The chief executive of the Passport Service, Bernard Herdan, said
he was confident the agency had learned from the mistakes of the
past as it embarks on a major series of IT projects.
The service will invest 20m a year over the next three years on its
Integrated Change Programme, which will use technology to crack
down on fraudulent passport applications and to secure border
controls.
The service plans to roll out computerised background checks on
passport applicants this year, e-passports containing encrypted
digital photographs from 2006 and electronic fingerprints from
2009.
The work will lead to major redevelopment of the Passport Service's
internal IT system, PASS, in 2008, when the service's existing
10-year contract with Siemens Business Systems comes to an
end.
The Passport Service's integrated change programme received an
amber warning light from the Office of Government Commerce in its
last Gateway Review.
But Herdan was adamant the service would not repeat the mistakes
that dogged the agency during the last major IT upgrades in the
late 1980s and 1990s.
In 1999, poor planning, inadequate testing, and a rushed IT
roll-out, culminated in a backlog of 500,000 passports, and huge
queues outside passport offices were shown on television
news.
"There will be no big bang changing over the contractor. That is
what happened in 1999. That is what we are not going to repeat,"
said Herdan, in an interview with Computer Weekly.
The service has introduced a policy that all upgrades will be
thoroughly tested by the staff that will use them before they are
rolled out more widely.
"We are now issuing six million passports a year," he said. "We
have to be careful that nothing we do will have a 5% impact on
productivity. That would have a serious effect on our daily
output."
Having good communications is the third important lesson from the
IT disaster of 1999, said Herdan. "The reason there was a crisis in
1999 was because among other things, people panicked. They saw
pictures of people queuing up on television, and they could not get
through to us by phone," he said.
The service has invested in an outsourced call centre, run by MTM,
which handles 4.3 million calls a year.
The Passport Service has now completed the recommendations of a
Gateway Review, and is confidant of a green light, said
Herdan.
"There were things they said needed sorting out, around the
procurement plan, the refinement of the business case and the risk
registers," he said.