Big Govt IT Contracts to be broken up by Tories
If the upcoming general election in the United Kingdom sees the public favouring the Conservative party, the resultant government would strive to break up large IT contracts already struck by the government, into modular components. This promise has been delivered by the Conservative party in its pre-election technology manifesto.
The manifesto that was published on Thursday reflected the party’s view that by reducing big contracts to interoperable modules, risk would be reduced considerably, besides creating opportunities for the smaller business firms to bid for the IT contracts of the government.
The party also said through its technology manifesto that employment of open standards would result in creating for open source IT, a level play ground. It further stated that to make sure that small high-tech businesses were not shunned out of the process of IT procurement, a presumption would also be introduced against the IT contracts of the government that were worth more than GBP 100 million.
The Tories added in their manifesto that apart from helping to expedite the growth of high-tech UK IT firms of the next generation kind, such policies would also strive to save costs.
It is also worth mentioning here that the Conservatives have been, over the past couple of years, promoting the concept of a decentralised approach to the IT sector that includes broadband internet realm, under the government. As a matter of fact, David Cameron the leader of the Tories had blogged in 2008 April that using modular contracts and open standards would follow best practice of the private sector.
