At last a government agency has had the confidence to
admit some of its mistakes on IT-based programmes, publish the
wider lessons, and show how it is learning from them.
The self-critical report of the Identity and Passport Service is
a direct response to Computer Weekly's campaign for departments to
be open, honest and accountable for their mistakes, so that they
and others can learn from them.
The unprecedented report sends the right signals to the 50,000
people who work in government IT and who keep thousands of systems
running smoothly.For decades their departmental heads, hired
marketing hands, political advisers and ministers have put much
effort into not admitting mistakes and pretending their
organisations are all-wonderful.
Such propaganda has the opposite effect. It has given government
IT an aura of unreality, a reputation for cover-up. Yet IT staff
and CIOs know that systemic problems cannot be tackled readily by a
department in denial.
If all departments produced reports of lessons learned with the
same conviction as the Identity and Passport Service, taxpayers
would be right to regard this as a genuine attempt by government to
begin to put its house in order.
But the Identity and Passport Service's report is not a perfect
solution to a lack of transparency in government IT. It is not
independent, it is unregulated, the perceptiveness of the findings
relies on the knowledge and skills of the internal interviewers,
and its credibility rests on the willingness of departmental heads
to publish criticisms as well as praise.
But while government IT remains largely unregulated, unaudited
and unsupervised, published self-criticism is a remarkable cultural
step forward.
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Passport agency goes public on test errors
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