Amid the welter of anecdotes, advertisements and media reporting, what do civil servants actually think of major government technology suppliers? Matthew O’Toole details the results of an intriguing survey on IT in the civil service

What do you think of the myriad technology suppliers selling IT-related goods and services to government? How many have you heard of? And, whether you’re involved in procurement or not, what factors should be given the greatest weight in IT buying decisions? When Civil Service World asked these questions in an online survey, we received nearly 1,400 responses from officials of a wide range of grades and backgrounds; some of the answers are fascinating.

As evident in the graphic above, among our respondents Fujitsu enjoys the highest brand name recognition as a government supplier; and this recognition is higher still among the more senior grades. Given that the Japanese technology supplier holds high-profile contracts with big delivery departments such as the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and is particularly prominent as a desktop provider, it’s perhaps understandable that a large number of officials are aware of the firm’s work – many encounter it every day. Mark O’Neill, chief information officer at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), suggests that where companies concentrate on IT infrastructure and other more hidden systems, most non-specialist civil servants are only likely to “vaguely recall” their names.

Fujitsu staff themselves express a certain amount of surprise at the company’s high profile. Simon Carter, marketing director of the UK government business, says he is “surprised, but heartily encouraged” by the awareness of the company’s work, but admits that the heavy desktop presence of the company may have something to do with it. While other firms focus their attention on services less immediately visible to officials, Fujitsu is “now unquestionably the largest desktop supplier within UK government”.

Another well-known company is the highly visible desktop supplier EDS – now merged with HP, a brand with a significantly lower recognition inside the civil service. HP-EDS actually lost a major DWP desktop supply contract to Fujitsu in January, and HP’s marketing director, Tina Green, acknowledges that many officials will be most familiar with the company via the helpdesk that desktop users call when something goes wrong. HP, in the main, has focused on infrastructure and is therefore “not visible to the vast majority of civil government users”, she says.

But in future the merged organisation, HP Enterprise Services, aims to raise its profile – in part, via its inclusion in the government’s new ‘Desktop 21’ buying framework. HP is one of just three suppliers accredited in the framework, says Green, which covers “both products such as desktops and laptops, and associated services”. 

Awareness is one thing, but which companies are the most desirable to work with? We asked those respondents who had expressed high levels of awareness of particular companies to tell us how willing they would be to work with those companies, pulling out results which show broadly how experience affects opinions. On that metric, American IT giant IBM comes out on top, with just under 60 per cent saying that they’d like to work with them. IBM’s vice-president for public sector, Jan Gower, admits that the company’s vast size – it has 400,000 employees worldwide – probably engenders a certain amount of trust. As Ian Angell, Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics, says: “What they used to say in the 1970s was: ‘You don’t get sacked for buying IBM’.” Civil servants may still be thinking the same thing today.

Furthermore, says Gower, the company is comfortable and experienced in the strictly-governed context of government supplying. “Where it’s public procurement and the process is quite important, then IBM plays to the process,” she says. “We have very strict business conduct guidelines, and I think our clients appreciate the level of integrity we bring.”

Over at HP Enterprise Services, Green acknowledges the differential reputations of HP and EDS. The latter garnered substantial negative publicity, but Green notes that it “did win and run many successful contracts, so there are many strong relationships to build on”. Nonetheless, she adds, “we’ve made a conscious decision to put everything under the HP name. We’re hoping now to build on the strengths of EDS’s services and HP’s heritage in service centres and infrastructure.”

Another interesting finding concerns the strong tendency of respondents to rate delivery as the single most important factor in IT procurement; it was rated as more important than price and trust, with past experiences and colleagues’ recommendations coming in surprisingly far down the table (see p1). Mark O’Neill at DCMS is encouraged by that finding. “It reflects a realisation that we need to get the thing done,” he says. “One of the things we have learnt over the years is to avoid an overly simplistic focus on price.”

Professor Angell is similarly certain that fixating on the lowest price tender in technology procurement is counterproductive – but sceptical that this is always understood by the key civil servants. “The people who sign off on these things too often think in terms of lowest cost, and [prioritising that] is usually the stupid decision,” he says. Price was in fact rated the third-most important factor in deciding IT procurement.

However, given the upcoming spending cuts – not to mention the specific savings on IT and back office costs promised by both major parties – isn’t it inevitable that up-front cost becomes an ever-greater factor in buying technology services? David Jones, chief information officer at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), rejects the notion that there is a “linear” distinction between cost and delivery.

“If I was faced with a choice between a company that I could afford but didn’t trust with delivery, and one that I did trust to deliver but couldn’t afford, I would go back to market,” he says. “There’s enough bad press [about government IT] without adding to the fire.” But Jones does add that civil service IT buyers will have to become “sharpened” to paying particular attention to price, and Green says that there’s an increasing focus on “value for money: not the lowest price, but value and flexibility.”  

For all the negative reporting of government IT problems, a very small proportion of officials said media coverage would influence their procurement choices. Few more mentioned recommendations from colleagues – but perhaps this low number reflects people’s self-perceptions, rather than the reality of decision-making. “Colleagues’ or peers’ recommendations are incredibly important in making decisions,” says Green. “And whether the media sways buying decisions or not, it does sway perceptions.”

David Jones of the CPS agrees that people share experiences frequently at senior levels, particularly in the Cabinet Office-led chief information officer’s council and in other forums sponsored by the Office of Government Commerce. Procurement is becoming more professionalised, but as the DCMS’s Mark O’Neill acknowledges, “it’s still a work in progress.”

“We’re on a road towards being a much smarter, joined-up consumer of services,” O’Neill adds. “Then we’ll make decisions that aren’t based on anecdotes or things overheard in the pub.”


Civil service IT survey: Methodology

Civil Service World emailed its database of about 20,000 civil servants, asking people to participate in an online survey: 1,379 responded, from a range of grades and departments. The results of the upper graphic show answers to the question: ‘How aware are you of these companies (in a government work context)?’ Given companies’ names, people were asked to respond on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 meant fully aware and 5 not aware at all; the upper graphic shows the percentage of respondents who answered 1 or 2. We have also provided separate figures for more senior respondents. To produce the lower graphic, we took those people who’d answered 1 or 2 in relation to particular companies in the first question, and examined their answers to the question: ‘When considering working with private sector companies, which are the five companies you would most like to work with?’ The figures show the percentages of those people who, given high awareness of a company, listed that company among the two companies they would most like to work with.