It is eight years since the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) called for "dolphins not
whales", warning of the "hidden danger to e-government" of
over-large ICT projects and cautioning that they "should be avoided
wherever possible". Yet, it seems that the lessons have still not
been learnt. The goldfish-like memory of public sector ICT
procurement persists along with the high-profile disasters,writes international public sector consultantAndrew
Hardie.
The famous and often quoted studies into ICT project failures,
such as the original 1995 Standish Group CHAOS report and later UK
publications by the Public Accounts Committee, the National Audit
Office and POST, reiterate the same basic findings: the problems
are caused by unclear objectives, poor understanding of
requirements, inadequate project management, insufficient user
involvement and lack of top management support. All of these
"people problems" are very important, to be sure, but far less
attention was paid to the problem of project size, tacitly
accepting that big is the only way to do public sector ICT.
There is however another way and other countries are showing us
how it can and should be done. Research conducted into public
sector ICT procurement in the developed world found that the
country doing this best was Holland, where they are not afraid to
break large projects down into smaller parts, despite the possible
accusations of aggregation the UK seems paranoid about. The
research also, not surprisingly, placed the UK at the bottom of the
successful public sector ICT project league.
But, there's a snag: splitting big projects into smaller ones
and managing their implementation and interoperation requires
government to be an intelligent customer - you can't just hand off
the whole problem to a supplier. The Dutch government values and
retains in-house technical skills whereas in the UK they have been
chronically undervalued and, assisted by outsourcing and civil
service fragmentation into agencies, have relentlessly migrated to
the private sector.
Rebuilding civil service ICT skills is a worthy, if long-term,
goal but what can be done in the short term to alleviate the
problem?
High street retailers solved the problem of uneconomic
over-large department stores by adopting the "shop within in a
shop" concept allowing flexible response to changing market
conditions. The Web, in a way, does the same by decoupling big
infrastructure (Internet and the Web) from service delivery (Web
applications) which can be developed, deployed and updated
rapidly.
Instead of massive stove-pipe systems embedded into dedicated
back-ends and complicated client-side applications, provide public
sector staff with "web terminals", connecting to common backend
servers and databases all procured and maintained as commodity
infrastructure. All new functionality can then be developed as
smaller projects: web applications to run over that infrastructure.
Development would be simpler, faster and less risky, supplier
dependence would be greatly reduced and small, innovative companies
would at last have a chance to compete with the big boys, assuming
the government fixes the massive bureaucratic obstacles they face
to getting public sector business.
It sounds like an uphill struggle, but maybe the recession and
falling government spending power will force small to become the
order of the day. Now, that really would be beautiful.