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By Sarah Left, 23 May 2000 00:30

NEWS The UK e-government minister, Ian McCartney, has issued a damning criticism of the government's performance on IT projects - and pledged that past mistakes will not be repeated. His criticisms came at the launch of a Cabinet Office report, entitled Successful IT: Modernising Government in Action, which lists 30 recommendations designed to avoid the IT disasters that have plagued the public sector in the past. McCartney promised radical changes to the system by which IT projects are conceived, tendered and implemented. He said: "There's been no clarity about the ownership of the objectives, no clarity about who was responsible for the management of the project, no clarity or sense of a system in place to deal with risk management." The report calls for every project to be assigned a senior official who will oversee it from concept to completion, and for large IT contracts to be broken down into more manageable component parts. David Davis MP, chairman of the public accounts committee, welcomed the report. He said in a statement: "Making these changes happen is key, and I am particularly glad that in future senior civil servants will be clearly accountable for the extent to which they have applied the guidance." Peter Gershon, CEO of the newly-formed Office of Government Commerce (OGC), said the changes should help departments make better choices about IT suppliers. Gershon said: "In the past, there was no mechanism by which government could see how a supplier is performing on a range of different contracts." Such information will now be held in the OGC, giving departments the ability to compare a supplier's record with other public sector clients. e-envoy Alex Allen is charged with seeing the report put into practice across central government. The government's full report is available at www.citu.gov.uk/itprojectsreview.htm