Downing Street 'skunkworks' chief seeks to reinvent government IT

Mark O'Neill is head of innovation and delivery at the Department for Communities and Local Government's Government Digital Service.

More commonly, he's known as the guy running the 'skunkworks' who is trying to reinvent government IT in the form of small, agile and, above all, successful projects, instead of the failed, over-budget and overdue behemoths of the past.

"We're about things being real. Real value, real deliverables, real outcomes. We're about innovation, not as an abstract good, but as a real, concrete good which delivers user benefit and business benefit," he said.

"To be blunt, we can't afford the old way of working any more," he added, meaning not just the cost but the operational waste. "We have no money, and people no longer have the patience to deal with long-term projects that don't actually go anywhere and don't actually deliver value."

The UK is not alone in grappling with these problems, and O'Neill keeps an eye on what other countries are doing, highlighting Estonia's "very impressive single portal for government services" and the CIO dashboards he's seen in the US.

O'Neill has been in the job for about six months, and one of his team's first projects was creating the e-petitions site. The previous government had the Number 10 petitions site, but "there was no follow through", he said.

In the first eight weeks on the new site, three petitions reached the 100,000 signatures necessary to get them considered for debate in the House of Commons.

The site went from idea to reality in about eight weeks, and was delivered for about £80,000 including hosting and security.

"To put that in context, the system at peak gets as much traffic as the entire Direct.gov site," he said.

And when O'Neill checked costings in the market, the quotes he received were five to six times what he ended up spending. Earlier governments might have seen that as reassuringly expensive, but for O'Neill it proved his team's worth.

"It helped us identify that we could take high-profile projects with tight timescales and turn round systems in that time," he said.

It also disproved the old notion that government must buy from large suppliers because small to medium-sized businesses are too small to get anything done.

O'Neill attributes this attitude partly to the biological tribal nature of human beings. "We like to see a similar-sized and shaped monkey in the mirror," he said.

Even so, O'Neill's department managed to demonstrate that it could use SMEs to get things done rapidly and efficiently, and traditional government suppliers have noticed.

"I've had some interesting conversations with some of the incumbents," he said.

"They tell us: 'We're now all very agile and do things differently than we did in the past.'"