Civil servants in the criminal justice system with £1bn to spend on
new systems say they plan to pre-empt an IT disaster by keeping
their projects as simple as possible and avoiding monolithic
contracts with a small group of suppliers.
The approach, by members of the Criminal Justice Information
Technology (CJIT) organisation, contrasts with the Department of
Health's plans to take on highly complex national projects and
award huge contracts to a small group of big suppliers.
John Wailing, head of technical design at CJIT, said, "We do not
just want to write a requirement, throw it over the wall to the
trade and then suffer some humiliation because the requirement is
not understood, and it all looks too hard. We want to do it in
smaller pieces, so we know it is going to work".
Traditionally, central departments have undertaken major
modernisations by awarding large contracts to a single supplier.
But projects like these have often ended in failure or the service
to the public being severely disrupted.
Wailing said the new approach is to have "quite a number of
partners" rather than a "monolithic contract", which he said could
be too big and too hard to manage. "One argument for having a
variety of partners is peer pressure," he said.
Wailing revealed details of CJIT's plans at a conference last week
in London run by Intellect, which represents technology suppliers.
One of the aims of CJIT is to allow case files on defendants, now
held on paper, to be transferred electronically between the police,
courts, prisons, probation officers, lawyers and witnesses.
Ministers have allocated £1bn to CJIT in the hope their IT projects
will speed up the criminal justice system and allow victims of
crime to keep track of cases