The problem for the UK is the Fujitsu owns the last vestiges of the UK IT scene.

ICT/ICL and a bunch of other were all bought out by them in the early 90s.

But also there are two other issues:

1) there aren't many companies that are able to bid on that scale

2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.

The solution to this is develop decent in-house architecture team who are able to drive specs and keep an eye on developments.

But

That requires three further things:

1) long term vision, with enough run way/agency to affect change

2) enough money to pay and keep decent people

3) the ability to terminate contracts when they get into shit. This is policitically challenging because contract termination == the current minister is shite in news term. "FLAGSHIP PROGRAMME SCRAPPED BECAUSE OF POOR PERFORMANCE, here is why $government is bad with lots of input from people with agendas that haven't properly been vetted because the journalist isn't a specialist (or its not a news site)"

Part of the answer is dividing programmes up into smaller chunks to attract a wider range of bidders.

The problem is that, even when divided up, they're still often "build and run" contracts which are less attractive to the smaller consultancies which tend to specialise in the "build" part, and are much less keen on the "run" aspect (with good reason, as it tends to be low-margin and painful).

And even then, fashions inevitably change and suddenly someone starts wondering why they've got 30 different tech vendors and need an expensive enterprise architecture team to glue their work together. Cue "why can't we just consolidate all this and get AtoS to do the whole thing?", and the cycle begins again...

Yes, it's all very bad.

> 2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.

Yes, agreed, although (at least) Capita are probably much worse. They're currently in a deep hole having screwed over the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme. It's been causing deep pain for people for a long time now. Where's IBM when you need them, or Oracle? Just joking.