One of the highest paid IT experts in government, Ian
Watmore, last month justified every penny of his £190,000 salary at
a single hearing of the Public Accounts Committee.
A man who has made mistakes and isn't afraid to admit it,
Watmore gave MPs the most credible account - from within government
- of what's wrong with public sector IT, what needs to be done, and
how innovation can be stimulated.
He put the differences between private and public IT in simple
terms: that the government has "too many initiatives", for
example.
And his comments bordered on the politically incorrect when he
said that Gateway reviews should be published - which
Computer Weekly has campaigned for since 2002.
Watmore also confirmed the long-held suspicion of MPs and others
that departments are wasting money hiring consultants to say things
civil servants don't want to say.
And he said the government keeps alive some failing projects too
long. They could be stopped earlier and "cheaply".
He said: "An innovative organisation tries a lot of things and
sometimes things do not work. I think one of the valid criticisms
in the past has been that when things have not worked, government
has carried on trying to make them work well beyond the point at
which they should have been stopped."
Watmore was strongly supportive of the work done by the 50,000
technology specialists in the public sector. He said it is possible
to innovate to save money and provide better public services, while
being mindful of risk.
Salary
Watmore's services to the taxpayer have come at a price. His
total earnings since he joined the civil service have approached
£1m in about five years. His salary has been higher than Gordon
Brown's (excluding the PM's expenses). But he is arguably the most
open and plain speaking civil servant IT expert to have come before
the Public Accounts Committee.
And he is in a position to know why the public sector keeps
making mistakes while the private sector learns from them: he was
government CIO and, before that, was top of his profession in the
private sector, as UK managing director of services supplier
Accenture, where he worked on public sector projects such as the
£2.6bn computerisation of welfare payments. He also worked on Stock
Exchange IT and the outsourcing of systems at Sainsbury's.
By the time he faced MPs last month, he had been promoted to
permanent secretary - head - of the Department for Innovation,
Universities and Skills.
Watmore was in a valedictory euphoria, some MPs noted, for this
month he joins the Football Association as its chief executive.
He was indeed relaxed - which is unusual for civil servants who
come before the committee's saturnine MPs.
The committee was meeting to learn why big projects keep failing
and mistakes are repeated. MPs cited projects which relied on new
technology: IT to support the Child Support Agency, the Single
Payment Scheme for farmers, and the £12.7bn NHS IT programme.
Public Accounts Committee chairman Edward Leigh said the
committee's MPs were "particularly depressed" about the
failure of the C-Nomis IT project for prisons and the probation
service because it is a recent project.
Of all the committee's 16 MPs, Leigh is one of the hardest to
please. He is apt to close hearings with remarks which paint a
vision of the apocalypse, especially after he has questioned civil
servants on IT failures. In May he told a civil servant, Phil
Wheatley, who had given evidence about the failure of C-Nomis: "I
have had all this before and I just do not know whether there is
any point really carrying on, frankly."
This time it was different. "Thank you Mr Watmore for your
candour," said Leigh at the end of last month's hearing, "We do not
often hear in this committee descriptions of officials' dealing
with ministers there are many lessons that we can learn and are
learning."
Gateway reviews
The biggest surprise of the hearing came when Watmore agreed
with Conservative MP Richard Bacon that Gateway reviews should be
published. So impressed is Watmore with the Gateway review system
that he says he may adopt the scheme in the Football
Association.
Gateway reviews are independent internal assessments of risky IT
projects, such as the ID cards scheme, the NHS IT programme and
technology to support the Olympics.
Whitehall abhors the publishing of Gateway reviews, particularly
the Office of Government Commerce and Jack Straw's Ministry of
Justice [formerly the Department for Constitutional Affairs] which
has given advice to departments on how to refuse requests under the
Freedom of Information Act.
Critics of the policy of secrecy argue that ministers are wary
of even a dim bulb being shone into the deep recesses of
government, where policy collides with implementation.
The counter argument is that confidentiality makes for frankness
in the advice given by civil servants to the reviewers, and honesty
on the part of the writers of the reviews.
The result of government policy is that Gateway reviews are
shown to the project's senior responsible owners only. If they want
to let anyone else see the review report that is up to them.
That said, the Office of Government Commerce did release
two early Gateway reviews on the ID cards scheme in March 2009
- but only after a tenacious individual had been prepared to go
through four years of appeals under the Freedom of Information Act.
Even then, the Office of Government Commerce emphasised that its
openness on this occasion was a one-off.
Watmore is happy for publication, though, because of his
experience of releasing capability reviews which give a red, amber
or green light to the managerial abilities of entire
departments.
Watmore told Bacon: "I am with you in that I would prefer
Gateway reviews to be published because of the experience we had
with capability reviews. We had the same debate [as with Gateway
reviews] and we published them. It caused furore for a few weeks
but then it became a normal part of the furniture."
The danger with publishing Gateway reviews is that "people will
not talk about what their real issues are and things will be
suppressed from the Gateway reviewers and you will end up with two
reviews, one that is publishable and one that is the private
one".
He added: "Current government policy is to keep them
confidential but personally, on balance, I would publish for the
reasons you have said."
Bacon asked Watmore whether suppliers would object to Gateway
reviews being published.
"I think they probably would, but they would have to get used to
it."
That situation may never arise. When Computer Weekly put
Watmore's case for publishing the reviews to the Office of
Government Commerce, it replied that it will not publish Gateway
reviews unless required to do so under the Freedom of Information
Act.
Opposition to change
The OGC's opposition to change is an example of one way the
public and private sectors differ. Watmore conceded that private
sector people who join the civil service "do find it difficult to
get used to ways of working in government".
He added: "Many of them struggle and quite a few leave shortly
afterwards we have tried to get better induction of people to show
them how the system works so they do not end up raging against the
machine and giving up completely."
MP Keith Hill asked whether civil servants have an incentive to
learn from mistakes or success. "Why should they bother?"
Watmore replied that civil servants are not incentivized by
money but a desire to deliver high-quality services. So the
incentive is to see what works - even if that means civil servants
leaving their desks to see what's happening on the front line.
"People sit too often in Whitehall and do not get out to the
front line enough, and do not see the consequences of things that
look good on bits of paper in Whitehall but are not actually
translating properly in the front line."
Watmore's other suggestions for reform are just as important. He
wants "fewer initiatives" and more put into them. He also wants
people kept "for a bit longer in key roles", although he recognises
that they will not stay in the same job for five or six years just
to deliver a project successfully.
"What we could do is longer stints in duty and better mechanisms
for grooming a successor so that if you know that somebody is going
to leave a project in a year's time you bring the successor in six
to nine months early to let them get up to speed; so that when the
first one leaves the second one is ready to take over."
One way to stop projects failing is to have them run by
experienced people who have made mistakes, and have recognised
where mistakes have been made.
"If you have not been there, done that and got the T-shirt, you
are ultimately not going to be good enough." Accenture employees
who did not have the right experience did not move up. "In the
civil service that was not always in the case."
Project management
The Department for Work and Pensions has the best project
management experience, said Watmore. If those sorts of skills are
not used elsewhere "we are going to have failures in other
departments".
He conceded that government has had its fingers burnt by making
policy announcements without understanding the problems of
implementation.
But Watmore is an exception in government, not just because he
is open and honest about mistakes. He has oiled the relationship
between suppliers and his department's ministers when in other
departments the permanent secretary has blocked such meetings.
He has changed the way people work even if it has made him
unpopular at the start - by hot-desking, for example, which means
people use whatever desk is free when they come into work. It
creates a "buzzy environment", said Watmore.
The worst thing about Watmore's stint in government is that it
is temporary. His talented contemporaries in government prefer to
work quietly within the system, doing what they can without rocking
any political boats; in short, doing what's expected of them:
shaming nothing and praising everything.
Watmore is prepared to talk about change at the highest levels
within government - and he has had the ear of two prime ministers.
What will follow his departure is a void, one suspects.