A project to put computers into every classroom in Northern Ireland
is in disarray after education IT supplier RM walked out of
negotiations on a £300m, ten-year contract.
Mike SimonsIn 1999 RM and ICL were named preferred suppliers for the
Classroom 2000 Private Finance Initiative to provide information
and communications technology to all 1,227 schools in Northern
Ireland.
However, after 18 months of negotiations the company last month
walked away from the talks, according to RM director Phil Hemmings.
"We could not agree a satisfactory balance of risk and reward," he
said.
The Northern Ireland Education Department was demanding penalty
clauses worth up to 10% of the contract's value, according to a
source close to the negotiations.
The deal to install and manage 50,000 work stations would have
been one of the UK's biggest Windows 2000 roll-outs.
Its collapse will be an embarrassment to the Government since
Northern Ireland has one of the lowest levels of IT use in the UK.
It will also cost RM dear. The company has been forced to write off
more than £5m because of the cancellation, a third of last year's
£15m operating profit.
The Classroom 2000 problems follow last year's decision by the
Home Office to drop a Sema-led consortium as its preferred bidder
for the £350m IT 2000 infrastructure project after almost two years
and opt for an ICL bid instead.
These examples highlight the growing problems of implementing
public-private partnerships and the difficulty of medium-sized IT
firms have in securing major public sector contracts
Sema was dropped after disagreements about risk allocation. The
IT 2000 contract was the first to pass through the Gateway Review
process, a scheme to prevent major project failure, introduced by
the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), but Hemmings said there
was little input from the OGC or e-envoy's office in the Classroom
2000 negotiations.
Hemmings said that the Classroom 2000 experience reinforces the
new IT project guidelines from the e-envoy's office that major IT
programmes should be broken down into smaller projects.
The Northern Ireland education department is discussing how to
salvage Classroom 2000 and ICL told Computer Weekly that it wanted
to play a significant role in the project.
A spokesman for the Northern Ireland Education Department said
it was unfortunate that mutually acceptable terms and conditions
could not be agreed with RM.
"Notwithstanding this disappointing outcome, the department
remains firmly committed to strengthening the ICT infrastructure in
schools. Alternative ways of providing this are now being
considered as a top priority," he said.