A Foreign and Commonwealth Office project to roll out an
enterprise resource planning system to 13,000 staff in the UK and
more than 250 locations overseas has been slammed by a committee of
MPs.
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said embassies
and consulates were suffering operational problems as a result of
delays to the Prism IT consolidation project, which aims to replace
30 different IT systems with an Oracle system.
The committee, which forced the publication of parts of a
critical internal report on the project, said Prism was
"substantially behind time" and causing "great dissatisfaction" at
embassies and consulates around the world.
Its report cited damning testimonials from embassy officials.
One said, "In the Foreign Office's long history of ineptly
implemented IT initiatives, Prism is the most badly designed and
ill considered of the lot."
The report said, "Anyone who has visited a post where Prism has
been rolled out knows that many staff are at their wits' end about
it."
Senior diplomat Norman Ling told the FCO's board that the
department lacked the project management skills needed to run
Prism, had exaggerated its potential benefits and had erroneously
rated the programme as medium-risk, not high-risk.
Ling said, "Prism was identified as high-risk in early
consultancy studies because of its size and the need for a radical
shift in FCO culture and working practices if the system was to
achieve all that was expected of it.
"The decision to rate Prism only medium-risk meant the Office of
Government Commerce's Gateway review process was not as robust as
it might have been.
"The FCO greatly underestimated the requirement for business
change when introducing Prism. It continues to do so."
Ling also said that, until last year, the FCO board had not been
as actively engaged on Prism as it should have been. "Given that
the programme is business critical, the board should have appointed
one of its own as senior responsible owner," he said.
The committee said it was concerned that the Foreign Office had
failed to inform parliament of the delays in implementing Prism and
called for regular updates to MPs on the project.
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