The
Labour Party Conference has avoided any debate on the state of
its largest IT projects and programmes - which, given its record,
is to be expected.
All governments have unsung IT successes and large failures. But
New Labour has had more big government IT-based calamities on
general exhibit than any government we can remember, despite
earnest attempts to learn lessons.
The Party's record was summed up in November 2004 by the
National Audit Office, whose reports are always carefully-worded.
It said, "The government has a poor record on delivering successful
large IT-based projects and programmes." That perception remains
today.
Ministers have launched "Transformational government" among many
initiatives which are aimed at showing that government can use IT
and unified working practices to provide cheaper, better
services.
In 2000 the Cabinet office published "Successful IT", a
worthwhile guide to avoiding not-so-obvious traps. The Public
Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office have published
many reports for more than a decade on what tends to make projects
successes or not.
As well as these, the Office of Government Commerce launched the
"gateway review" scheme early in the new millennium which is
supposed to filter out flawed projects and programmes before their
defects become manifest to MPs, the media and public. Impressive
government CIOs including Ian Watmore and John Suffolk have tried
to pre-empt high-profile failures.
But still the high-profile calamities drown out the successes:
the
IT fiasco over SAT tests, delays of four years in the
"Scope" system to help combat terrorism and other threats by
linking intelligence services and provide interfaces with the MoD
and government departments, the anger among junior doctors over the
failed
MTAS applications system, and some local implementations under
the
NHS's
£12.7bn National Programme for IT which have seriously
disrupted patient care and operations and appointments. These are
only a few of New Labour's IT embarrassments.
Why is its record on large projects so bad? The failures, we
believe, have more to do with politics and culture than technical
architectures and project management methodologies.
Building a bridge from the US to England may seem a good idea in
theory but it is not practical. Yet ministers embarked on the
technological equivalent with the NHS's £12.7bn National Programme
for IT because nobody they would want to listen to told them it was
fanciful.
One reason so many large public sector projects fail is that
executives from some IT suppliers regularly propose to government
unrealistic but ostensibly credible and beneficial solutions to
problems civil servants did not know existed until suppliers
explained what could be achieved with new technology.
The tenacity of some suppliers wears down civil servants. Indeed
the centralising, self-aggrandising, and self-expanding instincts
of bureaucracies play perfectly into the hands of some IT sales
teams who understand the "transformational" agendas of successive
governments.
What is the solution? There is no real incentive to get it
right. Senior Responsible Owners, ministers and permanent
secretaries come and go. There have been countless civil service
and ministerial leaders of the NHS's IT scheme. Project committees
are not accountable for their decisions.
One solution is for proper external scrutiny, including
publication of internal audits of projects, and the publication of
gateway reviews: the fear of getting it wrong, and being seen to
get it wrong in real-time, would provide an incentive to get it
right.
The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee
provide some important, objective scrutiny - but they have looked
at only a fraction of the 100 or so mission-critical government
projects, and usually only years after they started.
The NAO and PAC reports are deliberately de-personalised so
there is no individual accountability. It is not practical to solve
the problem of a lack of individual accountability in government -
it is part of the DNA of the Whitehall machinery. But you could
force the bureaucracy to account for what it does and how it does
it through the routine publication of external audits.
The plethora of sound recommendations for fundamental change in
the Poynter review has been the best thing that has happened to HM
Revenue and Customs for many years - but it took the loss of two
CDs with details of 25 million people on them.
Would that there were regular Poynter reports on the major
projects and management of every government department and agency.
Then we perhaps would not see unrestrainedly fanciful projects
being launched, and so many schemes fail.