[oracuk]

The UK government is a 19th Century 'filing cabinet bandwidth' information architecture. The IT systems as always reflect the organisation structure that produces them. The data redundancy and unnecessary domain separation is frustrating and archaic.

Uk.gov is just the cherry on the top of an old and creaky enterprise design that hasn't kept pace with changes to its mission or the world around it.

[ElliotH]

Actually the stuff GDS is doing starts from a clean slate and does away with much of what you are complaining about, in fact it is intended to fix a lot of it!

[oracuk]

If GDS was the IT department for the whole of government and the departments became a team of policy analysts and ministerial support then you'd be right.

Overwhelmingly the core information management and processing is on the local IT infrastructure of each department. GDS is unifying the web presence and some of the citizen identity systems, its not fundamentally taking over the core information systems of state.

EDIT: To be clear, I think something like GDS should take a long hard look at the core information systems of state and start again with a clean slate breaking the technology and the data out of the policy silos.

[ElliotH]

I don't disagree with you, but change takes time.

Getting publications together in one place will be a great start (which is being helped by the public bodies transition).