Richard Bacon MP, a member of the House of Commons’
Public Accounts Committee, said today that the project to build a
national database of offenders is a checklist of what not to do on
a government IT scheme.
He added that the system for scrutinising and challenging
government departments through the Office of Government Commerce is
not working.
He was commenting on a report of the National Audit Office
published today, on the failure of the National Offender Management
Information System – C-Nomis.
He said: "This project is a check list of what not to do in a
government IT project."
Nomis was affected by seven of the
eight most
common causes of project failure, even though the Home Office’s
Programme and Project Management Support Unit issued a certificate
in May 2005, as part of the project approval process, purporting to
certify that Nomis did not suffer from the common causes of
failure.
Bacon said: “These are systemic failures, which go much deeper
than one badly botched project. The system for scrutinising and
challenging government departments through the Office of Government
Commerce is simply not working.
"The OGC may come up with sensible advice but it is not taken
seriously enough by government departments, which are allowed to
ignore its findings. This cannot continue. We should either give
the OGC more power to do its job properly, or get rid of it and
start again".
Links:
Eight common
causes of project failure as defined by the NAO and OGC
Noms wasted £41m on C-Nomis project
Report: C-Nomis Prison IT system guilty of 'basic' project
management failures