Risk

There are some interesting behaviours that emerge from government and I have been trying to consider what the causes of these are.

Fear of failure seems to play a key role in the cost of government. Especially IT. As an SME I know the problems of dealing with government. It is interesting that government, a trillion dollar organization, has to protect itself from SMEs and their potential failure. They use the tier 1 suppliers to achieve this (force you into a subcontract position).

This is madness. It is the tier 1 suppliers that the government needs protecting from and I need not go into the examples of staggering failure here.

So why is this. Well government hates failure, ministers hate failure. Everyone hates failure. But government thinking appears to go like this.

1) IT projects fail.
2) We need major contractual protection and guarantees
3) These make contracting with SMEs impossible so only major supplier can be dealt with


But it is the major supplier failures that gov tries to protect themselves against that pushes the smaller suppliers out the market.

Something has to change. Government needs to start thinking differently and the media should help. Some things go wrong. We don't want them to, most are avoidable but that's life. If the media overreacts then the government and ministers layer on extra protection. This is a vicious circle.

It will be interesting to see if government actually starts to change off the back of these economic difficulties.