Government It Failures - Part II

The Independent is running with an expose of Labour IT failures that show a £26bn overspend / wasted spend over the past decade. so following on from my previous post here’s a few more failed projects



NHS National Programme for IT £12.7bn
Failed to ask medical professionals what the system should be (scoping issues), is years late, has connected only 160 of 9000 health centres. The Legal and commerical support bill has been £39.2m alone.

Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) £7.1bn
Replacement of carying different computer systems in use by Army, Navy, Airforce with one. Was supposed to be used by 300,000 people across 2,000 sites, however it is £180m over budget (quite small compared to the NHS programme) and 18 months late.

National Identity Scheme £5bn
The much discussed national ID card scheme, originally budgeted at £3bn and now effectively cancelled. Many, many issues with biometric features of it failing to properly recognise people.

Single Payment Scheme System £350m
A new sophisticated way of paying farmers subsidies based on their land area. In 2006 it’s failure meant that £1.28bn of £1.5bn of subsidies had not been paid. Although it’s cost £350m the Public Accounts committe warned last year that it was already at risk of |becomign obselete”

GCHQ server move, £300m
When GCHQ decided to move their server systems to a new building it was proejcted to cost £41m, in teh end it cost more than £300m.

Department for Transport Shared Services Centre £81m
A panacea that would integrate human resources and financial services together across the department and all of its agencies. It was even supposed to save the tax payer £57m. The total project will now cost more money (nearly twice more) than it was supposed to save and has meant that staff at the DVLA have had to learn german as the software installed is unable to use English for some messages

This isn’t the complete Independent list but just a few of my favourites (in particular I’m a big fan of GCHQ’s server move). I do think this list illustrates my point in my last post though that IT is fast becoming the defence procurement of this century with poorly scoped projects and ridiculous over spends.

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Government IT Projects

Louise Bagshawe has a piece on the Blue Blog about government IT projects that highlights some of the failures, over spends and over runs of IT projects and looks at alternative private sector projects. Personally I don't think the piece hangs together all that well as large scale goverenment IT projects don't correlate well to her private sector examples. She also failed to point out the excellent www.makeITbetter.org.uk which took apart a leaked copy of the current government's leaked IT strategy and put forward an alternative which included 8 practical steps and an overarching principle as well.

One only has to look at the devastating failures of IT projects over the past decade to see that radical reform  of goverenment's approach to IT is desperately needed. Since 1997 approximately £100 billion has been spent on IT projects, far more than any other European country, however despite this expenditure a study found that 70% of recent IT projects have failed.

The list is endless but a few personal favourites include:

• Broadband procurement, a £200m project to save the costs of procuring broadband by pooling resources, saved just £3.5m
• National Programme for IT, delayed to date and forecast to be £10.3 billion over budget
• Department for Work and Pensions Customer Information system, £48 million over budget
• NOMIS and LIBRA systems for the Ministry of justice, still not complete, and £620 million over budget
• NHS IT modernisation programme, has cost £12bn so far, with the pilot beign delivered 4 years late and is in the process of being abandoned

These are just a smattering of examples that show that IT procurement is becoming the defence industry of the modern age. Just as defence procurement (see the A400m for example) never delivers on time or on cost, neither does the IT industry, and for some reason despite contracts being signed and companies being contracted to deliver at a certain cost, the government continues to pay more and more money, in effect billions of pounds more than they contracted to do so. And just like the defence industry there are just a few giants, companies like EDS (now owned by HP) and Siemens who are sacred cows given projects again and again despite their track record and their failure to deliver in the past.

The solution is clear, radical reform of IT procurement and contracting and most importantly project management within the civil service and ministers that understand the projects that are being embarked upon, rather than believing the radical claims of suppliers.

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