The UK government spends more on IT than any other government, says the shadow minister responsible for reviewing the sector.
Francis Maude, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, said that if the UK government spent the same per person on IT as the Scandinavian countries, the cost would fall by 23 percent, or £3bn.
Despite high budgets, Maude said on Monday that the history of UK government IT projects is "littered with budget overruns, delays and functional failures".
He called for a "fundamental rethink" and called for changes including fewer mega-projects and a rigid insistence on open standards and interoperability.
Maude has appointed Tom Steinberg, who runs the TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet websites and co-authored The Power of Information review for the Cabinet Office, to work on the Tories' ongoing review of government IT.
Steinberg said: "A smarter use of IT by government can do more than just deliver services more quickly and efficiently, it can also open up the institutions of state and make our lives as citizens more effective and rewarding. I am looking forward to being part of this change."
In an interview to be published in the November issue of GC magazine, Maude said: "We are not saying there can never be large projects, but our presumption is that we would look for smaller scale distributed models with a strict insistence on interconnectivity.
"In the case of the NHS, for example, you would expect different units in the health service to be able to do their own thing to a much greater extent, subject to the requirement of connectivity."
On the adoption of open-source software, Maude told GC: "Our preference is to open the way for [open source], but not an assumption that [open source] is the right approach. Open standards we will be fanatical about. We will be insisting absolutely that the capability for interoperability is to be built in."
He also called for more effective procurement and management of projects. "What we have seen in the IT arena is several departments all installing document-management systems, all of them bespoke, all of them slightly different. It's baffling to think that they have such unique requirements.
"One department recently put in a document archiving and management system which cost £250m. That is a lot of a money for something that is available off the shelf and if you slightly massaged internal processes could probably be used. But they prefer to commission bespoke."
