New Socitm Futures boss has head in the G-Cloud

Dawinderpal Sahota, Computing, Tuesday 1 June 2010 at 12:07:00

Dylan Roberts wants to see more use of cloud computing in the public sector

The new chairman of
Socitm
Futures has outlined his intention to introduce more cloud-hosted services
into local government organisations.

Dylan Roberts, chief information officer at
Leeds
City Council, has taken on the additional role of replacing Glyn Evans as
chairman of Socitm?s IT strategy and policy-generating body.

He told Computing about his aspirations for local authorities to
extensively rely on the G-Cloud, a government-wide cloud computing platform.

He said that Leeds City Council has delivered almost as much efficiency as it
could in its ICT services and that any more efficiency that is derived from
rationalising or consolidating applications and infrastructure will be
insignificant.

?For me, the G-Cloud and the associated public sector network are extremely
important [for increasing efficiency],? he said.

He explained that he wanted public sector organisations to be able to consume
applications and services from a cloud platform with the assurance that the
information is secure and access is controlled.

He explained that the first applications he hopes to see in the G-Cloud are
generic applications that are frequently cloud-based already, for example email
and collaboration technologies such as Microsoft Sharepoint and unified
communications.

?The key things that we are looking for from a local public service
perspective is that your more generic applications are made available first
because they have a level of maturity ? they have been offered extensively in
the cloud,? he said.

He added that he also wants to see software vendors make other applications
available as cloud-hosted services.

?I would love to see ERP [enterprise resource planning] applications in the
cloud, but I?m not sure if the likes of SAP and Oracle would want to do this
yet.

"I?d also like to see in the local government environment, things like
council tax and benefits providers ? line-of-business providers ? social care
system providers; I would like to see those vendors starting to bring offerings
into the cloud.?

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2263895/socitm-futures-boss-head-g