(Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.)

The GDS was created because a Government minister (Maude), who was enthusiastic about digitising the interactions between the government and its citizens (an entirely laudable goal), was sold a pig in a poke by people who saw the opportunity to advance or enrich themselves.

Martha Lane Fox is an ex-consultant, whose sole achievement of note was to have been the co-founder of Lastminute.com, which was lucky enough to IPO right at the very peak of the dot-com bubble. Since then, she's sat on on the boards of various companies and charities. Fortunately for her, everyone seems to have forgotten that Lastminute.com was never profitable and was eventually acquired for less than half its IPO valuation, so she was able to buy enough positive PR to convince the government to make her the "Champion for Digital Inclusion", during which time she commissioned a report from some consultants - http://www.go-on.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pwc_report... - which claimed that the government could save £900m if the "digitally excluded" got online.

Mike Bracken had zero experience in government or the public sector before being appointed as head of the GDS. His previous role was as "Director of Digital Development" for the Guardian, so his expertise is in running websites (and the infrastructure supporting apps) for a newspaper.

The GDS started off by creating the Alphagov prototype, which was essentially a pretty-looking static-HTML portal with zero functionality (all the links went back to the original websites). They then presented it to the powers that be, saying "Look, we can digitise the whole of government and make it look like this, AND save hundreds of millions of pounds!" (pointing to Martha's report as supporting evidence).

Francis Maude believed them and gave them the budget to recruit hundreds of Nathan Barley types (with more than a little cronyism and jobs-for-mates), with puffed-up CVs and a vocabulary full of buzzwords, and gave them grand titles (and grander salaries - Mike Bracken's base salary is over £150,000). Their few unqualified successes have been very low-hanging fruit. Most of what they've delivered has been worse than what was there previously, and in a few cases (e.g. trying to apply Agile methodology to the Universal Credit project at the DWP), they've screwed up massively and ended up wasting millions.

If there was ever a proper independent review of what GDS has delivered, there would be front page headlines about how much money has been wasted. Unfortunately, the public sector has always been bad at admitting to mistakes or underdelivery, and the GDS, in particular, is one big gravy train. Any suggestion that things aren't going well is hushed up and brushed under the carpet, so that those at the top can hang on to their little empire and their well-paid jobs. Needless to say, any dissension from within the ranks has the potential to be severely "career-limiting", so those further down the foodchain who have any sense have either left or decided to keep the gravy flowing for as long as possible by keeping their mouths shut and their heads down.

Meanwhile, Martha Lane Fox was made a Baroness, and Mike Bracken was given a CBE.