One of the responsibilities of the UK’s Government Digital Service is to review any IT spending by other departments, and are staffed so that in many cases they can implement and support products themselves rather than outsourcing them. My understanding is that other departments are making headway in being allowed to bypass that process, but at their peak GDS were fantastic at shutting down bad projects before they’d sucked up millions of pounds.

tl;dr it's not working

Well how the hell do we have a £40M contract for supply of laptops to schoolkids filled by a noname laptop supplier using the jankiest (really low quality, really poor spec) laptops worth maybe £100 but being charged to the taxpayer at >£300 each.

School IT people are getting them delivered, a lot are broken, and the cost of repair is given as more than the cost of buying _retail_ a better replacement.

I don't know how these people live with themselves, ripping off the taxpayer and lumping in-need schoolkids with poor equipment.

Anyone in that decision chain could spend an hour reading "budget laptop" articles on trusted websites, then look on the website of a high-street supplier for a top price. Boom, saved the taxpayer £20M.

Mind you at least something was delivered, current UK government tenders appear to be typified by non-delivery by completely inexperienced companies for costs well above market.

The equiv contract in Australia went to Lenovo. Microsoft and Adobe preloaded the laptops with Office and Adobe Suite and no cost. Worked out pretty well.

This is especially sad given that the BBC micro project in the 80's was a resounding success and showed exactly how these project should be run.

I used to work for a consultancy that almost exclusively worked for the German armed forces. And pretty signficant chunk of these contracts evolved around requirements and specification documents. Basically we wrote them, the way the armyed forces wnated them to be written, and they just signed of on them. That was equally shocking as it was hilarious sometimes. The sad thing, almost the complete management of that firm, and the majority of employees, used to be former Army, Navy or Airforce. Or from the civil admin staff. I always wondered how much value we actually created, the amount of additional expertise was quite limited.

US Digital Service. GSA 18f.

They already exist. Mysterious why CDC didn't use them. Maybe they are hollowed out after the Trump years. I know I wouldn't have stuck around.

In my 10 years supporting CDC, I can tell you 18f is nonexistent there. Nothing to do with the administrations.

I imagine you are correct that this happens frequently.

However, if a large outsourcer like Deloitte gets the gig, they should have the right experience and knowledge to work with the customer to determine what they really need/want, and to steer them through the whole process. They should also ensure they use best practices, such as tests. If a company fails here.

I think there is blame to go round on both sides.