Only 30% of the government's technology-based projects
are a success, a government expert has revealed.
The figures come at a time when taxes are funding a £14bn annual
spend on IT - equivalent to 7,000 new primary schools or 75
hospitals a year.
The low success rate will do little to build confidence in two
of the government’s biggest and riskiest IT programmes:
the £5.3bn ID cards scheme and the
NHS’s £12.4bn National Programme for IT.
The figures were given by Joe Harley, chief information officer
at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the largest civil
government department. He is also a member of the government’s CIO
Council.
Speaking at the Government UK IT Summit in London this
week, Harley said that, for the government’s IT spend of £14bn,
it could construct “7,000 primary schools every year", about
600,000 nurses could be employed or more than three million state
pensions paid.
“Today, only 30%, we estimate, of our projects and programmes
are successful,” said Harley. "Why shouldn’t it be 90%?”
He added that government CIOs and suppliers have signed up to
meeting a series of targets including an increase of the success
rate of projects and programmes to 90% by 2010/11.
He added, “It is not sustainable for us as a government to
continue to spend at these levels. We need to up the quality of
what we do at a reduced cost of doing so. The first step is a
conversation for radical change and we have had that conversation
with our key suppliers across government.”
One target is to cut overall IT spend which stands at £14bn a
year by about 20%.
To achieve this, CIOs would aim to cut the cost of running
desktops by 40%. In the DWP alone there are more than 100,000
desktops.
A DWP spokeswoman later played down Harley's comments. She said
he was quoting from an independent report in which success was
narrowly defined as the project being on time, to cost and meeting
the specification exactly.
LSE calls for review of ID cards as costs keep rising
>>
Reid announces risings ID costs>>
MPs slam failures in delivering NHS IT>>
Department of Work and Pensions>>
Tony Collins's
It projects blog >>
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