For the first time, government auditors have explained
with clarity and insight what differentiates good IT-based projects
from bad ones.
Most striking of all, the National Audit Office report
vindicates Computer Weekly’s long campaign for more open
communications, honest appraisals of risk, and greater
accountability on government IT schemes.
During a year of research, auditors picked out 24 case studies
of success from a plethora of pretenders. Projects which delivered
IT systems that few people liked or used were rejected.
The report also highlights systemic deficiencies in government
IT. Some of the practices highlighted in the document border on the
anarchic (see page 16). In the private sector such bad practice
could amount to negligence.
The question is: what happens now? The painful answer is
nothing. The report will go onto government shelves and be
forgotten. It has many good recommendations, but there is no
mechanism to enforce their execution.
So government IT will remain, in the main, unregulated, unpoliced,
unaccountable and excessively secretive.
Computer Weekly has recommended US-style legislation to compel
the public sector to police good practice, but the Office of
Government Commerce has rejected the idea.
There will not be lasting change until those at the top of
government come out of the world of make-believe, where civil
servants speak to MPs and ministers in an endless monotony of
jargon-laded phrases which all have the message, “Trust us: we know
what we’re doing.”
We know from countless IT-related disasters that government does
not always know what it is doing. And the latest NAO report
confirms it.
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