Technology for Government

The UK Government spends around £16 billion per annum in technologies to make services more accessible and responsive while increasing the effectiveness of all the necessary back-office systems to raise efficiency and reduce costs.

Services

To improve services and reduce delivery costs the UK government is investing heavily in the infrastructure to personalise its online services which are already some of the best in the OECD. Improved personalisation should help increase service usage by citizens and businesses.

Outsourcing

The UK is the largest EU market for outsourced IT services and this is increasing by 3% per annum as the government seeks to reduce its costs.

Mobile and Flexible Working

Another area where the government seeks to reduce its costs and improve services is through mobile and flexible working. This is to try and ensure that mobile field workers such as carers or Police have better access to information systems when out and about doing their job.

Next Gen

A key technological area being explored to reduce costs and the environmental impact is the wider sharing and reuse of applications. These are developed to open standards and hosted by a small number of higher performance greener data centres accessed by a high performance secure government network. These Next Generation IT systems are referred to increasingly as G-Apps running in the G-Cloud.

Access to Talent and Technology

Over 27% of UK jobs are ICT-related, one of the highest in the world. A key challenge and opportunity for the sector is exploiting the rapid evolution of technology. The UK, having three of Europe’s top five Technology Universities and many other world-class Research and Teaching Universities as well as an extensive industry ecosystem, is well positioned to respond to the talent and technology challenges. Examples of world-class research strengths include: information security; intelligence management; network security; and search technology.

Technology Financing

The UK venture capital market is the largest in the EU, accounting for 40% of European fund-raising, and second only to the US globally. The economic impact of the private equity industry is substantial and is continually growing. Supported at one end by networks of Angel financiers and at the other by Public Markets, raising finance to support robust business propositions is rarely an issue. In addition, a large amount of Government R&D spending is focused on ICT research and Knowledge Transfer Networks help to stimulate collaborative R&D between academia and industry in UK and internationally.