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Row flares over success and accountability of Whitehall IT projects

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5th Jun 2007
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The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee this week released a report to encourage successful implementation of government IT projects, just days after the government went to the High Court to keep the results of internal "gateway" project reviews out of the public eye. John Stokdyk reports

The government spends £12-14 billion a year on information technology and the PAC report noted the "considerable risk" to to public funds and service levels if major IT-enabled projects fail. Between 90 and 120 projects are consisdered "mission critical", noted the report and, " given a history of past failures, government departments need the structures and management processes to secure greater success in IT-enabled programmes and projects".

The report continued: "In the past in departments, board level engagement with major programmes and projects has been found wanting, resulting in a failure to identify and act on immiment risks to delivery. Departments have not always shown themselves to be intelligent clients, with poorly defined requirements and a lack of capacity to engage effectively with suppliers, and only a minority of programmes and projects have carried out final Gateway Reviews to determine if they have delivered the benefits they set out to."

Rather than repeating its regular litany of project failure, the PAC drew on a series of case studies by the National Audit Office documenting successful government IT projects. These projects all featured three common principles: senior-level engagement; acting as an "intelligent client"; and achieving the specified benefits.

On successful government IT-enabled projects, the departments were clear about the business process they wanted to change and the outcome they wanted to achieve. The Pension Credit project team, for example, resisted demands for unnecessary alterations to the initial specification.

Comptroller and Auditor General Sir John Bourn and Cabinet Office permanent secretary Ian Watmore, who heads the Delivery and Transformation Group, both emphasised these points in their evidence to the committee.

Sir John commented: "In our experience, many of the difficulties have arisen when a project with many elements is sometimes taken forward with a large number of partners, and the client does not have a full understanding of what he is trying to do and alters it as he goes along. In those circumstances, you can say that many of the projects and programmes have run into difficulties."

Watmore added: "I do not recognise the idea of a technology project. If it is a
technology project, it is doomed to failure. It has to be for a purpose that is backed and delivered by Ministers and the Department. Without that, it is doomed to failure."

While ministers have the power to halt major IT programmes that are likely to fail or no longer meet policy objectives, theTreasury's Office of Government Commerce does not have this right. All it can do is flag up issues of concern with "red" ratings when projects go through their five gateway review stages.

Whitehall's enthusiasm for these reviews is limited, the PAC report notes. A year after passing their gateway 4 reviews in June 2005, only a third of the projects had completed the benefits evaluation "gate 5" review stage.

The PAC lent its weight to a new Major Projects Review Group that has been set up within the Treasury, which will review the business cases for high risk or mission critical projects. The intention is to weed out badly conceived ventures before they start, but the committee warned, "It will need well rehearsed action plans to intervene to stop programmes and projects that begin to falter."

Introducing the report, PAC chairman Edward Leigh MP made supportive noises. "Not all major government IT projects end up on the rocks: as the successful Payment Modernisation Programme and Pension Credit have shown. If more large IT projects are to be similarly successful, then departments will have to understand what was done to make things go right," he said.

"My committee asked the OGC to provide a list of the 90 programmes and projects agreed as ‘mission critical’. The fact that this has now been provided is a much-needed first step towards opening up to scrutiny how government departments have been managing their IT-enabled change."

The critical projects which will be of most interest to accountants include six HMRC schemes, including reform of the Construction Industry Scheme, the Tax Credits programme, pensions simplification and a collection of internal IT and processing upgrade projects.

Casting a shadow on the PAC report, however, was the High Court appeal brought by the OGC last week to prevent the gateway review documents concerning the government's ID card scheme project from being published under the Freedom of Information Act.

The OGC justified its stance a statement that said: "So far the gateway process has helped achieve over £2.5 billion in value for money savings. In the government's view, disclosure would seriously undermine the effectiveness of the gateway process, as confidentiality is essential to the whole process.

"The gateway process is a crucial management tool to improve the success of the government's projects and programmes. In the government's view it is not in the public interest to put that effectiveness at risk through disclosure of the information contained in the two reports concerned in this case."

According to Computer Weekly, OGC officials have ordered the destruction of gateway review reports.

Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor Vince Cable MP tabled a Commons question asking Treasury ministers to explain why the order to shred documents was given.

"Given the government’s IT project record of massive cost overruns and delay, it is absolutely essential to have the maximum degree of transparency and public accountability," said Cable.

"The Chairman of the Committee [Leigh] may be reassured on this score, but the appalling behaviour of Government departments, destroying paper trails rather than submitting them to scrutiny, suggests there is an element of self-delusion in the belief that we now have a transparent system."

HTML and PDF versions of the PAC report, 'Delivering successful IT–enabled business change' are available from the committee's publications page.

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By KenKLM
08th Jun 2007 06:56

IT problems
They spend £12-£14 billion ???? Someone is getting rich from poor performance . The new CIS system , even though it was delayed a further year to get it right , is just an absolute shambles and does not work AT ALL !

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By David Carter
09th Jun 2007 09:43

there's a very good book.....
While politicians come and go, civil servants are the permanent part of the government and ought to be experts at administrative systems.

Instead the ciil servants are hopelessly incompetent. It's an institutional thing. These IT projects will always be disastrous and it will never get any better.

If you want to see how it's done, there's a very good book called "Plundering the Public Sector" by David Craig who used to work for one of the major IT consultancies. The big consultancies are taking billions of taxpayers' money from these idiots. Reading it makes me ashamed to be in the profession..

And if you think the Tax Credits system was a disaster, that's nothing. The new £12 billion NHS system is just being rolled out. It's a disaster of course, but the civil servants are forcing the NHS trusts to buy it whether they like it or not . But maybe they will find that this disaster is more difficult to cover up, and when people start dying........


Here's a piece by Tony Robinson of Computer Weekly, Tuesday 10 April 2007

"The sad thing about the IT-related crises at Milton Keynes General Hospital is that everyone involved wanted its "early adopter" systems installed under the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) to succeed.

A letter signed by 79 end-users at the trust described as "heroic" the staff who have prepared for the systems' go-live and have worked extra hours to cope with subsequent difficulties. They also described Fujitsu, the supplier of the Cerner Millennium Care Records Service software, as heroic.

But heroism has not prevented glitches that have been "unacceptable and particularly bad in outpatient clinics". The case notes of 40 patients are said to have been lost. This repudiates the main business justification for the NPfIT Care Records Service: that lost case notes would become a thing of the past.

More seriously, say the letter's signatories, "The software is so clunky, awkward and unaccommodating that we cannot foresee the system working adequately in a clinical context."

Milton Keynes is the fifth trust in Southern England to go live with the NPfIT system. There have been complaints at other sites.

Staff at Connecting for Health, which runs the NPfIT, worked hard to ensure success. But the problems seem to be getting more serious.

We do not blame software supplier Cerner. It has a good US-based product that is proving a challenge to anglicise. Yet NHS trusts across Southern England are contractually obliged to install it.

There comes a time when a minister has to say, "Do we really want to continue with this sort of disruption? Or is there a better way, even if we have to admit we got some important things wrong when we first announced the programme?"

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