Too many costly government IT projects come to grief or badly
fail to live up to expectations. Tony Collins examines the common
factors and explains why more accountability is needed to reduce
the waste of taxpayers' money
Whatever government is in power, department heads and ministers
dance on the edge of a precipice when it comes to major IT
projects. Peter Gershon, former chief executive of the Treasury's
Office of Government Commerce, says no major public sector
organisation has cracked the problem of achieving high levels of
success in IT but "we think we are among the leaders of public
sector in the world trying to confront this issue and come up with
practical solutions".
Even so projects are still launched which are overly ambitious,
unnecessarily risky, have constricted timetables, pay little heed
to warnings, in which there is too little consultation with
prospective end-users, and the commitment is too great to allow for
any U-turn despite the history of failure on national IT
projects.
A report by the National Audit Office on systems at the Criminal
Records Bureau in February found that the timetable was too tight,
warnings from stakeholders and a shortlisted supplier went
unheeded, consultation with end-users was belated and then
inadequate, and there were poor communications between the
department and the supplier.
And, in another well-documented case, Fujitsu/ICL signed a £184m
contract with the government which the supplier's staff regarded as
undeliverable, according to a report of the National Audit Office
in January 2003 on the Libra project for magistrates courts. The
project was a disaster: the main purpose of the contract was to buy
a core caseworking system for magistrates courts. A secondary
purpose was to deliver office automation. In the end the core
software was not delivered but Fujitsu did supply the office
automation at a cost of nearly £50m more than the original contract
price.
The challenge today of delivering successful projects is compounded
by the lack of accountability. The biggest civil computer project
in the world, the national programme for IT in the NHS, is
criticised by many in the IT industry as being cocooned in secrecy.
The minutes of regular meetings of consultative groups, the
National Clinical Advisory Board and the Public Advisory Board,
have not been published since their inaugural meetings seven months
ago. And MPs who question the project receive evasive
answers.
The Department for Work and Pensions, too, is equivocal when
answering questions about the billions of pounds it is spending on
an IT-led modernisation. It is at pains to point out what is not
being abandoned rather than what is happening. It is also evasive
when answering questions from MPs and Computer Weekly about whether
a combination of system problems and internal management weaknesses
are to blame for the Child Support Agency's poor service to the
public.
Tenacious MPs who ask difficult questions on IT projects are easily
rebuffed by departments. Richard Bacon, a member of the Public
Accounts Committee did not accept the answers he was given on the
failed Libra project. But the replies to his supplementary
questions were swathed in vagueness, as were the replies to his
further questions. "I never did get proper answers to my
questions," said Bacon.
When the Ministry of Defence was asked by an MP about the state of
software on its Chinook Mk3 helicopters, officials replied with
details of problems that did not exist rather than those that
did.
And such was the poor level of accountability at the government
communications headquarters GCHQ that its board knew in 1997 that
the figure it was given for the cost of moving the location of
systems was wrong, but nobody corrected it. It was stated as being
£20m when directors knew the figure should have been £41m. In fact
the estimated cost turned out to be £450m. The truth did not emerge
until the National Audit Office published its report on the office
move in July 2003, six years after the mistaken cost
underestimate.
There are volumes of papers and books on what constitutes best
practice but there is no penalty for non-adherence to the
guidance.
Since the early 1990s, the Public Accounts Committee has issued
several reports which show that basic lessons are not being
learned. After the debacle of the Regional Information Systems Plan
at the Wessex health authority, a senior NHS official said a key
lesson was not to centralise power and decision-making for major IT
projects. Forgeting this principle, the Department of Health has
centralised power and IT decision-making.
Senior managers in the public sector can take huge risks with
public funds without any fear they will fall over the edge of the
precipice. Protected by the Civil Service culture of secrecy,
ministers and department heads can cover up the true state of a
project or can present failures as successes.
When the transport select committee asked an executive at National
Air Traffic Services about an IT project at the Oceanic air traffic
control centre in Scotland he was full of praise for the contractor
EDS. It later emerged during a court case that the board of Nats
was, at the time of the assurance to Parliament, considering ending
the contract with EDS.
Parliament was also misinformed about the Post Office's £1bn
payment card project. The trade and industry select committee found
that a senior minister spoke of the project's success within sight
of its being cancelled.
When it comes to accountability, there is an important difference
in approach between the private and public sectors.
Sometimes in the private sector people lose their jobs when a
project fails, as happened at Prudential Europe when it ended an
online insurance scheme. And managers at IT supplier Fujitsu/ICL
lost their jobs when the Libra project failed, according to the
report by the National Audit Office. Shareholders can hold a
company's chief executive to account. But nobody in the public
sector has ever been sacked because an IT project was abandoned,
for they were only doing their jobs.
Nobody wants anyone to suffer damage to their careers when IT
projects fail. It is in any case difficult to establish why a
project has gone wrong and who, if anyone, was to blame. Even with
the benefit of hindsight, reports from the National Audit Office
rarely if ever single out one individual as blameworthy. It is
usually the case that nobody is to blame.
Projects fail for the best of reasons: because ministers and
department heads have wanted with exuberance to improve the way
their departments deliver a service to the public. Suppliers add to
the enthusiasm for new systems by pointing to what has been
achieved in the US and elsewhere. But in the rush to achieve the
benefits as soon as possible and for contracts to be signed with
minimal bureaucracy, the most serious risks are categorised as
manageable, as has happened with the NHS IT programme.
It could be said that the riskier the project, the greater its
attraction: for the bigger the challenge, the more chance the UK
government will be hailed a technological world leader. Richard
Granger, the head of the NHS' national programme, has likened the
challenge of delivering the scheme to Brunel's Great Western
Railway. This is, in part, because Granger hopes that the IT-led
modernisation of the NHS will bring about lasting and profound
change.
The US government has recognised that a lack of accountability,
secrecy and cover-up has contributed to major failures of IT
projects and has introduced legislation that requires departments
to report contemporaneously to Congress on the progress or
otherwise of projects; and to disclose any deviations from standing
orders. The Clinger-Cohen Act is not perfect, but it puts
accountability and the need to adhere to principles of project
management on a statutory footing. There is no similar compulsion
for departments to report to Parliament.
This is why Computer Weekly advocates the publication of Gateway
reviews which are independent rapid assessments of projects at
various stages by the Office of Government Commerce. We also
recommend the passing of legislation for the UK public sector which
builds on the strengths of the Clinger-Cohen Act.
Few people want more red tape to add to the overheads of companies.
But the Clinger-Cohen Act is not for the private sector: businesses
are specifically excluded from its provisions. The main aim of the
law would be to provide a framework of accountability that means
ministers and departments report on the progress of projects to
Parliament when they are under political pressure to meet tight
deadlines. This would help to ensure that flawed projects are
stopped and reviewed independently rather than allowed to continue
because those on the project have a vested interest in keeping it
going.
Legislation that forced people to wear seat belts was thought an
unnecessary intrusion by some but it has saved lives. Nobody would
say today that the law was unnecessary. Publishing Gateway reviews
and introducing legislation will not stop IT disasters but, as with
seat belts in serious crashes, it would reduce the chances of
fatalities.
Boosting accountability would discourage departmental heads and
ministers from describing failed projects as successes. It would
also give a greater incentive to departments and ministers to seek
to apply the lessons from history when conceiving, planning,
implementing and measuring the success of major systems.
Failed public sector projects hit the most vulnerable and needy, as
happened with the introduction of systems at the Child Support
Agency and Inland Revenue's tax credits.
By the time the National Audit Office reports on such projects,
huge sums may have been wasted, opportunities to improve the
service to citizens may have been lost, and those who were on the
programme and could have benefited from Parliamentary scrutiny are
likely to have moved to other posts or jobs.
There is no evidence that the number of disasters has increased or
decreased in recent decades. The difference today is that the
amount of money spent on risky projects is greater than in the
past. Plans by the Home Office to introduce ID cards may cost more
than £1bn. The Department for Work and Pensions is the throes of a
modernisation for which more than £2bn has been set aside, and the
Ministry of Defence is embarking on an infrastructure scheme
costing more than £3bn.
Suppliers will always tempt ministers and heads of departments and
agencies into spending large sums on new technology. And many in
government will welcome the innovation that comes from risk-taking.
But a calculated gamble should be against a framework of
accountability in which Gateway reviews are published and checks
and balances are put on a statutory footing, as in the US.
Without radical action, Computer Weekly does not believe that
anything will change: the IT disasters will continue largely
because there are no real obstacles in the path of failure.
Lifecycle of a public sector IT failure
- The design accords with the best practice project principles,
but there is an expansion of the objectives and costs as interested
parties give their views on what the new systems could do
- An invitation to tender is issued, but the commitment to the
timescales and design is too great to heed warnings from
prospective end-users, unions or one or two reputable prospective
suppliers that the timetable is too tight or the scope
unrealistically ambitious
- After contracts are awarded fuller consultation with potential
end-users begins but is inadequate or self-selective
- The supplier begins to realise it has over-estimated its
ability to understand the customer's business and convert this into
IT systems, while the customer realises it has over-estimated the
capability of the supplier. More often than not the supplier
realises too that it has not asked enough questions before signing
the contract, and the customer has not understood its business
sufficiently to explain its work practices, the complexities of the
project, the risk of failure and real costs to the supplier
- The timetable begins to lengthen and the projected costs
increase but the commitment is too great to allow any indecision or
U-turn
- As the project begins to founder, the cover-up begins. Failure
is depicted as success. MPs do not get well-rounded answers to
questions
- Failure can no longer be hidden because the public or the
departmental end-users are affected by the contract's being
abandoned, changed, rewritten or re-awarded
- Years later there are sometimes reports by the National Audit
Office and the Commons Public Accounts Committee
- The department says it has learned from the mistakes of the
past
- Those who give these assurances that lessons have been learned
move on and are replaced by new personnel who embark on projects
which repeat the mistakes of the past
- The cycle begins anew.