Recommendation 13

The Cabinet Office and DSIT told us that the role of the Centre of Excellence will include working further with departments, for example to help them produce much stronger forecast data on what they are intending to spend, and helping them optimise their use of cloud by avoiding over–purchasing and incurring unnecessary costs. DSIT explained that, through the Centre, it would be working with departments to get much stronger forecast data on procurement and digital spend. The Cabinet Office told us that it aimed for the Centre to help align departments on their requirements to enable government to leverage its purchasing power. DSIT similarly said that, through the Centre, it would need to make sure that departments were seeking to procure the right things and were not “overprovisioning or over–spec’ing what they need”.19 We are concerned that DSIT will not have sufficient authority over other departments to produce the scale of change needed.