Government Names Open Source Guru As Tech Advisor

In a move that could hint at the Government’s future direction over open source technology,  Liam Maxwell has been appointed as technology adviser to the Cabinet Office.

Maxwell has worked as an advisor for the Conservative Party regarding technology and is widely considered to be the man behind the Government’s open source strategy drive, which is now being executed by the Cabinet Office. Maxwell was also the IT manager at public school Eton, as well as  previously being a Tory councillor for Windsor and Maidenhead, which pioneered the use of virtualisation to cut costs.

Maxwell’s appointment is to begin in September and is expected to last 11 months. He will advise the Efficiency and Reform Group within the Cabinet Office on how technology can deliver better quality, lower cost public services.

Strong Record

This role includes helping the government develop new, more flexible ways of delivery in government; increase the drive towards open standards and open source software; help SMEs to enter the government marketplace; and maintain a horizon scan of future technologies and methods.

His appointment was welcomed by Ian Watmore, the Government’s Chief Operating Officer.

“Liam’s insight and knowledge will make him a valuable source to the team over the coming year,” said Watmore. “He has a strong track record of delivering success in government ICT and he also brings significant experience of turning the theory into practice.”

Maxwell is of course well known as a leading advocate of open source systems and for the standardisation of IT systems across government departments. In May for example he used his blog to attack the idea of “system lock in” which kept Government systems artificially high.

This point was also highlighted in April when Watmore, who was formerly Tony Blair’s CIO chief, hit out at the previous Labour government, which he accused of creating huge IT projects simply to make policies “sound sexy”. This accusation followed the January 2010 investigation by the Independent newspaper, which exposed the shocking cost of Labour’s botched IT projects during its period in power.

Maxwell meanwhile gained a great deal of recognition back in June 2009 when he co-wrote a Tory paper which called for citizen-centric, open source IT development in Government, in order to end to wasteful, monolithic central government IT projects.

That paper also spearheaded a call to outsource NHS data to the cloud, but Maxwell later backed off from the idea, saying that media stories overstated the idea expressed in his paper. That idea was also attacked by then Tory shadow home secretary turned civil liberties campaigner David Davis.

But Maxwell’s influence within Conservative circles is clearly evident, especially after the Coalition government delivered its ICT strategy in March this year, in which it called for the use of more open source software, as well as highlighting the need to move to cloud computing in order to increase collaboration.