envisaged when the contract was conceived. Across the board, Southwest One are saying there's far less procurement to be carried out than they were anticipating.

"They are redoubling their efforts to get everything within the net. There has to be a sea change. Instead of everyone going to buy bits and pieces, there has to be discipline. We have hopefully instilled that, that everything goes through Southwest One," said Williams.

But the council leader insisted Taunton Deane was benefiting from the deal. Southwest One was meeting a contracted obligation to reduce its charges to the council by 2.5 per cent a year for the life of the 10-year contract.

Williams, who was leader of the opposition when the deal was done in 2007, said SW1 was contracted on the basis that it was the private sector and therefore more efficient. Hence its service charges were reduced by 2.5 per cent every year.

"We have no problem with this contract at the moment. It's delivering what it's meant to deliver, apart from the procurement savings," he said.

Public Image Ltd.

Southwest One's service charge was set from day one. But by 2011 it had delivered just £3.3m of £192m promised cost-savings - a promise that clinched the deal for Taunton Deane and the other two participating public bodies, Somerset County Council and Avon & Somerset Police Authority, in 2007.

Southwest One meanwhile reported a £31m loss in the year to 31 December 2010 and has notched a loss for every year it operated.

The loss, reported last week, included a one-off charge of £17m for ongoing implementation of an SAP system intended to unite the back-offices of participating public bodies and cut their costs. The SAP implementation has had ongoing problems.

Southwest One's finances went unremarked on the news service it provides "customers" in Somerset. But it has showered them in the last 18 months with such mollifications as "Maximising efficiency through shared services", "Punching above your weight to achieve growth", and "How collaboration and cooperation can help to deliver procurement savings".

As the IBM venture was planning to file its latest cost-overruns at Companies House in December, it told residents about an award it had received for its revenue & benefits service.

Benefits have given councillors no cause for celebration however. A Taunton report on benefits cuts said recently: "In the end we will have to decide, from a limited number of claims, which vulnerable group we support the least".

At least, with Southwest One's award winning support, Taunton Deane will be able to turn the needy down more efficiently.

£176m shortfall

Participating councils are meanwhile seeking to renegotiate their Southwest One contract half way through its 10 year term after Somerset concluded this would be the only way it could hope to see the £192m savings IBM promised.

A spokeswoman for Southwest One said it had "identified more than £6.5 million of potential procurement saving opportunities" for Taunton Deane.

She repeated Cllr. William's statement that councils were saving less because they were spending less.

"Southwest One has a target to deliver approx £200m savings for TDBC, Somerset County Council and Avon & Somerset Police over the course of the 10-year contract," she said in a written statement.

"So far projects have been commissioned, which plan to deliver £71m of savings over the life of the contract and to date £15.9 million of savings have already been delivered."

IBM was unavailable for comment.

Mmmmmits snug at the top. Especially if you're Julian David, IBM's top UK salesman, who last week was picked to be Director General of Intellect, the ICT oligopoly's trade association.

It's only three years since David bagged the sale of the century, getting the Cabinet Office to re-badge IBM's cloud computing slogan as HM G-Cloud. Now he's not only got the cosiest seat in the business, but Andy Nelson, his apprentice on the G-Cloud programme, has been appointed government CIO at the Cabinet Office, the most senior job in government IT.

Imagine how made up David was when, chuckling over his cognac at the Intellect hearth, he learns that Nelson, Ministry of Justice CIO and senior responsible owner for HM G-Cloud, would be his opposite number in government.

How cosy it will be round the fireside when the pair are joined by Cabinet Office permanent secretary Ian Watmore, who was Nelson's colleague at Anderson Consulting (later known as Accenture) for seven years after they joined the 1980 intake.

How quaint last March's government ICT strategy now seems, with Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude vowing to "put an end to the oligopoly of large suppliers that monopolise [government] ICT provision".

All that puff and bluster for aught

David moves into office at a crucial time for IBM. All his work promoting the G-Cloud is about to come to fruition. But it will need an extra push to get public bodies around the country to swallow it, close all their data centres, sack all their techies and give all their computer systems over to IBM or whichever branch of Acme Data Corp. they happen to buddy. That's what the G-Cloud promises.

David's just the man for the job. For though his 28-year career at IBM was officially terminated in 2010, he has an unrivalled track record selling IT industry fads.

He was there in 1998 as IBM's European Marketing director, flogging the Year 2000 bug fix to a terrified public, telling them it would be "the kiss of death" to anyone who didn't fix it.

He was there again flogging disastrous Enterprise Resource Planning systems in the millennial boom years.

The fateful year SAP began selling IT disasters to the retail industry, there was David again as ERP marketing director at the Retail Industry Unit of IBM, telling supermarkets how by spending mere hundreds of millions of pounds they could turn reliable old systems into ones that would burn their money more efficiently.

Retailers lapped it up. Andy Nelson, our new government CIO, was there in 1997 - lapping it up as Asda director of computer services, though only as long as it took to outsource the supermarket's computing to IBM.

Asda's then new CEO Allan Leighton did the deal after returning from a Harvard MBA programme. Two Harvard professors came to see it went smoothly.



Bad reputation

It might not have gone so smoothly, but it certainly gave the eggheads something to think about when that first raft of ERP deals came to fruition in the mid-noughties.

MFI's £50m IBM SAP implementation led to losses and two boardroom scalps.

Sainsbury's had outsourced its entire IT in a £1.8bn deal with Accenture, then overseen by Ian Watmore. Four years later, its first ever net loss was attributed to supply chain and IT problems.

Sainsbury's kicked Accenture out and wrote off £260m IT spend. Bringing its IT back in-house was said to have helped turn the business around. Its management still denounces outsourcing, "unequivocally".

Angela Morrison, the woman who kicked Accenture out of Sainsbury's, had earlier kicked IBM out of Asda, undoing the work our new man Nelson had done in 1997.

Asda's subsequent, do-it-yourself SAP implementation was so successful it was rolled out across the rest of Walmart, its parent. Walmart's success was said to stem from doing its own IT, because it was too integral to trust to an outsourcer.

Other companies followed suit. JP Morgan bank terminated its $5bn IBM outsourcing contract in 2005. It had been the largest such deal in banking. Even Gartner, cheerleader for the US IT industry, admitted it was "time to stop compulsive outsourcing".

Worse still for IBM, the dotcom bust had forced the private sector to freeze IT spend. So IBM and its ilk turned on the private sector, which was famously the only sector spending any money. Watmore was now in government, overseeing the spending.

That's where Julian David pitched up after retail. As vice president of IBM public sector business he started flogging the same big outsourcing deals that had gone tits up in the private sector.

There was some good news to boost his chances.

Boots terminated a £710m IBM outsourcing contract only half-way through its term in 2007, apparently because it had been so successful its modernisation finished early.

But Boots vowed never to put all its eggs in one basket ever again.

Rob Fraser, its group IT director (now at anti-outsourcer Sainsbury's), said outsource suppliers had no interest in helping customers cut the cost of their IT.


With friends like these...

But outsourcers were now busy trashing their reputations in the public sector. They made such a good job of it that government IT became synonymous with disaster. And government is going through the same re-evaluation of outsourcing industry went through in the mid-noughties.

This is the apparent legacy of John Higgins, Intellect boss for 14 years. He became head of the CSSA in 1998 and rode the rise and fall, consolidation of power, establishment of a bankrupt contractual model, left a trail of IT disaster stories and an industry with a reputation for bodge and exploitation - a reputation that became so well established the coalition government was able to define itself in opposition to it - to define Labour as the government of big-state IT failures. Government has denounced his trade association's membership and methods as the corollary of Labour IT. It has tried to mend their mutual record of kaput computing by rallying tech entrepreneurs not normally associated with Intellect.

On the occasion of David's appointment last week Intellect issued a press release in which the DG-designate said he looked forward to doing his bit to improve skills in the industry and support SMEs.

CW asked Intellect for David's SME credentials, Intellect said he had wide experience and had worked with SMEs.

David used to flog computers to SMEs as vice president of IBM's SME business. But his SME credentials consist of just eight months as a board director of EGS Group, a £3m company that had worked with him on the Cabinet Office G-Cloud plans in 2010.

He left EGS in May 2011 to open a UK office for Hong Kong-based, Bermuda-registered, Azeus.

...who needs SMEs?

David's SME credentials do not compare well with the notable notches he marked up as big business honcho at IBM.

The most notable of his recent achievements was an infamous £400m outsourcing deal by which IBM sought to gain control of public computing across the entire South West England. It is hard to imagine this megalomaniacal plan having any regard for SMEs.

Flush with the Boots boost in 2007, IBM formalised an agreement in principle to subsume the IT functions of 36 councils and emergency services in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire.

It initially involved IBM taking 75 per cent ownership of a public-private partnership called SouthWest One and acquiring the IT functions of Somerset and Taunton Deane Councils and Avon & Somerset Police.

It would implement a SAP system to run them and deliver £192m savings over 10 years. David said the project would cut costs and boost the local economy. But it floundered.

The SAP implementation went awry. A report by Somerset County Council Review Panel in 2010 said participating councils would have to renegotiate their contract before they would realise the savings IBM promised at the outset.

The then Somerset CEO Alan Jones had earlier denied specific allegations of SAP problems and contract failures made by Ian Liddell-Grainger, local MP.

£65m of savings had already been booked, Jones claimed in 2009. The 2010 report said the venture had delivered only £2m of savings, had no clear idea how it would produce the rest and could anyway conceive only an estimated £45m cut in procurement costs.

The affair was murky, with Unison and councillors complaining about unwarranted secrecy. IBM had blocked an ITV reporter from using a little-known public scrutiny law to view the contract. Liddell-Grainger made unsubstantiated allegations of corruption. Jones got embroiled in grubby in-fighting with councillors.


David personally played an important part in turning this trashy reputation into a revamped sales story for outsourcers. Called the cloud, it was a transcendental vision worthy of the late 90s ERP pitch.

The cloud was a rebranding of ideas already in David's public sector pitch in 2007: departmental silos were bad, paying IBM to consolidate your data centres and virtualize your systems was good. Asset re-use was the carrot on the stick.

The fully formed cloud pitch was essentially outsourcing with dodgy bits stuck on. It promised to cut costs, cut jobs and deploy a radically new sort of computer system.

It'll be different this time

As president of Socitm in 2010, Jos Creese promoted those same ideas, proposing local authorities sack computing staff and buy services instead from the cloud.

Creese fell in with David in 2006 when as CIO of Hampshire County Council (home of IBM HQ) he did a five year deal to rent an enterprise architecture made of elements that would later underpin IBM's cloud.

Hampshire had at the time just celebrated the successful installation of an SAP system. Council IT staff had done the installation themselves. Hampshire systems were running £2m-a-year more efficiently.

Creese's ideas echoed those touted by Ian Trenholm, CEO at the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, a council with intimate ties to the coalition government. David's cloud pitch did too.

The shared idea was that if councils standardised their business processes, their organisations would readily plug into the cloud.

Sainsbury's had adopted the same ideas for its abortive Accenture transformation in 2000 - the one that led the supermarket to realise how IT was too important to entrust to someone else.

Margaret Miller, it's then CIO, said how was trying to adopt standard business processes so it could use commodity computer systems. Miller now advises government customers for Accenture.

Pompous postlude

The idea runs contrary to the bottom-up noises the coalition government made before coming into power.

It runs contrary also to agile and lean, the empowering methods to which government has turned in the hope of reversing the trend for moronic public computer ventures - methods more akin to Sainsbury's, Asda and Hampshire in the days when they took IT into their own hands.

The Cabinet Office is meanwhile making a song and dance about getting SMEs into the G-Cloud. But the cloud will ultimately be a greater force for consolidation than economic regeneration.

When every council in the South West is using the same business processes, IBM's SouthWest One will be able to make a better case for subsuming their IT. The G-Cloud may not, as we are told, be a greater opportunity for SMEs, but merely something that must be made to accommodate SMEs so they are not excluded entirely.

Placatory postscript

Woah there, cowboy. The UK hasn't broken its open standards pledge quite yet.

The Cabinet Office may have rescinded its open standards policy. It might even be about to put it to public consultation after it had already received a democratic mandate as manifesto commitments of both parties in the coalition government. And it may be that this reversal was done despite the government having already turned that mandate into a civil service edict and a central tenet of government ICT Strategy as well.

And it might have done this after lobbying from companies like Microsoft that opposed it.

But it's not killed the policy dead. Not yet.

Bad example

The European Commission set the example of public administrations that declare a preference for open standards one minute, only to implement a propreitary standards policy the next. If this is the act to follow, it may only be a matter of time before the UK caves in to pressure from those "vested interests" the Cabinet Office has said are railed against its policy.

This is what the EU did first with its misnomerically-named European Interoperability Framework. And this is what it did again recently when choosing a document format: after a nearly decade pursuing competion cases against Microsoft, it has chosen to use Microsoft's contested OOXML document format in Microsoft word-processors across the institutions of its administration.

Prior to the Cabinet Office withdrawing its open standards edict it had received delegations from Apple, Oracle, the Business Software Alliance and IBM, as well as Microsoft.

An informal public consultation meanwhile came out resoundingly in favour of open standards - giving the Cabinet Office a second mandate for its policy.

But Public support was still not enough to protect government policy from opponents in the corporate software establishment whose dominant proprietary standards help sustain artificial monopolies in their area of technology.

Lobotomized

This is worth repeating: public support from British citizens who had given the coalition government a democratic mandate to implement an open standards policy was not enough to withstand lobbying pressure from a handful of US corporations who have the most to lose by it.

We were reminded this week of the stifling consequences of technology monopolies when the Department for Education pledged to reform Britain's torpid computing curriculum in schools. Children were "bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers" said Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education.

Instead of learning how to operate the products of American capitalism they will now be taught logic and set theory - these slaves of the machine will be taught to think for themselves.

If Gove does his job they will go on after school to produce software systems to compete with those previously deemed all-you-need-to-know about computers. British industry would benefit. US industry would benefit too, if from nothing more than being freed from the illusion that it is great when it is merely powerful.

Microsoft software has been a lobotomy inflicted on British school children. Yet Microsoft told the Cabinet Office its open standards policy would put the UK IT industry at a disadvantage. It would damage British commercial interests, said Microsoft in a Cabinet Office brief leaked to Computer Weekly.

Corporate mandate

Microsoft and other corporations known to have sent delegations to discuss standards with the Cabinet Office have not responded to our interview requests*. The apparent contradictions in their position go untested. We know open standards would damage Microsoft's commercial interests. It has been unable to tell us how its position accords with UK commercial interests.

Both coalition parties pledged open standards for reasons that should put Microsoft back in its shink-wrapped box. When the public square in a technology market - its standards of interoperability - are controlled by vested interests, innovation is stifled.

So the coalition parties fulfilled their election promises by making open standards public policy. That policy is now under threat.

When the government launches its formal consultation on open standards this month it will seek support for its policy again - a third mandate, if you like.

The exercise will be the last nail in the coffin for open standards if the government only hears from opponents. Then we will have to wait for today's generation of primary school children to grow up before this important debate is conducted in public by citizens whose intellects have not been placated by corporate Usonia.


*
IBM

Though IBM has not yet deigned to speak to us about its position, it may yet be supportive of government policy. It favours the Open Document Format in its Symphony office desktop software, for example. But it like other corporations is shy of speaking about its lobbying and your correspondent has little expectation that it will do so now on this matter of import to UK citizens, over which it has been in the privilaged position to be able to bend the Cabinet Office's ear informally before the mere plebs who will feel its greatest impact were even told the open standards policy was being withdrawn.

Oracle & Open Forum Europe

You might however for similar reasons say as much of Oracle, custodian of Open Office since it acquired Sun. Oracle is also backer of the Open Forum Europe, the open source campaign group that has a close working relationship with Cabinet Office and plays a prominent role in lobbying on standards policy across Europe.

Yet Oracle's delegation was shown in the leaked brief to have supported Microsoft in opposition to government's open standards policy.

Microsoft

Just before Christmas we broke in a fairly uncredited scoop that the policy had been scrapped. This was plain for anyone to see in an edict Cabinet Office issued in November.

(Though your humble correspondent can take some special credit for breaking this news, having learned how to read passably well in the 30 years 20 years or so since he first used Microsoft Word, and considers himself therefore to have been at a not unenviable advantage when it came to interpreting this plain-written document and relaying it in said scoop).

There wasn't any proof at the time that Microsoft was behind this, er, shameful fudge. There is now: the evil software cowpowayshen was at least lurking in the shadows. The question, however, is whether it can be credited with steering the government into a U-Turn. Or whether it was just barking with the dogs as the caravan rolled on.

The British government withdrew its open standards policy after lobbying from Microsoft, it has been revealed in a Cabinet Office brief leaked to Computer Weekly.

The Department of Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) also formerly opposed the policy before Cabinet Office withdrew it. BIS supported Microsoft's position against open standards, the backbone of the government's ICT policy. The Business Software Alliance, infamous for its lobbying against open standards policy in Brussels, also lobbied against the government policy.

Microsoft took up direct opposition to the ICT Strategy's pledge to give preference to technologies that supported open standards of interoperability between government computer systems, said the briefing paper.

The software supplier was concerned this would prevent companies from claiming royalties on the point of exchange between those systems.

It complained specifically about the wording of UK procurement policy, which in January 2011 established a definition to explain its edict that open standards should be used in government computing wherever possible. UK policy specified that "[open standards] must have intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis".

Microsoft said it supported the aims of UK open standards policy - specifically that government systems should be interoperable, that it should be possible for government to re-use purchased software components, and that government should not be "locked-in" to using particular technologies.

It also told the Cabinet Office it "agrees that open standards are key to delivering this [policy mission]", said the brief.

But it opposed the Cabinet Office office definition of an open standard. It said the definition of open standards adopted in the government ICT strategy would hamper innovation and restrict "freedom of choice for citizens".

It said the government should officially adopt standards only under terms defined as Reasonable and Non-discriminatory (RAND). It referred to this as FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory). This would permit patent holders to claim royalties from anyone trying to implement the standard.

It's position was identical to that taken by other representatives of the corporate software establishment, led by the Business Software Alliance.

Their lobbying of government would effectively erase open standards from UK policy, as it had already successfully done with the European Commission's last statement on standards, the European Interoperability Framework 2.0. Their preferred RAND licence terms are a standard feature of non-open software standards including those encumbered with hardware patents that have nevertheless come into widespread use such as GSM and WiFi.

Microsoft told the Cabinet Office its open standards policy would prevent RAND standards such as mp3 and GSM from being used in government computer systems.

UK policy had however established a preference for open standards "wherever possible". It would have allowed departments to use non-open standards when there where no open options or when the widespread use of a proprietary standard prevented alternatives from being deployed.

The Cabinet Office is expected to open a formal consultation on the rescinded policy this month, a month after it was due to publish its first list of mandated open standards.

The open source lobby has advised that abolishing the open standards policy would undermine the other key element of government ICT policy, to create a level-playing field open source software.

Open Forum Europe, a trade body, said FRAND terms precluded their implementation by open source software suppliers because the open source business model did not support collection of royalties.

In opposition to the patent lobby's arguments against open standards, the Free Software Foundation Europe, a lobby group, has cited internet standards in defence of royalty-free models.

Microsoft refused to talk to Computer Weekly about its consultation with the Cabinet Office.

It said in a written statement: "Microsoft fully supports the Government's ICT strategy and its goals of reducing cost and complexity, and increasing information sharing, interoperability, openness and re-use."

The BSA said in a written statement it also supported government's policy aims.

"However," it said, "reducing public procurement expenses in the UK does not require the adoption of a policy which undermines the value of Intellectual Property and Innovation."

Cabinet Office said in a written statement: "No lobbying has taken place that has affected our approach in creating an Open Standards definition that works for government."

BIS also refused to discuss its differences with Cabinet Office. It said in a written statement: "Discussions are still ongoing between the departments with many options being considered."

Tuesday 27 December was a good day to bury bad news. With 60m Brits digesting their Christmas Bank Holiday feasts in front of crap telly, news outlets were running skeleton crews. The most work done anywhere was by the nation's sewers, straining under the seasonal glut in excrement.

This was the day Computer Sciences Corporation let it slip that it might have to write off the entire $1.5bn it has invested in the UK NHS National Programme for IT (NHSIT), after two years of negotiations under the threat of cancellation.

Was this some fit of seasonal goodwill from the most vilified of boohisstems integrators - relinquishing its claim on money otherwise needed desperately for aunt Mabel's tit transplant?

Or was it just the latest manoeuvre in the battle for public opinion being waged over Labour's National Programme for IT?

It was of course the latter and though CSC's warning was not the defeat it appeared to be, it was a retrenchment the beleaguered company did well to keep from the limelight. Now it has cleared all its skeletons from the closet and is reportedly close to appointing a new CEO, the markets might ease their sustained punishment of its share price.

Weak resolutions

The spotlight can return now to the government, which after a year of playing shark cards on CSC has achieved nothing of its ambition to scrap the National Programme.

It hasn't scrapped the programme because it can't simply tear up its contracts. It may not want to either. It outsourced the work. CSC, its outsourcer, invested $1.5bn in it. It developed an albeit unfinished suite of next-generation health software. It wants the guaranteed return on investment the NHS deal originally promised.

Unable to cancel the contract, the Cabinet Office has been able only to stall while the political machine piles up evidence in condemnation of the programme. If public opinion turned the contract toxic, CSC would have to get rid of it; NPfIT could be scrapped.

Public relations

This seemed to be the game when in February the NHS interrupted ongoing negotiations with CSC to issue a public threat of contract termination. CSC was still missing deadlines for systems it was originally contracted to deliver in 2007. But NHS couldn't terminate the contract without facing the question of its own liability for the project's failure.

So Cabinet Office forbade NHS from signing the deal until its Major Projects Authority had reviewed the project and issued a verdict on the MOU. The evidence meanwhile stacked up against NPfIT and CSC.

Negotiations reached a preliminary conclusion in May, in the shadow of a damning National Audit Office report into NPfIT's failure and the part CSC and other suppliers had played in it. But the terms (when leaked - Public Accounts Committee hearings that month were denied details) did not look pleasant: a one sixth cut in the £3bn cost of the contract in exchange for nearly a third fewer implementations and a year added to the contract term.

The MPA was apparently not content. Within weeks NHS CIO Christine Connelly was replaced with a Cabinet Office executive. MPA delivered its review, recommending the NHS extract further concessions from CSC, effectively condemning the MOU to the shredder. But the document was classified and seen by only a limited number of ministers and civil servants. CSC carried on in the belief that the review had not yet been completed. When CSC stated this in a statutory report to shareholders on 15 June, MPA stayed schtum.

MPA stayed schtum again on 3 August when the Public Accounts Committee produced its report into NPfIT, calling for some sort of review to consider terminating the contracts.

Hogwash

The MPA also stayed schtum when on 10 August CSC said in a statutory statement to shareholders that the MOU was still waiting on the conclusion of the MPA review. It wasn't until September that the Department of Health finally admitted it had the review. It said it would consequently seek to dismantle the programme more quickly than it had been doing. But this was hogwash: it had not reached an agreement over CSC's £3bn contract.

Cabinet Office finally published a heavily redacted version of its review on 23 September, just seven days before the six-month deadline for its return of a £170m advance if the MOU hadn't been concluded. Of course the MOU hadn't been concluded. MPA had redacted its final recommendation on the MOU. It had apparently not delivered its verdict so the MOU wasn't agreed and the money had to be repaid.

CSC had egg on its face over the repayment. Its CEO announced his retirement. CSC then went back to the negotiating table. But it told shareholders on 9 November it was still waiting on MPA's recommendation on the MOU and therefore the future of its contract. Its financial results were terrible.

The stand-off had achieved something. It had crushed CSC's share price to below a goodwill threshold, contributing to a £2bn deduction in earnings. That crushed its share price further. But there was still no resolution in negotiations that had now been going on for two years.

Nothing, it seems, would make CSC fold its cards. Yet if the government settled for anything less its ICT strategy and long-standing condemnation of the National Programme would look puerile.

Hard news

That was until 8 December when the Times Newspaper stepped in with the apparently shocking results of an "exclusive" investigation: the MOU would involve CSC's contract being extended by a year and £2bn, it said.

The Times story was ridiculous. But it caught on with some help from MPs on the Public Accounts Committee. Committee chair Margaret Hodge compared CSC to "cowboys". Whatever had been going on since negotiations had resumed, CSC was on the ropes, but still clinging to its contract. The MOU terms published as findings of the "exclusive" investigation had been public since May and a matter of public record since CSC repeated them to shareholders in June.

CSC had said in the summer the MOU deal would extend the contract a year. It said it expected to realize up to £2bn in revenue in the period. It was very unlikely this meant an additional £2bn, or two-thirds increase, on the existing £3bn contract. A £500m reduction was part of that same deal. It more likely meant that would be the period when CSC would realize the bulk of its income on the entire contract. It's payments had always been contingent on delivery. It might have won a quid-pro-quo extension for a cut in the cost of the contract, but MPA hard-nuts had not dragged negotiations out for another year only to hand CSC another £2bn.

Winter harvest

CSC's share price held out till a scheduled dividend payout on 20 December. It then took a dive. Ratings agencies started downgrading CSC. Phrases like "junk status" started flying around. A week later CSC said the MPA had rejected the MOU. So the Cabinet Office had finally delivered the verdict it had published internally in June and redacted in September.

CSC said the MOU talks would resume in January. But with nothing having been achieved in 2011, it had to face the possibility that it would not never recover the £1.5bn it had invested in NPfIT to date. Talks were clearly getting nowhere even now they were entering their third year.

So Cabinet Office goes back to square one after a year of public buffoonery and fruitless backroom scheming. It's ICT strategy is starting to look ridiculous. Neither the Department for Health, the Cabinet Office nor CSC will answer even the simplest of questions about the situation, such as when MPA actually delivered its verdict to CSC.

The only reason anyone knows anything about the talks is because CSC is required by law to tell its shareholders. They enjoy a greater right to know what about what the government is really doing with the National Programme than British citizens and tax payers.

Margaret Hodge may have been right. But the government's failure to produce a CSC deal that will allow it to conduct its planned "dismantling" of the National Programme and deliver redress for its failure makes it begin to look like it lacks the moral as well as contractual rectitude, no matter how bad a deal it thinks the NHS got in 2003.

Cabinet Office scrapped its open standards policy before opening it to consultation last month, opening the way for a major policy U-turn.

It issued a procurement policy edict on 30 November that erased a standards policy that had been in place since 31 January. It was revoked after a period of lobbying by powerful companies lined against its open standards policy that included Microsoft and the Business Software Alliance.

The 30 November edict to procurement officers, Procurement Policy Note (PPN) 09/11, said it superseded the 31 January policy, PPN 3/11. But it contained no superseding policy. It deferred to a forthcoming public consultation on open standards the Cabinet Office had announced 5 days earlier.

"PPN 3/11 has therefore been withdrawn," it said.

The policy had required public bodies to specify open standards "wherever possible" and had defined an open standard as something produced in an open forum, sanctioned by an international standards body, and made available irrevocably at zero or low cost without payment of royalties.

This position was vindicated by an unofficial consultation Cabinet Office held over the summer. 87 per cent of 970 respondents said an open standard should be royalty-free. Majorities agreed with other positions the government had taken on open standards. But the Cabinet Office did not publish statistics about who the respondents were.

The Cabinet Office said in a written statement: "The previous consultation was very helpful, but when the full review of responses was completed in November it became clear that there were still some points that needed clarity."

It said it was committed to open standards but thought retaining the current policy was "inappropriate" while it conducted a consultation.

A spokesman refused to say what points needed clarity or in what areas of former policy government was prepared to give ground to the proprietary software industry.

He was only prepared to say, "The Cabinet Office will be holding a new consultation on Open Standards in the New Year."

Cabinet Office's prior policy on open standards had acted as a line in the sand that invoked the spirit and principle of a long campaign for the liberalisation of public technology waged by leading Conservatives in opposition. It had been launched by Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne and as the keystone of coalition ICT Strategy had been implemented by minister Francis Maude.

It looked to remain stout against the anti-reformist position being pushed by IT establishment bodies with the most to lose from liberalisation. But its fumbling progress has been under sustained and biting criticism from standards experts.

Gerry Gavigan, standards expert and chairman of the Open Source Consortium, said the consultation was "stupid and unnecessary". It opened the field up to opponents of the policy and fed suspicion that it was bowing to pressure from proprietary software vendors.

Graham Taylor, chief executive of campaign group Open Forum Europe, said he did not believe Cabinet Office would weaken its open standards position. OFE had pressed it to strengthen the open standard definition deployed in its original 30 January policy statement.

Julian Swan, director of compliance marketing for the Business Software Alliance, said it supported the policy moves and would "work closely with the UK government" over standards policy.

"Reducing public procurement expenses in the UK does not require the adoption of a policy which undermines the value of Intellectual Property and Innovation," he said.

Outgoing deputy government CIO Bill McCluggage told suppliers last month the consultation would ensure its policy was strong enough to withstand a legal challenge from "vested interests", a veiled reference to the established proprietary software industry against which the coalition government has formed its policy position.