Government ministers and CIOs have identified the key
causes of public-sector IT disasters. So why are mistakes
repeated?, asks Tony Collins
Every few years, like cyclical bouts of unseasonably warm
weather, a minister pledges an end to tackle the causes of systemic
failure of IT-related projects in government. But do any of these
announcements make any difference?
Jim Murphy is the latest minister to read the yellowing script
entitled "How this government will tackle the generic causes of
failure".
In a speech to a London conference on 10 October, Murphy
promised that the government would use better management and
monitoring of suppliers to "tackle the generic causes of failure".
He said, "We have had high-profile mistakes in a minority of
cases... We are putting a system in place now that should make that
sort of systematic failure a thing of the past."
Five years earlier another Cabinet Office minister, Ian
McCartney, announced, "We will not tolerate failure." He unveiled a
Cabinet Office study on the lessons from IT project failures. The
report was authoritative, the result of much work by experienced IT
professionals, and contained many important do's and don'ts.
But it has not stopped flawed IT-related schemes being
implemented. Audit reports show that projects that supported the
Criminal Records Bureau, the Child Support Agency, tax credits, the
national programme for IT in the NHS and National Air Traffic
Services repeated mistakes from past project failures.
In several cases political imperatives, rushed planning and bad
decisions clashed with a need for caution. Business processes were
not fully understood or simplified before the systems were
designed.
The safest option is not to launch at all, so suppliers and
departments have balanced taking risks with not proceeding with
implementation. But a lack of scrutiny and external oversight,
coupled with exuberance and over-optimism, has led to an emphasis
on risk taking rather than caution.
As a remedy for failure, ministers have announced repeatedly
that they are avoiding big bang implementations, as if this were
the only reason that projects are aborted, do not achieve the
predicted benefits, soar above budget or are repeatedly
delayed.
The former head of the Office of Government Commerce, Peter
Gershon, highlighted this point to the Treasury Committee of the
House of Commons in January 2004. He said, "One thing I think we
have learned from these so-called big bang implementations, like
the Criminal Records Bureau, like new tax credits, like the
Passport OfficeÉ is that you have to test them very
thoroughly."
He added, "The whole emphasis of the government's approach now
to IT systems is to avoid big bang if we possibly can."
The result is that IT projects now run into serious problems for
a variety of largely predictable reasons, with the advantage that
big bang is not one of them.
For example, the NHS IT programme, the world's largest civil IT
project, is suffering from protracted delays and deep
disenchantment for reasons that had been predicted. But big bang
implementation is not one of the reasons.
This week the Cabinet Office announces a new IT strategy,
designed, in part, to consign failure to history. It is likely to
be an impressive document, the work of government chief information
officer Ian Watmore and his CIO colleagues from Whitehall
departments.
Few in government have a better understanding and experience of
complex IT-related programmes and projects than Watmore. He is one
of an increasing number of private sector experts who have been
recruited to tune the engines of government. Other far-sighted
recruits include David Varney, chairman of HM Revenue and Customs,
and his chief information officer, Steve Lamey.
But one wonders whether any of these talented individuals can
make any real difference when so little has changed in more than a
decade, despite a continuous flow of ministerial and departmental
announcements of modernisation, improvements and new strategies and
projects.
Billions has been effectively spent for the benefit of IT
suppliers, and for some departments that have expanded their
empires. In return for financing huge investments, taxpayers have
sometimes suffered levels of service from some major departments
that reached new lows.
Magistrates courts are installing "new" case management
technology that was originally designed more than 12 years ago at a
cost of nearly £400m - almost three times the original sum agreed
under a contract with Fujitsu.
HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions,
the two largest departments in Whitehall, have spent more than £2bn
on IT developments over the past 10 years. But they still do not
have a single view of their customers. Information is scattered on
different, obsolescent systems that do not adequately talk to each
other.
HMRC, with 100,000 staff, is struggling to cope but nobody with
influence seems able to tell ministers who are excited by the
anticipation of a major new system: "Please don't launch new
initiatives when the foundations are crumbling. Let us simplify
business processes and the systems, get our own house in order,
then we can build new storeys."
There are numerous successes in the public sector, but they tend
to be smaller, tightly controlled projects with specific targets.
For example, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency has had
several IT-related successes, as have many local authorities and
some NHS trusts.
But too often ministers and suppliers encourage each other to
think big: to launch something that is immeasurably more complex
than what has gone before, to beat the rest of world, to do it
quickly, but in stages, and with as little transparency as
possible.
One result is that the national programme for IT in the NHS was
launched without anyone having a clear idea of how much it would
cost when local implementation was taken into account.
The ID cards scheme is going ahead without enough information
being made available for assumptions to be rigorously tested.
Ministers say they are confident the schemes will be successful.
And if the projects are not, one suspects they will still be
declared successes. There is no reason to fear failure.
In short, it is difficult to see how any ministerial or
departmental announcement or any new strategy will make much
conspicuous difference to the way government is run, its costs, or
the services to the public.
New IT strategies will add to the good works on common-sense
practices. But sound advice and noble intentions will not make the
difference between success and failure: countless parliamentary
reports on the causes of IT-related failures show that several are
caused, in the main, by non-adherence to known principles of good
project management.
Little can be done to force adherence to good practice in the
public sector other than by legislating for accountability and
transparency, and allowing rigorous external scrutiny of the
feasibility and progress of projects by disinterested
parliamentarians, the media and taxpayers.
But this will not happen. Whitehall's culture of secrecy and
less than frank internal and external communications is too
strong.
The private sector has learned, sometimes the hard way, that
openness, honesty and rigorous accountability are critical to the
success of large and complex IT-related programmes.
In Whitehall, open and honest communications are all but
non-existent. A senior executive at HMRC said last month that
nobody in senior management could bring themselves to use the word
"problem". Potential problems are spoken of as merely "issues",
stepping stones on the path to inevitable success.
In the US, funding for large programmes has to be approved by
Congress. This policy ensures external debate and rigorous scrutiny
by representatives of taxpayers. There is even legislation that
ensures accountability to Congress on major public sector
IT-related programmes.
In the UK there is so little regular external scrutiny that some
MPs resort to asking Computer Weekly for information on how
IT-related projects are progressing. They say they do not discover
that IT projects are failing until letters begin pouring in from
distressed constituents.
Two weeks ago a Home Office minister, Tony McNulty, tried to
make a real difference. He said in the Commons that Gateway reviews
on ID cards would be published as far as they could be. The reviews
are independent assessments of IT projects at six stages of their
lifecyle by the Office of Government Commerce.
It was the first time a minister had given any undertaking to
publish the reviews. His announcement threatened to lift
Whitehall's curtain on the progress of IT-related projects.
Yet the next day the Home Office's press office issued a
statement saying the reviews would not be published. A minister had
been overruled by his civil servants. Nothing changes. It means
that the ID cards scheme will continue without any rigorous
external scrutiny, and with parliament being fed selective titbits
of whatever information civil servants allow their ministers to
reveal.
There are of course diligent IT leaders in the public sector,
and determined efforts to bring about change will continue.
The new IT strategy for government announced this week is likely
to emphasise the need for professionalism and bringing together
human resources and finance divisions of various departments,
so-called shared services.
It makes sense to amalgamate departments that are doing the same
thing with different staff and systems.
But seasoned observers of the government machine may wonder if
suppliers, unable to see e-government as a continued source of
revenue, have lobbied for shared services as a replacement
initiative.
If the new schemes fail, the suppliers will still be paid; and
heads of departments will have nothing to fear because the chances
are that parliament will not be told of any failures.
So there is little incentive for departments to succeed. That is
how it has been for decades, and there is no reason to believe
things will change now.
The BBC programme Yes Minister is often quoted in parliament to
explain how the engines of government are powered. In one episode
the archetypal civil servant, Sir Humphrey, expounds on the
benefits to taxpayers of a fully-staffed and highly efficient NHS
hospital which, incidentally, has no patients.
But Yes Minister lacked one important touch of realism. When it
comes to the management of IT-related projects and programmes, life
in government is Yes Minister without the smiles.