 If we now change tax slightly, we have Jeff Hall, who is PSN, so Public Services Network Technical Lead at the Cabinet Office. Jeff is responsible for providing technical leadership to the PSN Program, which is implementing a network of networks. I'm sure Jeff is going to tell us more about that. Really, he's going to talk to us about why the Public Services Network forms the basis of a new kind of marketplace over to Jeff. I was quite struck by Mike's comment that Citizens Advice Bureau is lovely, and I was thinking wonder what people perceive PSN. I don't think we'd ever be described by anybody as lovely. I want to ask you to put your hands up on that one, and probably not trusted, more feared, I would think, in truth. So another anomaly in here is that I'm PSN technical leader, as the introduction said, and I'm talking about marketing, which should be good for a laugh or two, but hell, marketing people never stop talking technical. Sorry. So PSN is a lot of fun, but it's also dogged by quite a lot of myths, so I thought I'd break a few, and that's why this is not going to be a technical discussion. There's plenty of documentation on the web for those who like to read about MPLS and such. So what is it? During the introduction, it's a network of networks. It's a network of services. It's a network of people and organisations who want a network. When people talk about going and doing a bit of networking, I'm sure they don't mean connecting via MPLS. They mean going to a party, getting to know people, exchanging information, and PSN is about that in a funny sort of way. It's not a physical network, it's a network of networks, where it creates an environment that supports a new kind of market. So why? Why? Because I think you've just heard from Mike and Adam. If I heard the word change once, I heard it about 500 times, and that's because that's real and you experienced it as well. I heard words like agile and new services and new kinds of information exchange and new ways of communication. So when you step back and look at the public services and the whole environment, you end up with thousands of networks, all of which are different, most of which are not connected together, five and a half million people, thousands of sites. It's pretty inflexible. They've been bought in a bespoke manner, and I won't go on. But you understand those problems that when you start doing the kind of social networking, the Blackpool and Taunton example was perfect. If those two organisations aren't connected together, how on earth could they ever do social interaction? So the old way of doing things wasn't sustainable. It doesn't scale in this modern world. When you've got a high rate of change, you've got hundreds of organisations that Adam was referring to, Mike was referring to joining and helping him. We heard the word partnership there as well. Organisations that will come into existence, organisations disappear. That's a rate of change that here the two didn't happen. Handling that on the kind of range of networks in the old style was a very difficult, very expensive, unaffordable, not workable proposition. So why do we get away from that? Well the first part of that is we need seamless connectivity. When you connect to your broadband at home, you don't consider where your bank is hosted, where Amazon is hosted, where BBC iPlayer comes from. You just connect and go. You use it. So the idea of PSN is to create an environment of seamless connectivity. Any service, anywhere on PSN, any information transported to where it's needed, provided it's appropriate. There's a small caveat in there because not everything should be everywhere in terms of your personal information, for example. So how do you partner and agile, you use that ability to transport information, exploit the services that could be there. As I said, it's a new kind of market. So it's a market for services, not a market for connectivity except that we create a commodity, the commodity of connectivity is part of that market. So it's an open market and it's underpinning the transformation of ICT. So it's an enabler, it's not the end goal in itself. But we do desire to create that effect of a single network. Now we've heard a lot about change in the last few minutes and an acknowledgement that change is hard. And I can tell you after four years, change is really hard on this scale. And we've had some great times doing it, and we've had some tough times doing it through the ups and downs of doing it, but we are getting there. And there's a logical way to bring change about. We're not building a network, so we can't create a paint by numbers plan and say, right, first you get your core network and then you get your access and then you put your services on. It isn't like that. We're actually taking something that people use today, all of the networks, the former network networks, largely exist in some form or another today. And we merge them together against common standards so that they interconnect properly and operate properly. That sounds fairly straightforward. Anybody who might have had any involvement with things like IETF and ITU will know that standard is not something you undertake lightly, and it never happens quickly because you've got vested interests and negotiations and somewhat like the fisheries negotiations that the government was talking about this morning on the radio. It takes a long time. However, we have heard it, the cats, and we do have our foundation layer. We've established ourselves. We have our first delivered networks. We have some converged procurement. We have industry-led standards in place and published. And as I say, for those of you who like reading about technical standards, they are all on the web. But it is a journey. We have moved forward embracing that technology, getting partners on board, getting users on board, getting the first services on there, standing up the centralized services that glue it together. It doesn't come with no central cost, but it is essentially the networks interconnecting. But you will understand that you need to sort out little things like addressing and certain types of routing and other things in order to make it operate. And then once you've done that, of course people want to put more services on so we go on and enhance and exploit finally that. And hopefully what we've done then is to light the blue touch paper to an environment that supports innovation and new initiatives. Now that in itself is something of a change and why I said it's a new market. If we look at the way we used to do things and maybe we still do, you go through a cycle of understand what the need is, define it, consult with industry, redefine it, consult again, go out to purchase, winner, build, execute, and that whole process takes years. Now, as we've just heard, the rate of which services and applications and the ability of people to communicate is changing is much faster than that. So the consequence of that situation is that what we build by that route is five years out of date on its first day of use. So what we want to do is to create a network of networks that supports a vibrant, innovative environment for people to put services on, not services that PSN dictates, but services that people innovate and bring to a market. So that's a change. It's a change for our suppliers because they're used to responding to, I have a requirement, then there's a bit process, they will then respond to it. What we're asking to do is invest products in a marketplace in an innovative way based on industry best practice. I'm sure you heard that this morning a little bit regarding the ICT strategy that we want to do is to have the way in which large and small enterprises operate today transferred into the public sector. PSN is the environment that enables that to happen, but the other part is this new marketplace. The marketplace that says that suppliers understand that it's a requirement in the marketplace generally, invest in products, bring those products to market for consumption by the public sector rather than waiting until the public sector puts its hand up and says I have a need and then five years later that need gets resolved except as everyone in this room I'm sure knows by that time the need has changed. So it has been a long journey and we have managed to get somewhere with it and the results speak for themselves. We've got a large family. It isn't again imposed from the centre. We have a family of organisations who seeing the opportunity have started to develop their own areas and bring it to the family of PSN. So what we learned was once you do have the right environment in place then genuinely they will come and some are very enthusiastic and we believe it or not rather than us pulling from the centre, we get people beating us up for not having enough in the centre to support what they want to do. So I really bless early adopters without them. We'd be nowhere. So a great deal of enthusiasm and activity and the result of that is that the market exists and it exists because we can show the savings and benefits from it. Now what that does tell us is that you can create a market and not only that when you put the motion, put it in motion to create that market you start to make savings before you've even completed building the thing that creates that market. Why? Because the suppliers believe the market exists therefore they start pricing and bidding into that market in a way that makes them present themselves as aggressive and participants. So savings are there even before you finish which is handy in the current environment. And all of this results in some skepticism of course but particularly like that one. It's a bit of a shock when something starts working especially when it's been a long hard road to get there but work it does. So in terms of market rather than in technology we have large but before I go into the market we do have the network interconnects up and running. We do have traffic flowing over them. We are working our way up the security layers from the basic level that people would have experienced with GCSEX for those who are familiar with it and working our way up the stack so that we can provide a comprehensive set of services. So not everything that people might want to consume is there today but what we see is because we now have the frameworks in place we see and these are the last six months March previous going back six months as you see the new framework for PSN come into being so the take up accelerates rather rapidly. And what you also see is that initially people buy connectivity and then the services start to come on top of that which is not terribly surprising because you build the house after the foundations. But the pipeline actually is quite interesting is that first bar on there is actually the previous chart is just in that first bar. So we go from this modest if reasonably exciting start to some very big numbers indeed where you end up with total sales of around 1.4 billion. So I would contend when we get to that we really have created a market and if that's a competitive market then public sector will benefit from the savings that come out of that being a commodity based industry best practice product rather than bespoke government product market. On the other side of an industry point of view although that attacks some individuals revenues the reality is that if you operate properly in a market you make better profits which shall us tend to like. So it can be a win-win without without so that we gain and their revenues go down but the profits go up everybody gains because we're getting standard product it works and what's more the work the product works in the same way as it does in industry and in some instances the same way as it does at home and going to to Mark's point it means that the generations that come into work in the public services will be using tools that they would have been familiar with elsewhere not having to learn to use the systems that government uses uniquely amongst other benefits and I suppose as I was relating at lunchtime it also means that that people in the public services can benefit from the kind of services that industry's been taking for granted for about 10 years if when I came from industry into public sector the biggest shock for me was dropping down from not being able to do things that I was doing in 2003 not being able to do them into 2013. A simple example is I used to travel a lot in my previous job I could work out a Singapore airport on the wi-fi I could bring my telephone from my desk in the UK to that PC in Singapore airport I could bring all my messaging I could bring all my emails I could bring my entire office to that one environment in Singapore airport I can't do it outside of the building opposite except at home under very strict circumstances and even that doesn't bring the phone it only brings the email so I want to move what the effect of PSN is that the organisations wherever they are Blackpool Taunton can work together effectively because they're all connected together because the market supplies the kinds of services that make people productive in a cost-effective way to put it in that show so what will happen as we yeah so what we will expect to happen then is as the next generation of frameworks happens so that so we will move to a smaller lots and lots of smaller buys rather than vast buys and what that also does is opens out to to the wider public making it easier for the wider public sector to become a dominant part interestingly of the market picture and that really is a response to some of the things that you've seen in policy change in that if you look at the development of things like healthcare out towards the local communities that means that they're buying lots and lots of small things rather than one big thing at the centre and there's a lot of them so they have a very big impact on the behaviour of our market so more buyers placing smaller orders less complexity smaller and more innovative supplies as well and simpler ordering procedures all of those add up to a fast agile market so immediately we've we've had our first central government awards we have a large number as you saw from some of those press cuttings of regional consortia coming into the to connect to us on the wider public sector our authority which provides the governance of the centre is up and running and some of the cyber enhancements are also in place and the thing called the government converts network which sits at the the core of it just connecting things together is starting to be heavily used and I suppose I have one of my smug told you so moments when I look at some of the incumbent suppliers who told me that we would never need more than one gig of interconnectivity because and I quote the government never talks to each other and that in the first instance they've already had to upgrade or planning to upgrade the capacity beyond one gig for some of these interconnects so that was quite an enjoyable moment and finally we're starting the process of migrating for what GSI or GCF away and that's 588 customers in the local customers in the first instance and they will all become PSN customers and consume exactly the same services that they needed before so GSI will shut down and we will end up with that community ultimately the health community will join us the centre of government communities and so everybody who's exchanging information in the public sector will have this underpinning of PSN anything anywhere connectivity there's also as was the case with GSI the concept of non-central sorry non-central government and non-public sector organisations using PSN and that comes about because as you you cease to be able to make the distinction between what is truly public sector and what is a agency supplying a service on behalf of public sector as is the case with local surgeries and so on which are effectively private businesses and the relationships that the MOJ has with with solicitors and so on so all of these things are blurred lines which PSN will cater for by one means in another so finally it's built on a few pillars one of the things that we do get a lot of people complaining about is things like codes but in the end if everyone's going to exchange information freely and confidently there has to be an element of trust if there's trust then there must be some basic standards in which people trust otherwise it's a free for all you might as well chuck everything on the internet and if you do that you'll find very quickly if you're unguarded that it will be consumed in interesting and unwanted ways so trusting systems the ability to monitor the ability to provide resilience after all if your information is being passed and it's a matter of life and death you really don't want to be at the hands of systems that are subject to random failure so the PSN marketplace is open we've delivery started and we're moving up the stack of complexity and security and there's been a huge amount of progress and although I've had a little dig occasionally during this at the suppliers by and large they've come with us and worked very hard we've had some great help from suppliers big and small in defining PSN and making it real but as you saw from the numbers 1.4 billion the big prizes are really ahead of us in terms of the monetary savings and in the terms of people like Mark and Adam and others being able to make use of this facility to do things that we would never have imagined when we started thank you