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 IT failures.
But
N
ew Labour has had more large-scale government IT 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 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 prevent high-profile failures.
But still the roll-call of high-profile calamities drowns out
the successes: the
IT fiasco over SATs tests, delays of four years in the "Scope"
system to help combat terrorism and other threats by linking
intelligence services and providing 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 just 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's not practical. Yet ministers embarked on the
technological equivalent with the NHS’s £12.7bn National Programme
for IT because nobody they'd 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 have caught on to the "transformational" agendas of
successive governments.
What's the solution? There's 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've looked at
only a fraction of the 100 or so mission-critical government
projects, and usually the scrutiny is applied only years after the
projects have started.
The NAO and PAC reports are deliberately de-personalised so
there is no individual accountability. It’s not practical to solve
the problem of a lack of individual accountability in government -
it's part of the DNA of Whitehall. But you could force the
bureaucracy to account for what it does and how it does it, though
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 perhaps we wouldn't see unrestrained, fanciful projects being
launched, and so many schemes ending in failure.
See also:
New Labour's unlucky 13 IT projects - Tony Collins analyses the
government's recent track record in IT >>