With little publicity, services supplier Accenture and
the Department for Work and Pensions completed a pilot in July of
one of Europe's largest citizen databases.
The Oracle-based Customer Information System (CIS) will hold 85
million records on almost everyone in the UK, including the
deceased and their beneficiaries, and details of ethnic
backgrounds.
CIS will provide an overview of the personal details of anyone
who has a national insurance number. It will have links to hundreds
of local authorities, and other government departments, including
HM Revenue and Customs.
It had its first release in March and is being used outside of
the DWP: magistrates courts and the Department for Constitutional
Affairs are using it to track down offenders who have changed
address without notifying the courts.
There are already other large databases containing information
on tens of millions of UK citizens, including those run by the
Passport Service, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and HM
Revenue and Customs. And the Department of Health plans a UK-wide
database of medical records as part of the national programme for
IT in the NHS.
But aside from considerations around civil liberties, the
arrival of the DWP's CIS database is good news: its relatively
simple design looks like achieving success. For the first time CIS
will provide a comprehensive overview of the details of people who
claim more than one benefit. Information on claimants has been
collected on a variety of ageing systems, some of them dating back
more than 14 years, which in the main are run independently of each
other.
An attempt in the 1980s and 1990s to provide a "whole-person"
overview of claimants failed to achieve this target.
This whole-person concept was one of the justifications for the
Operational Strategy, a project for which Andersen Consulting, now
Accenture, was one of the main contractors. Described by the
government in 1991 as the "biggest and most ambitious
computerisation programme in Europe", Operational Strategy became a
partial success: it computerised welfare benefits such as income
support.
But the project went £1.9bn over the cost estimate given to the
House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. It is still the most
high-profile cost overrun of any IT-related government scheme.
In May 1994 the then social security minister Nicholas Scott
said the latest estimated total cost in real terms of the
operational strategy to 1998-1999 was £2.6bn, which included an
estimated £315m for consultancy services.
"The total cost of the Operational Strategy was originally, in
1982, at £713m. The current estimated cost exceeds the initial
estimate by £1.9bn. The original specification did not embrace the
substantial cost of subsequent changes."
Officials had also pledged that the Operational Strategy would
not only cover its costs but also provide a net benefit by cutting
20,000 jobs in the department. In fact, numbers in the department
rose by tens of thousands, although the workloads also
increased.
In 1999, 16 years after the Operational Strategy was launched,
the National Audit Office confirmed that the whole-person idea had
not materialised.
The NAO reported that the Operational Strategy had automated
many administrative processes but, "It did not achieve planned
staff reductions or service quality improvements and was never
fully completed."
The department's IT strategy had left it with nearly 200
mainframe computers. "At present citizens have to be asked for
their personal details many times, many local office processes are
still paper-based, officials cannot easily read across from
entitlements on one benefit to claimants' position on other
benefits, and there is considerable scope for fraud in some
areas."
One problem with the Operational Strategy was that it tried
initially to provide an overview of citizens by integrating various
benefit systems. When this proved too ambitious, each major benefit
was allocated its own separate system, many of which still run
today.
The idea behind the CIS is that it provides the whole-person
overview but without integrating or replacing legacy databases. It
is an extra, purpose-built database into which legacy systems can
feed information on citizens. The old mainframes and separate
benefit systems can then be replaced one by one, with CIS taking
over as the central repository of information.
This should reduce the potential for benefit fraud, avoid the
need for claimants to give their personal details more than once,
and give the DWP, councils and other departments a more reliable
way of checking the identities of individuals who apply for
government handouts.
Replying to a parliamentary question about the DWP's IT projects
in January, Jane Kennedy, one of the department's ministers, said
of the CIS, "This project will deliver a database of key citizen
information to be shared across the DWP."
In a joint statement Accenture and the DWP said last week, "The
CIS will bring together core customer information onto one
database. This involves building one of the largest
high-performance databases in Europe and a large series of web
services."
So CIS succeeds where the Operational Strategy failed. And the
Operational Strategy's main contractor, Accenture, is gaining
ground as a supplier to the DWP and to government in general.
Accenture is the main provider of a pensions programme at the
DWP, and it is the only supplier to the NHS that has two local
service provider contracts, worth nearly £2bn.
The £72m contract for CIS is dwarfed by EDS' share of DWP
business, which is worth more than £2bn. But the CIS is at the core
of the department's IT plans.
"CIS is a core component of the infrastructure that supports the
systems that will deliver the department's modernisation
programme," said a DWP spokeswoman.
In their joint statement Accenture and the DWP claimed that
Andersen Consulting was only one of a number of suppliers that
developed the Operational Strategy. But in public documents only
Andersen was mentioned as the main supplier.
Indeed, on 8 February 1990 the company threw a party for its
staff and civil servants in recognition of their successful
achievements during the past seven years in developing the
Operational Strategy's computer systems.
If nothing else, the CIS shows that past inglorious computer
projects are no barrier to future success, even within the same
department. It could be said that Accenture, having learned from
the shortcomings of Operational Strategy, is best placed to build
the CIS.
The CIS is a success so far - not that success or failure seem
to make any difference to a supplier's chances of winning major
work in the future.
What is CIS?
The £72m Customer Information System (CIS) is an Oracle database
being built by Accenture for the Department for Work and Pensions.
It will hold a wide variety of data on nearly all UK citizens.
For many people whose details are held on the database there
will be information about whether they have been in hospital in the
past year, information on everyone who lives at their address,
whether they are an asylum seeker, and whether they are involved in
any dispute involving work.