Machiavelli once wrote that misjudgements and wrong
turns are like tuberculosis: hard to detect and easy to cure in the
beginning, and easy to diagnose and very hard to cure at the
end.
For this reason alone it is necessary to do everything
reasonably possible to spot the early warning signs of an IT
disaster. In the private sector directors do not any motivation to
spot the early signs of impending failure. If a company loses tens
of millions on an IT-related scheme, or its service to customers
suffers significantly after introducing a new system, directors and
IT managers may lose their jobs.
In the public sector it is very different. No minister or head
of department has lost their job as a result of an IT disaster; and
life for public service IT staff and directors in public service
who see things going wrong can be frustrating.
They do not have the power to stop a disaster. They can warn
internally of the early warning signs of one, but are unlikely to
do so because the culture permits constructive criticism only at a
level of detail: nobody can question the project as a whole without
being seen as off-message or worse, a Luddite. And it is just as
well the culture does not allow anyone to be fired after an IT
disaster, because it is the senior and middle ranking IT executives
who would be most at risk, for being the quietly-spoken critics
whose prophesies nobody at the highest level believed but who were
proved right.
This discouragement of whistle-blowing is compounded by secrecy.
A project’s potential users and most other stakeholders and MPs
cannot scrutinise a project in its early stages to help identify
the early warning signs of failure or to analyse how well it is
progressing, which could help ensure their buy-in or support.
These are some of the huge holes in the processes of
accountability over IT projects which cost millions of pounds - and
billions in the case of the NHS’s National Programme for IT.
The first MPs learn of an IT disaster is from the media or when
their constituents write to them about the poor service from a
particular department. The public spending watchdog the National
Audit Office writes some penetrating analyses on failed projects.
But this is years after the scheme began, and its reports encompass
selected projects only. It is true that MPs can ask Parliamentary
questions but these are not replied to directly. Instead ministers
and heads of departments usually simply restate official
policy.
In short there is an almost total absence of contemporaneous
accountability or transparency on IT projects. This can be
mitigated by two things: new legislation for the public sector
which would provide a statutory framework for accountability and
the publication of independent gateway reviews on the progress of
projects.
Treasury minister Ruth Kelly has agreed to look at a statutory
framework but she has rejected our call to publish gateway reviews.
In this week’s issue we deconstruct the detailed arguments put
forward by Kelly and the OGC for not publishing the reviews.
But we suspect her rejection has much to do with the culture of
the civil service. By tradition heads of department do not change
their minds over a decision that has been taken: it implies they
are fallible, capable of making a mistake. The OGC has taken the
decision to keep gateway reviews secret, and so it defends the
decision even though IT suppliers, stakeholders and MPs want them
published.
We encountered this attitude over our campaign to clear the
names of the pilots who were accused of flying a Chinook helicopter
into the Mull of Kintyre in 1994. A decision had been taken to
blame the dead pilots and the fact that it may have been caused by
a computer problem was not the issue. A decision had been taken and
it could not be reversed.
This pretence of infallibility has ludicrous consequences. It is
manifested in the way some senior officials coming across to MPs as
invincible. Labour MP and member of the Commons’ Public Accounts
Committee Ian Davidson said during a debate in Parliament last
month there should be smugness score for officials who come before
MPs to explain why projects have failed.
"Some officials are so pleased with themselves that if they were
made of chocolate they would eat themselves. I am tempted to name
and shame them, but they are so conceited that I suspect that they
would take it as a compliment."
We urge the OGC to distance itself from this anachronistic and
artificial world populated by officials who pretend to be
infallible, who cannot be sacked for failure, and who influence
decisions on how billions of pounds is spent without allowing
scrutiny of their decisions and deliberations by stakeholders, MPs
and others.
By publishing gateway reviews, the government can show that it
is prepared to reverse a decision already taken, that it is not
hidebound by civil service tradition.
Publishing the reviews will not stop disasters. But it will show
that the government is no longer prepared to exploit Whitehall’s
culture of secrecy to hide poor thinking.