I think I had my first Mr Kipling’s mince pie of the festive season as long ago as September. Yes, it had the festive holly on the top; and amusingly, it had a best before date well before 25 December. But now, with two doors open on the advent calendars, I can now confirm it’s officially December. So where’s our IT government skunkworks?
As I noted back in June, the project to form a crack IT development team at arms-length from ‘proper’ IT, action point 1.12.iv to be specific, was due to be completed by the end of November. The transparency.number10.gov.uk website is still listing it as ‘in progress’, due for completion in November.
So I’m grateful to Mark O’Neill for tweeting me in the direction of this event next week at the Institute for Government, which promises ‘an opportunity to explore the Skunkworks project – an initiative from the Cabinet Office being rolled out to develop faster and cheaper ways to develop IT applications.’ Mark will be speaking at the event, as will DWP’s Steve Dover, and a representative of ‘Agile specialists’ IndigoBlue (whose website runs on Drupal, by the way).