Off down the Amazon: DCMS confirms UK national tech advisor Maxwell has resigned The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has today confirmed the resignation of Liam Maxwell, though the UK government’s top tech advisor will work his notice period and not leave until October. As exclusively revealed by The Register earlier this week, Maxwell is set to swap life in the public sector for a …
Mr Maxwell has changed data classification policy across government to suit Amazon Web Services. There used to be a handful of providers previously, but now there are only two. I'm sure that when contracts are up for renewal, government will be able to negotiate good terms and conditions...
Also, how much money has been actually saved by these "transformation" projects to AWS?
I wonder how much money HMRC are paying AWS, I'm 100% sure it's more than AWS pays HMRC.
Do you mean this bit:
the risk of a former official improperly exploiting privileged access to contacts in government
Because for starters, that's not listed as a rule, it's something that the rules are intending to avoid, and the way that it's avoided is by limiting what he can do for the first two years in his new job.
Secondly, if you read carefully it applied to the "former official", which he isn't, yet.
So, if he doesn't keep to the rules which the Civil Service chooses to place on him, then he would be in breach of the code, but as he hasn't started that job yet, it's a bit early to tell.
Between (essentially govt appointed roles) and industry has long been a thing.
It is almost invariably the case that a person moves to a company that has (obviously coincidentally) benefited a lot from that persons decisions whilst in their "gov" role.
Just look through back issues of Private Eye (they also focus a lot on similar scenarios in defence procurement, top military bods move from equipment buying roles to working for companies they purchased kit from)
A combination of the rules currently in place coupled with the feeble interpretation of them is not great, in many peoples view.
Let's go back to 2009 and a Centre for Policy Studies pamphet about data, written by a Councillor and the Lead Member for Policy and Performance at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead - yes, that will be Liam Maxwell
In "It's Ours" (pdf) he argued that the Government should give people back their ability to control their data (such as medical records) that the government traditionally holds.
However, it seems, when offered the chance to work in government (he started in Cabinet Office and then the Government Digital Service) these were just the first steps in his Damscene conversion to "It's not ours - it's not even government's - it's any bloody multinational with a cloud"
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
