Ian Cuddy

While Googling something the other day I accidentally 'discovered' this:  The TypePad blog of John Suffolk who, for the uninitiated, is none other than Her Majesty's Government's Chief Information Officer.

Mr Suffolk apparently started blogging last month, sharing his personal thoughts, updates and insights on current UK Government IT issues.

(I've tried contacting the Cabinet Office to confirm whether this is genuine. No word on that yet, but the everything on the blog is, in my opinion, far too detailed to be fake.)

Suffolk's blog is well worth a read, and in particular a post he made just last week in which he sets out a 'few thoughts' on how the Government's IT strategy will affect industry over the next 10 years.

To give you a taster his opening gambit is: 'I think we are all in for a shock, a big shock.'

In the post, Suffolk effectively announces to vendors that the end is nigh for commercial software licence mega-deals and large-scale IT roll-outs.

So unless vendors adapt quickly, he reckons their current business models will effectively disintegrate within a decade.

>nterestingly, he confirms earlier that this month, the Gov CIO & CIO Councils jointly agreed to create the government Apps Store ('G-AS' if you will), which up until now has only been reported as being a 'possibility'. Suffolk predicts this will have a huge, fundamental impact on Government IT, with this approach becoming the norm.

Elsewhere he also discloses some decisions made at the aforementioned joint CIO/CTO summit, which include news that departments have now bowed under pressure and agreed to 'publish raw non-personal data as a default.'

Which all goes to explain the recent tweets about this. Suffolk adds however there were 'some things to work through on a few data sources'.

Also of note is that the summit saw approval of 'some slight enhancements to the open source, open standards and reuse strategy'.

Here's the link to the blog again.