At last, the government has seen sense and halted the use
of Public Finance Initiative funding for future IT outsourcing
contracts. The decision follows a string of high-profile PFI
disasters at the Passport Agency, Child Support Agency and Lord
Chancellor's Department, where Libra, the project to link IT
systems in magistrates courts, failed.
PFI, the private funding of public investment, puts the onus on
private companies to raise funds and deliver IT systems that
support public services, and therefore transfers risk to the
supplier. The theory is that suppliers do not begin to recoup costs
or make profits until systems are delivered, when a regular service
fee is levied.
How could such a funding system have been deemed appropriate for
the delivery of mission-critical IT systems? The premise that you
only pay for a service once it is delivered to your satisfaction
assumes that the supplier is able, without your daily intervention,
to go away and build a successful system. By resorting to PFI, the
government lost control of the suppliers and key projects, making
failure almost inevitable.
Jettisoning PFI is a good move, but the question remains: why did
the government take so long to reach its conclusion? The answer is
that Whitehall is still not good enough at learning from past IT
failures: witness its recklessness in seeking to modernise the NHS
by breaking down software into modules - each of which is bigger
than anything attempted anywhere in the world. Avoiding PFI on IT
contracts is one lesson the government has learned - but there are
many more it hasn't.
Gartner alert shames software suppliers
Gartner is advocating that system administrators protect every
laptop and, ideally, every PC on their networks with a personal
firewall. It asserts that relying solely on the corporate firewall
to safeguard your network against hackers will no longer suffice.
Users pay through the nose for licences, and every new licence must
be combed for clauses that unduly favour the supplier. Given these
facts, is it unreasonable of IT departments to expect secure,
high-quality software that enables them to maintain systems without
constant fear of compromise?
Suppliers should be ashamed that the fragility of their products
has made Gartner's warning necessary - and they should redouble
efforts to produce software robust enough to meet users' needs.