It seems the chancellor has woken up to the argument that while an
aggressively "wired" public sector seems like a jolly good idea for
some, for others, notably the National Audit Office and the
Treasury, there is growing alarm at the way the money is being
spent.
According to one source, the Probation Service has been paying its
support contractor £11,000 every time it calls out an engineer at
the weekend. With costs like these it is hardly surprising that
Gordon Brown is disturbed, and it explains why IT suppliers are so
keen to help the public sector along its increasingly expensive
path towards its 2005 goal of digital Nirvana.
It is the irksome return on investment idea that keeps nagging at
my conscience. The Government is spending billions of pounds
upgrading, improving, evolving and managing the nation's
information real estate and yet, more than six months after the
site collapsed, it cannot even get the 1901 census back online.
The public sector complains that it does not have enough money to
push through its IT programme but we could build a hospital a month
with what we waste on aborted pilot projects and lose on IT
projects that wildly over-run, such as National Air Traffic
Services' Swanwick centre.
Here is a suggestion - not my own - which I believe comes from the
right direction. The Government should set-up a "tiger team" to
oversee the hugely expensive public sector projects that industry,
in its wildest dreams, would never risk trying.
The team might be 12 people with long track records and experience
of IT and project management at the macro level. Once a project
looks set to collapse, this team would go in to cut through the fog
of civil service excuses and public relations damage control and do
what has to be done to save or sacrifice failing public sector
mega-projects. It would be part rescue, part sanity check.
What frightens me is the prospect of a public sector
in denial and the very real spectre of failure. There is obvious
friction between local and central government where IT strategy is
involved, and all the Pathfinders in the world are not going to
eliminate the "them and us" perceptions overnight.
IT managers in large corporations have sleepless nights thinking
about £1m projects and yet the Government calmly believes it can
succeed with £100m initiatives. Fools rush in where angels fear to
tread, and when they go wrong what happens? A serious review of the
responsibility, strategy and technology, or the application of lots
of expensive string and Selotape behind a smokescreen of
excuses?
I believe we need to urgently review our progress towards the goal
of becoming an information society. Why are we doing what we are
doing? Does the argument that the strategy is one of spend
avoidance, rather than a search for return on investment, actually
hold water?
Simon Moores is chairman of the Research Groupwww.zentelligence.com/