Recommendation 14

We asked how government could manage its relationships with large technology suppliers, particularly given concerns about lack of competition or rising costs.20 DSIT told us that it needed to build government’s capability in some specific areas of digital procurement, as activities such as “buying cloud brilliantly is a quite specific skill, even within the digital procurement set of skills”. GCF said that, as digital was now at the heart of almost every procurement, it needed to do more to build digital commercial skills, and that this was “absolutely” part of what the Centre of Excellence would do. It recognised that much of the more complex digital procurement was undertaken by multidisciplinary teams, so this would need a wider focus 17 Qq 1, 5 18 Qq 15, 20, 41 19 Qq 23, 27–29 20 Qq 27–29 12 than only on commercial teams.21 The Cabinet Office wrote to us after our evidence session to tell us that new systems are predominantly “cloud first” and cloud computing expenditure was likely to always trend upwards to meet the priorities of the business.22