That big UK gov leg up for small biz: SMEs bag just 1-in-10 G-Cloud deals Small businesses have taken just 10 per cent of government IT contracts available from public-sector shopping catalogue G-Cloud. That's according to a group formed to give Whitehall feedback on actions that could boost SME involvement. The target figure is 25 per cent. Fronted by managed hosting and IaaS provider Memset, the …
The Govt don't want SME's.
Govt procurers love paying 3k a man day for Consultants. If you're a procurer, its in your best interest to handle contracts as large as possible.
The single only reason why there is an interest in SMEs is that the Govt think they're cheaper. And they are, only because procurers will not pay SME's what they will quite willingly pay to the 'big' consultancys.
Procurers are also completely risk averse - going with bigger, in their eyes, means going safer.
The great thing about Govt procurement is that the cash is never ending, you don't go bankrupt and you never get sacked.
Fantastic!
The comment was IL3 is labour intensive and the PSN is not handing out IL3 security passes.
And this isnt about running the country's infrastructure - its about providing cloud services to Govt of varying sizes. If you're a large provider you can recoup the costs of IL3 later on in a way unavailable to SMEs.
Anyone who has run an SME and tried to get List-X status knows about the stitch-up in supplying secure systems. You need to handle S* to get List-X. You can't handle S* until you are List-X. You WILL NOT get a contract until you are List-X. Procurers just will not touch you, even if you have everything in place.
Harry Kiri, you are indeed right. I work for an SME Security Consultancy and we work with and have taken a number of organisations through List X, IL3/4/5/6 accreditation, PSN, ISO 27001 and other HMG Security requirements. It is a total chicken and egg thing. "Oh you don't have HMG Accreditation? well you will need it to win this work. But you have to have it first, and we can't give you any indication if you will win it." That means spending large resource on achieving accreditation with no assurance of revenue. Crazy situation. So much for a pragmatic and proportionate approach to Risk Management!
A bureaucratic solution to a bureaucratic problem with a liberal dose of additional process thrown in.
Small businesses don't have spare capacity hanging around to fill in forms for the box-ticking procurement process. Big companies do and they certainly charge for it.
Contract awards are now being held up as the procurement process grinds on. What a great way to start a project: late. Not because of some technical issue, but because the contract wasn't awarded in time. Of course smaller companies can't just swallow these delays.
Is it little wonder that only the big boys are playing.
Unfortunately one problem is risk. Big contracts need careful checks on the risk before punting allot of money at a company. Unfortunately SMEs represent around 23% of bank lending yet make up 40% of the bad debt risk. This is not to say that all SMEs are high risk, but that looking at them as a whole they are more likely to present an unacceptable risk than a large company so are less likely to get past the basic checks.
The SME I work for gave up any idea of working for either national or local Government long ago because the hoops you have to jump through in order to win any contract are so convoluted and time-consuming that it's just not worth the effort. If we can win contracts from blue chip multi-nationals who probably know a whole lot more about what they need than the average civil servant, why are the demands of Government departments so ridiculous?
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