Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

[A summary of each other's writs follows.]

IT services and systems supplier Qinetiq is suing the National Policing Improvement Agency after the agency cancelled a national web-based system, the Police Portal, which was designed to help the public report incidents and hate crimes online.

The Police Portal was also designed to allow the public to contact the police during a terrorist incident such as the London bombings, and would have provided secure communications between police forces.

Qinetiq claimed that the NPIA, which oversees national police IT, caused delay and hindrance after September 2006, which prevented the project from progressing.

Using the portal a police force might have created a message advising "Protected Registrants" of an impending major incident and might then have created a separate message advising the public not to travel to an area.

There has been some criticism by NHS users of the Fujitsu helpdesk. But a blog reader writes:

The Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust is preparing for a possible compensation claim after a troubled go-live under the £12.7bn National Programme for IT [NPfIT]. 

The trust's staff have been struggling to cope with bugs and downtime since the go-live of the "Millennium" system from US supplier Cerner in June.

The trust's board has been told that all problems continue to be logged so that it is ready should a claim prove possible.

When civil servants announced they had reached £71.25m settlement with IT services supplier EDS over problems with tax credits IT systems, they left out some important details.

After tax credits were introduced in April 2003 - supported by a new system built by EDS, the main IT supplier to HM Revenue and Customs at that time -  thousands of families were unexpectedly overpaid. HMRC sought to claw back the overpayments while struggling to reduce delays in making payments to hundreds of thousands of families.

In November 2005 HMRC announced it had reached a settlement with EDS on compensation for the IT problems over the introduction of tax credits. But what was not mentioned in the announcement was that EDS was being quietly allowed to pay £26.5m of the settlement from any future business it won from the UK government. Under the deal it would pay quarterly instalments of 4.5% of income from future government work over three years.

The time is up in December this year. But EDS has not won the contracts it had hoped for from the UK government, leaving it well behind on its payments, Computer Weekly has learned.

Now the Labour Party's conference, which was held in Manchester, is finished, I've looked at the lessons and what went wrong on 13 large, government IT-based projects and programmes:

Is a promise or a prediction made by a supplier's sales team ever a representation? When is a representation, if that is what it is, ever a misrepresentation? If ever there is a misrepresentation, can it be held to be fraudulent if it is made thoughtlessly rather than deceitfully? What if the customer relies more on promises than representations?

Some of these were matters raised at the nine-month hearing between BSkyB and EDS - the most expensive High Court hearing the history of the IT industry.

One argument made during the hearing was that promises, predictions and opinions are not representations. So can they be held to be misrepresentations?

It's of course common for IT suppliers to have an exclusion clause in contracts to protect them from claims from users after a serious failure.

The clause usually says that the supplier is not in any circumstances liable for loss of business, loss of profits, loss of anticipated savings, loss of or damage to data, third party claims or any consequential loss. Sometimes the clauses are challenged in court.

Now a Court of Appeal ruling suggests that suppliers can have confidence in correctly-framed exclusions of financial loss. 

The BBC reports that "ministers have been ordered to publish two reviews into the controversial ID Cards scheme after a four-year Freedom of Information Battle".

This is true. But the BBC doesn't mention that the two "gateway reviews" in question, on the ID Cards scheme, may never be published.

Bankruptcy, prosecution and disrupted livelihoods - Post masters tell their story.An important and exemplary piece of investigative journalism by my colleague Rebecca Thomson.

A law firm which represents Naomi Campbell, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant is also acting for the former director general of NHS IT Richard Granger.

The firm, Schillings, says on its website that it is "one of Britain's top law firms dedicated to safeguarding the reputations of international corporations, brands, celebrities and high-profile business people".

Full story on ComputerWeekly.com