The UK security community's massive upgrade of
information and communications technology is starting to show
benefits despitedelays with key projectsandpoor operating practices, according to
a parliamentary watchdog committee.
Paul Murphy, chairman of the
Intelligence
and Security Committee, outlined three major IT-related
projects in his annual report published this week.
These are a £1bn upgrade to the UK's electronic surveillance
system, a secure network to enable information sharing between
security agencies and other government departments, and the
installation of an integrated financial and human resource
administration system at the Security Service.
Phase Two of Scope, the new secure network that links the UK's
security services, will now start between mid-2008 and early 2009,
three years late, Murphy said. The delay will allow extra
government departments to align their business processes and
prepare to link up.
The new start date follows delays to phase one and a "serious
process failure", which resulted in the loss of some operational
data at the Scope operations centre.
Murphy said phase one, which allows
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the Serious Organised Crime
Agency (Soca), the Department of Business, Enterprise and
Regulatory Reform and the Home Office to share information, went
live in October 2007. Other government departments that receive
information via Scope include the Foreign Office, the
Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office and others.
Scope, which is the backbone for Soca's secure communications,
was already showing results, Murphy said. "The average time taken
to initiate and process a request for information has been reduced
from nearly 12 hours to just 15 minutes. HMRC has reported more
fluid and efficient communication and a greater demand for its
intelligence," he said.
Referring to a massive upgrade at GCHQ, the government's
communications security agency, Murphy said it had increased the
ability to access, process and store messages and improved
connections between GCHQ databases and those of the Security
Service to allow analysts to work
collaboratively and share data. It also provided an
applications-hosting service to provide greater flexibility and
efficiency to GCHQ's software developers.
Murphy also reported that the security service is overhauling
its administration with "a computer and database management
facility on which much of the service's administrative, corporate,
and financial planning will depend."
He quoted the former director general who said, "[It] is a
project that we believe is overdue to help us run all the things to
do with a much bigger workforce in other words, using it to map
skills, promotions, transfers, expenses, et cetera. We have systems
for all of that, but they are old systems. They make it difficult
for a senior manager to pull all that information together."