John Suffolk is the government CIO of the world's fifth-largest national economy. His job is to lead a national council of government CIOs and to act as the face of U.K. government IT at home and abroad. He leads delivery of public services transformation enabled by technology. This Gartner Fellows interview was conducted face to face with John Suffolk on 12 November 2007 in U.K. government offices at Whitehall, London. I.  The Role of the Government CIO Gartner: I want to start by asking you about your role. Why does the U.K. government need a head of IT? The position didn't exist in the 1980s and 1990s, though there were many government IT projects at that time. Suffolk: Well I'm not the really head of IT; this is a CxO role. It is not about day-to-day delivery, because we have brilliant people in technology leadership positions who worry about that. This is about taking a holistic view across the public sector. Actually, it's about taking a holistic view around the world by asking, first of all, where is the world heading? For example, the top 5% of the people leaving the education system in China is greater than the whole U.K. population. With factors like this, the world is shifting. It's not so uncommon for us in the U.K., in a city or rural area, to have residents talking in a hundred different languages, but it's wrong to believe that somebody who talks a language can read and write the language they speak. This creates a situation where U.K. government activity is truly global. If I look at the U.K. public sector, at last count, we employed about 5.8 million public servants. We operate in 140 countries. And because the U.K. has always done it this way, we operate at a national scale. So the government CIO role is about looking at all of those major changes around the world, assessing the scale and complexity of what's happening from a U.K. perspective, and it's about how we can collectively move forward, so the sum is greater than the collection of individual parts. So that's primarily how I see my role. But yes, I do have a role in being a head of profession in the IT community. We employ about 50,000 IT professionals; some numbers say that in actual fact, including outsourcing, we probably employ 85,000 people. So this big-scale stuff. And thinking about those 5.8 million public servants for a moment, I don't know exactly how many PCs we have, but some estimate it's about 4 million. So let's be really generous and say 1 million of those are cost-optimized, which means 3 million aren't. If I could save a hundred pounds on each PC, that would be a £300 million, or $600 million, saving every single year. Well, in the U.K. Cabinet Office we've managed to take £1,200 off Gartner's TCO model number (see Note 1). That's a best-practice saving, which we can make available to the whole public sector So I have a role to play in terms of big, corporate global efficiency and effectiveness by taking the best of what we do and not telling people to copy it, but challenging and saying: "Guys, if you can beat it, tell us how and we'll copy, but if you can't beat it, join in." II.  The Progress of Shared Services Gartner: That efficiency point leads me nicely to the question Gartner analysts most wanted me to ask, which boils down to this: Why can't government shared services progress faster? Suffolk: Well there's a presupposition there that it's not going fast. And as a research organization, shame on you for not doing your research, because we already have 60% of the civil servants in shared service, after two and one-half years (Gartner Research has a different position on this – see Note 2). I could compare that favorably to anybody in the world. But I don't think it's a matter of speed; it's a balance between efficiency and effectiveness. But anyway, it's not the issue for me; it's not at the top of the agenda. Is our National Health Service going to put shared services at the top of the priority list for its transformation program – or is it patient care, or waiting times, or cancer success rates? Is the education system going to put shared services at the top of its agenda, or improved learning outcomes? We need to understand that, in a cost-cutting world, where we have lots and lots of agenda items and fundamental policy items like stopping unwanted teenage pregnancy or people recommitting crimes. Shared services have to take its space on a crowded agenda. If shared-service progress was the only agenda item, then I'd probably agree and say, "Look guys, this is the only thing we're doing. Go faster." But it isn't. It's one of the thousands of critically important things that has to be done. And therefore, it's a little bit na?ve to assume that any one agenda item will always be at the top of the agenda, and you can solely focus on that. III.  International Comparisons Gartner: Looking at the role that you hold, the scope of the things you tackle, the progress rates and so on – how do you benchmark your activities internationally? Suffolk: Whether we like it or not, everyone compares every country to every other country, and you tend to get a fair amount of risk from that. For example, Capgemini has just done another review of the European member states on how those countries compare from an e-enablement perspective. Whether you want that research or not, you have it, and of course, we look. But to be honest, we're often not significant to the comparators of other countries. And some of this is down to the pedigree of the U.K. For example, our police national computer is, I think, 33 years old on the first of April 2008. That system does 15 million transactions a day and has over a quarter of a million users on it. That gives you an indication of just how vast the U.K. is from a technology perspective. We're likened to Australia, but there they just created their first PNC over the last three years where we've had ours for certainly over 30 years. So comparators are interesting, but they don't drive strategy. So for us, we have our own strategy, which sometimes will put us ahead of the pack, but sometimes we'll be nowhere in the running, and that would be absolutely right. Now, we have what we call the five nations group: ourselves, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America. And we share absolutely everything that we are doing. We also watch Singapore and other countries, and my colleagues in mainland Europe are doing this, because you can always learn something different. And that thought comes back to my earlier point about when you look at my CxO role and the role as spokesman for the U.K. government: The world has absolutely gone "flat" from a joining-up perspective. And whether you like it or not, you have to work with your international colleagues because legislation often requires it. And our citizens travel the world. I think we have over 4 million ex-pats, who still want products and services from the U.K. public sector. But that will mean dealing with people from every country. So yes, we work hard for our colleagues abroad, we look to listen and learn and share as much as we can. But do we worry about league tables – rankings? Absolutely not. IV.  Key Directions Gartner: Okay, that's a good description of your current approach. So far, what policy directive program or specific project has pleased you most? Which one are you most proud of? Suffolk: I'm only interested in the systemic change that we can introduce. I'm not interested in a rifle shot approach, where we fix A and we fix B for a local department – as important as they are – and of course, we do that as well. But what I'm particularly pleased about is that, first of all, via the CIO council, we are fundamentally bringing the public sector together to drive forward IT-enabled change, and drive forward in the IT profession – put citizens in the center of what we do and drive forward shared services. But you have to address problems that you've never come across or seen in the private sector (most of my working life as you probably know was spent in the private sector). Let's look at an interesting example. We have no ability in the center, and no desire to tell people what to do. That's because they are going to say, "What's it got to do with you? I run my own department, and I'm accountable to parliament. Get lost." And we respect that. So how do you get democratic decisions made, where people actually follow a strategy, when they have no obligation to follow it? And I've introduced a thing called the Champion Challenger Process, in which, in essence, anyone can pick a process, a system, a technology, an architecture, a specification, and say, "Guys, I think it's a Champion X." So take, for example, our Government Gateway. It has 12 million enrollments for identity and verifications – citizens and businesses in the U.K. Our last count was certainly three times the largest online retail bank in the U.K. So we can say it is a "champion" identity and verification service. But what we also say is, anyone can challenge us. Anyone can come up and say, "No, no, I think I've got a better product than that." And they challenge the champion. And we don't care whether it be arm wrestling, drinking under a table, playing poker, (joking) or some other formal kind of evaluation to say, strategically, which is the best product for that particular need. In reality, we apply a variety of intelligent capabilities, so the evaluations tend to be quite stringent. It goes like this: If a challenger fails, he or she must adopt the champion; if no one challenges the champion, he or she must adopt the champion. So you get convergence of strategy in both products and technology, because actually, it's the right thing to do. Not because I've been told to do it. I haven't got anything better, so why wouldn't I use it? And that is an example of a systemic change. A second thing is that we put portfolio management at the Cabinet (see Note 3) level. As you can imagine, when you employ 5.8 million public servants, when you have 16 large departments in central government, which are often bigger than many of the FTSE 100 organizations, to talk about portfolio management is quite a massive thing. But what we did was take in the top 35 or 40 programs across the whole of the central government predominantly, and said to governments, "This is your portfolio of IT-enabled change. This is the amount of money you're spending on it, and this is how they conform to the standards." We did this, first of all, because it begins to get people to think about change, and Department A is doing work reliant on Department B. For example, ContactPoint, the system that looks to protect vulnerable children and young adults (which will be used by fully 100,000 users but operates in the majority of the 400 local authorities), is dependent on a network put in by one department, but the system's being built by fundamentally another department. When you're looking from the information security perspective, you would not see that A is connected to B. It's quite interesting, when you put them on the same sheet, you begin to see what the real priority is. So putting in portfolio management is really important from a holistic nature, but also you begin to see the trends. What are the thematic issues that are occurring across the public sector that you have to fix? One of the ones that we have found, which is true also of my work life in the private sector, is that generally speaking people are completely hopeless at delivering the benefits from the IT investment they have made. And by putting in portfolio management, that hits you in the face. So again, at the systemic level we can come along with policy process and training and support to fix it as a systemic issue. These are the things that I'm most proud about – the things that fundamentally move the U.K. public sector and the U.K. IT profession forward. V.  IT and National Competitiveness Gartner: You've been in the private sector, and you're in this government role. Taking all that experience into account, how much do you think that ICT in general contributes to national competitiveness? Do you think that's an important thing, or do you think it's overstated? Suffolk: Oh, it's fundamentally important. I've come across business people who have no time for technology. And one of the questions I pose is, show me any modern business that's not underpinned by the strategic use of ICT. Now when you ask them, "Do you use Amazon, or do you shop online?" the answer is, "Of course I do." And I say "Well, how on earth do you think they do that?" It's from the strategic use of ICT, and, therefore, you cannot be competitive as an organization or as a country without technology being a part of what you do. You may not wish to accept that for whatever reason because you think sales and marketing is really important, or that finance is really important, or HR is important – and of course they are really important. But I'm afraid you're going back to the 19th century if you don't have technology. I saw a statistic recently that said something like 85% of kids in education have used a computer game, a console, while 85% of the teachers have never used one. And it says to me quite clearly how the generations have shifted. And I have a belief that technology is getting to the point that is similar to where we are with electricity for much of what we do. We come into the room, we flip the switch and the lights come on. None of us give a damn how the electricity got there. Much of what we do in technology is so pervasive now that none of us gives a damn how it got there; we just expect it to be there. And then from a competitive basis, we have a technology ICT industry that provides a very dense infrastructure, and the country stops if it doesn't work. You just look what happens in any terrorist event. Frequently, the first thing people do is mobile phone or SMS. And you can see just how much people rely on technology that they take for granted. And then there's the application space on top of that, which is where I believe the real value-add comes from. I don't believe there's much actual competitive advantage from the infrastructure; it just has to be there. Just as there's not a lot of competitive advantage from having electricity – that's the world that we now live in – but you cannot have competitive business and competitive countries without that ICT base Gartner: Recent debate about the need for a European equivalent of a GPS system is a good example of the underlying infrastructure investment question. Do you think that Europe, and the U.K. in particular, actually is investing sufficiently in its underlying IT infrastructure? Suffolk: That's a great question, and it's a really hard question to answer. Only because in essence, when you look at the technology adoption codes by country, and you look at the maturity of adoption by country, and you overlay them, it's a bit like saying, "Guys, it's fairly easy to put a system in – into a greenfield site – because I've got nothing to integrate with." And therefore, your implementation tends to be much faster, because you have none of the baggage that you're carrying around. But if you've been a long-term adopter of technology, as the U.K. has been – and even look at the fixed telecom line perspective – you look at much of what we do in telecom and infrastructure across the board. Actually, it is faster for these emerging European countries to go to new technology, because there's nothing there to start off with. So I don't look at whether our adoption rate is faster, because historically, it has been fast. What we do need to be careful of is the technology choices that we make over the next three to five years. I believe the technology has never been advancing as fast as it's been advancing in the last few years. And I see that accelerating away. But with that comes a very, very big threat to the ICT industry on a worldwide basis. I'm a trained executive coach, and we would always say, often someone's greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. I think that neatly applies to the ICT industry, because while it is its greatest strength that technology is advancing at a pace we can't keep up with – there's the downside. The ICT industry has to support and implement a technology that even it can't keep up with. So if I compare it to what's being talked about, that's still three to five years old, in terms of technology that people actually install, so you pose the question why? It's because those are the skills that people have – of the old technology, not the new technology that's being invented. And the whole adoption cycle has shifted from the typical product life cycle from academia invention to consumerism today. It's either adopted or it's not adopted. If it's not adopted, it's a dead product. So I think we have to be cautious as an industry in terms of what we adopt as the next technologies. I also don't think that we should have knee-jerk reactions to other countries who are adopting the latest whiz-bang, because those, by their own rights, become legacy very, very quickly. The issue to me is the capability to adopt things on a national scale, safely and securely, not the underlying technology, that may or not be emerging. VI.  Cutting-Edge IT Gartner: Thinking of the NHS data-spine, the National Identity Card and other current projects – these, by scale and in the technologies they're using, are cutting-edge. Government ministers and others will say to you occasionally, "John, what's your take on this? Is it working? Is it safe?" How do you form your own judgment about whether those things are going okay, and whether they're likely to succeed? Suffolk: Okay, first of all, let me correct you. The projects that you've mentioned are not cutting-edge. I'm not aware in the commercial part of government that we have cutting-edge projects. The NHS is not cutting-edge from a technology perspective, and neither is ID cards. We invented much of our biometrics as a county, and therefore, we are very well versed in terms of biometrics. We have DNA, we have fingerprints, we have facial, we have the biometrics on passports. This is not cutting-edge. Yes, the health service is the biggest broadband network, just as we have the country's biggest wide-area network in GCHQ (an intelligence and security organization). It says so on their Web site. But for me, that's a kind of "So what?" Don't get me wrong; scale brings its own problems. But we talk about a broadband network that was on time. Actually, it was faster than the original plan – under budget. It's the biggest on the planet and people have done a super job. Our challenge in terms of technology is invariably never the technology. And the old models, in terms of balancing the needs of people, processes and technology, are fundamentally as true today as they were 20 years ago. So I worry about whether we have got that balance right. I invariably do not worry about the technology. Not because we don't make mistakes in technology – we absolutely do. But generally speaking, somebody somewhere in the public sector has cracked the technology challenge, whether it be Health, or Defense, or the Home Office, or Education or local government, somebody has cracked it. You may have a scale issue, but if you can scale up to the planet's biggest in anything, normally, you're pretty good. And it's quite interesting. A lot of suppliers say to me, "John, whenever we ask for a large-scale reference, we always reference the U.K. public sector, because you do the biggest stuff in the world." We're not like America or Australia, where, frequently, you work on a state basis. We work on a national basis. And therefore, we come and say, "Oh yeah, we do have 350,000 users," and, "Oh yeah, we do 15 million to 20 million transactions a day, and that's one of 10 systems that do that." And, "Yeah, it is national, and yeah it does have 400 companies." And it's kind of like, so what? So what I look for is, first of all, are we really clear in terms of the articulation of government policy, how that is translated into strategy and the objectives of the program? And do you have enough ground-level traction that understands what success looks like from a business requirements perspective? Do we have clarity in terms of what process change we will need to fulfill those requirements in underlying and supporting technology? Do we have skilled, knowledgeable, experienced people, who have operated at that scale before? Do we have the right governance in place to make sure that if I'm going to invest a 100 pounds, I'm going to get more than a 100 pounds worth of value back. Otherwise, I'm better off putting our money in the worst-paying bank account, because I know I'm not going to get my capital back. And therefore, I'm afraid the boring, mundane, anally retentive basics of good program delivery are what I worry about. I invariably do not worry about the technology. VII.  Web 2.0 Gartner: We are currently, in the midst of a big wave of social Internet technologies, often referred to as Web 2.0. What's your take on that wave of blogs, folksonomies, wikis, etc. Do you see it as a particularly high value with respect to what government needs to achieve? Do you think it will change, for example, democratic inclusion? Or do you see it as of relatively low consequence at this stage? Suffolk: Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I read with some interest all the hype around Web 2.0. I think Web 2.0 is the next shift, but I would say this: First of all, the U.K. has circa 60%-plus Internet penetration, in terms of U.K. homes. We have an 80%-plus penetration in terms of digital TV. So if we're thinking about social inclusion, by definition, there are still pockets of society that are excluded from the use of technology. It doesn't matter whether you're on Web 1.0, 2.0 or Web 27.0. That is not going to change the social inclusion perspective. It does change the dynamics of inclusion for those that currently have access to digital media, electronic media, such as today. And I think the skill, going forward, is really how to harness that. For example, I'm a firm believer that companies and countries are currently constrained by the physical yet unrealistic boundaries they set for themselves. So the U.K. will think, we have to set policy broadly in the U.K. public sector. Well, why? Because Web 2.0 means we can post an issue globally and say, "Guys, what's the best research in the world about people recommitting crimes when they leave prison?" And we can take the brains from all countries, all cultures, all experiences to begin to do collaborative problem solving, collaborative policies and collaborative options analysis. And I think that's where Web 2.0 will have the greatest value, from a public-sector perspective. I hear a tremendous amount of rubbish around lots of very eminent people saying things like, "Well of course, you need a lot more rich media and Web 2.0 for citizens." And I'd say, why? Let me give you an example. When I am renewing my car tax, I want that to be a 12-second transaction – straight in, straight out. The last thing I want is that clutter, with damn video and graphics, which is slowing up my transaction. And again, I think we run the risk with some of the technology of forgetting, actually, that some transactions are about being high volume, high quality, safe, secure, reliable and damned fast, because my time as a citizen is not free. Others, where I'm saying, "Guys, I need some help to understand. I'd like to see some videos of the patients who have gone through this operation. I'd like to be able to do some research in terms of what the education and the classes are like in a certain area." And I think the former Web 2.0 package is collaborative, and the rich media plays a very worthwhile role in terms of that kind of interaction. But it is not sensible for every kind of system interaction. So I think, again, we need to be careful in saying, we have a technology. I think – on occasions – I think we have a technology which is looking for a problem. But the issue for me is, asking again, the boring, mundane basic questions: Tell me what my business problem is; tell me what options I have to solve that business problem; and what I need to do with my people and my processes and my technology to come up with the best strategic solution. It is not just about jumping on a Web 2.0, or any other kind of technology solution. VIII.  Green IT Gartner: The British government in the last few years has been quite involved, on a national and international level, in talking about the environment and climate change. Information technology has some role to play there. And information technology consumes energy. Suffolk: Yes it does. Gartner: What are your thoughts so far on government IT in the context of this environmental change? "Green IT" some call it. And to be quite specific here, I don't believe you have set any particular national-level targets for electricity consumption reduction in government data centers. Will those be forthcoming? Suffolk: Well, this really plays back to the question of Web 2.0. And it's a bit like watching five-year-olds play football – where 20 out of 22 players are following the ball. We've had the 20 players following the Web 2.0 ball, and now we've got the 20 players following the "green" ball. And the issue for me is saying, "Guys, I want to play top-tier football, which is about strategic man-to-man marking." This is the value of strategy and tactics. This is about understanding what our opposition is doing, and what their strategy is." But, therefore, you have to put green into the context of what you are trying to achieve. Let me give you an example. I think we have fundamentally failed on a worldwide basis as an IT industry to understand the cost of what we do. And I roundly blame Gartner for this, because you guys are the ones that come up with TCO benchmarking. And it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, I go out and I pick boring desktop infrastructure. What price do you think the suppliers broadly pitch? You won't be shocked to know that it's somewhere around the Gartner TCO benchmark. And there's a CxO, the CFO, or the CEO, says, "How do I know this is good value for money?" Well of course Mr. CEO, it's very much in line – or even slightly ahead of – the Gartner benchmark. So you have the self-fulfilling prophecy. I look at this, because of my financial services background, and say that actually zero is a very good starting point from the cost. You now justify every number above zero, and I am again, quietly attentive. I say, "Could you please tell me how that server is configured? Should I have disks in there, or should I have the disks in the SAN? Tell me what the electricity consumption would be. So when you begin to take a man-to-man marking approach, everything else falls in its line. But one of the players just happens to be the green player. So from the Gartner TCO benchmarking, we've already knocked 70% off that already, by starting from zero. And to answer all of the elements of TCO, you must answer power. If you answer power, you're also addressing the green agenda. Then there's the question of how long do you keep an asset? In the good old days of green screens, we would keep them until they fell over. We now have this quaint notion that we should refresh every three, four or five years, and I'm thinking, but why? Eighty percent of what I can see of people's work on technology is ERP, Web-based transaction services. Why do I need a big lump of tin on the desk, which I'm going to refresh every four years? Well, I'm probably using only 10% of the capability. And don't tell me I need rich media, because if I'm doing ERP, accounts payable, or call center common transactions, I don't need Web 2.0; I need transaction-based systems, which are fast and furious, and accurate. And therefore again, for me I'm into systematic change for governments, so by answering the green question I've also answered the TCO question. I've answered the replacement cycle question. I've answered the question of where you buy the PCs. I've answered the networking question. I've answered the data center question. I've answered, "Why do you put a four-core processor in there, when your applications can only use one?" But the interesting thing is the ICT industry often can't tell me the answers. So when I say, "Boys, why did you bring in four-core?" "Well, because that's the latest stuff." "Do the applications run on four-core?" "We don't know. No one's ever asked us before." Again, the industry needs to mature away from being a practice-based industry to being an engineering-based industry. Because if it was engineering-based, somebody around the world will crack the green question, whatever we thought that was, and we would copy that best engineering. So when an engineer says, I need to lay a kilometer of road down, they know what the engineering is to lay a kilometer of road. But they don't reinvent the engineering for a kilometer of tarmac each time, they know what the engineering is. When there's a new insight, a new learning, everybody picks up that. That's what an engineering-based industry does. We need to do it that way. IX.  IT Industry Improvement Gartner: Don't you think that given the underpinnings of Moore's law, its pace and creativity, that it's hard to hold to an analogy as basic as "tarmacing" roads? Suffolk: Utter, utter rot. Yes, of course the underlying technology is changing quickly. But then the focus should become how to handle the overall configuration of technology and the procurement of the technology to accommodate that. Moore's law applies to some components, but it does not apply to every bit of technology. It certainly applies to the hardware, but it fundamentally does not apply to the software in many respects. So you need a configuration response and a procurement response. I have all the equipment I need here already, operating at a particular price/performance level. At some point in its lifetime, I should consider swapping some of it out, and that's the factor that should be in the design upfront. Gartner: So if I were to ask you, what's the one thing you'd like to see from the IT industry, is that it? Suffolk: Well I think the one change I want to see from the IT industry is they need to step back and say, "Boys, on the one hand we're inventing things that we cannot support from an implementation perspective." Then you say, "Guys, this is not going to get better, this is going to get worse, because the rate of change in my opinion is accelerating," and that's a very positive thing. And therefore, what is the new paradigm that the industry is going to move to? To help us decide that, in the U.K. public sector we are trying to frame intelligent questions – like what within the technology stack could we now call a commodity? Is ERP a commodity product? I would say yes. If you're in the ERP department, you might say no. If the IT industry followed the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) industry example, what should be the margin of that commodity product? I came from a large (private sector) institution where my margin was 88 basis points. That's less than 1%. So should the margin on a commoditized IT product be less than 1%? Let's try some other example intelligent questions: If I buy integrated products from a company, shouldn't they charge me the same price that I should get the component products for? If not, well why not? If I invent some IP in a particular part of the public sector, I own the IP, so why would anybody want to try and sell me back my own IP somewhere else in the public sector? And the list of such questions goes on. So, as and when we become much more intelligent clients, commoditization and other factors will cause fundamental changes in response from the ICT industry. X.  Fixing the Internet Gartner: You have talked about technology not being the problem, but I will ask you, if there was one technological breakthrough you'd like to see, what would it be? Suffolk: I think the Internet – the Web – is a truly wonderful invention, which has dramatically moved society forward around the world. We need to be careful it doesn't become the Wild West though. And I'm surprised that the ICT industry hasn't come up with a mechanism that broadly says, every ISP connecting into the World Wide Web is a certified ISP – to begin to take off the spam the porn, and the unpleasant things that go onto the Web. Because rolling the plot forward 20 years, without a shadow of a doubt, ISPs will be providing a part of every country's basic infrastructure – telephone traffic and every medium will be on the Internet. And yet you see children being exploited; you see identity theft; you see fraud; you see stuff on there of the most horrific nature. We would not allow that in any other walk of life of our society, yet we allow it in terms of the Internet. So if I could wave a magic wand, I would get all of the ISPs around the world together, and say first of all, you have to be certified to be an ISP. First of all, whenever you connect up, you'll be validated to be providing the latest firewalls, the latest anti-spam and so on. And by the way, if we see just one dodgy bit of dealing from you, you're disconnected from the club. You can't get on unless you're certified. But just as I see directors being banned from holding company directorships because they can't run an effective company, or they don't do things in an appropriate manner, I'll expect to see that from an ISP perspective. Because it will become so fundamental to worldwide success going forward, I think we need to get our act sorted out. Gartner: That begs a specific question about identity. How we determine the identity of individuals seems to be an international issue, but we can't expect a particular vendor, or even group of vendors to fix that part of the Internet. Suffolk: Of course. Gartner: So is it a United Nations question? Who do you think should be leading the final solution for identifying individuals? Suffolk: Look, there isn't going to be one worldwide solution in our lifetime, and I don't believe there should be. I've been through 26 mergers and acquisitions, and we've always kept with customers having multiple numbers because they have multiple accounts with multiple organizations. The world has coped with that for the last 50 years; it will cope with that for the next 50 years. Of course over time, things will converge on less numbers, and I think that's an appropriate thing to do. My point about the Internet is not so much about identity. It's that we frequently allow people to trade on the Web who are looking to steal data and identities, who are looking to exploit the children and normal adults on the Web, who are looking to steal and to bribe and corrupt on the Web. And I think because the Internet is something that will be underpinning worldwide economies over the next 50 years, the industry should begin to address that as an issue. Gartner: John, thanks very much for your time. Suffolk: You're more than welcome. Note 1 TCO Estimates Suffolk's reference to £1,200 versus the £2,000 Gartner TCO number relates to the public-sector "flex" framework vendor contract implemented initially in the Cabinet Office and being extended to the U.K. Office of National Statistics and elsewhere in the government. Note 2 Shared Services There is a significant difference of opinion here. Gartner believes most services – and, in particular, those concerning the front office – remain departmentally siloed, and yet sharing here would have the greatest impact in terms of efficiency and quality of service transformation. "Government Consolidation and Shared-Service Efforts Will Continue to Struggle" provides a recent Gartner view on the difficulties all governments face in this area. Note 3 The Cabinet The Cabinet is the committee at the center of the British political system and is the supreme decision-making body in government.