Whitehall could learn valuable lessons from a major IT
change programme under way inNorthern Ireland, analysts said this
week.
As reported in Computer Weekly last week, the £800m programme
will consolidate IT systems and services across 11 government
departments. It features a raft of integration projects, including
the merger of at least 10 datacentres, and the creation of a single
data network and a single finance system.
While Northern Ireland has been quietly working towards
shared services and the efficiency gains they can deliver, the
civil service in the rest of the UK has been accused of suffering
from inertia when it comes to forcing through change.
Reasons cited for resisting system integration and consolidation
include the size of Whitehall departments, the security of sharing
sensitive data, and system complexity.
But the excuses need to stop said Rakesh Kumar, research
vice-president at analyst firm Gartner. "Size is an issue, but you
can scale up some of the processes and so increase financial
savings. You can look at projects such as thin client technology
and reducing office printing levels."
Security no excuse
"Departments might have to be more cautious because they hold
sensitive data. But this is no valid reason for not going ahead
with institutional change," said Kumar.
Philip Virgo, strategic adviser to the
Institute for the Management of
Information Systems, agreed. He said security measures would
not need to be any greater than those put in place by large
commercial organisations.
"The automated systems that handle telephone billing in the UK,
or City clearing systems, are far bigger, more complex and more
secure than anything in government."
The inertia inherent in the civil service is, Virgo said, due to
the culture of a large bureaucracy.
"There is a massive cultural problem. They have people who have
been there for over 20 years and have grown used to big systems.
There is a culture of thinking bad practice is good practice," he
said.
Bill McCluggage, Northern Ireland's director of
e-government, who is overseeing the Northern Ireland Civil
Service (NICS) IT programme, said sharing experiences with other
organisations in the UK could be helpful.
"Everyone is different and we are only the size of a large local
authority. I am not sure one size fits all, but you can share best
practice," he said.
Importance of user buy-in
McCluggage said the NICS had spent time building support for the
programme among users. "We formulated a concept, then ran a series
of group engagement activities, getting business leaders together
and socialising the idea. There was a lot of legwork, but it
generated a degree of consensus."
However, Virgo said Whitehall's complicated rules, such as those
governing the benefits system, need to be simplified before systems
can be consolidated.
"Whitehall has very complicated rule books which it tries to
automate without sorting them out. You cannot take a convoluted and
irrational set of rules and simply automate them. You have to
refine them first," he said.
Virgo also advised against changing too much at once. "The way
forward is to separate out the volume and complexity. Use simple
systems to handle the high-volume stuff and interface these with
small systems to handle complexity.
"Departments need a path of incremental change within a
strategic framework - break these big systems down into manageable
projects and do them separately," he said.