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By Natasha Lomas, 6 April 2009 08:00

INTERVIEW

People and services are always on the mind of Joe Harley, the CIO of the Department for Work and Pensions.

The DWP deals with 20 million 'customers' per year, paying out in excess of £124bn in benefits annually, and making some 14 million payments per week.

All of which amounts to a truckload of responsibility for Harley, the man heading up one of the largest IT systems in the world. One glitch in this matrix would mean serious repercussions indeed.

"The day job is very important at the moment," Harley tells silicon.com, sitting in his Whitehall offices where the chimes of Big Ben are faint but audible. "You can just imagine the chaos if our systems went down and people weren't getting paid, or our telephony wasn't working and people couldn't get through."

The pressure on Harley - who's been DWP CIO for coming up to five years, taking the reins back in July 2004 - is especially acute at present, as the economic downturn pushes more Brits out of work and onto benefits.

"All of the department is lending great support to Job Centre Plus to help with resources," he said. "From an IT point of view it's very important that our systems are responding; that they're robust enough; that our telephony is providing the services that it needs to; that we've got sufficient capacity to make sure the services are getting delivered."

All too often IT seems to be the pantomime villain of the public sector, with big government projects gobbling up huge sums of money and resources, yet failing to deliver promised benefits on time or on budget.

But in this instance, new technology seems to be something of a white knight for the DWP, helping the department cope with the ballooning demand. The rollout of a converged IP network to the DWP's contact centres, benefits centres and Job Centre Plus means telephone calls can now be dynamically rerouted around the UK to regions where staff are less busy, as Harley explains. "That's helping enormously. We wouldn't have been able to do that a couple of years ago."

A government IT success story - however modest.

But the DWP is not without its share of tardy IT projects - a parliamentary question earlier this year revealed nine major IT projects are collectively more than 15 years late. Harley himself has expressed dissatisfaction about tech failures, telling a government IT summit in 2007: "Today, only 30 per cent of government IT projects and programmes are successful. We want 90 per cent by 2010/11."

Asked what, looking back, he wishes he could have changed or done differently, he told silicon.com: "I would have liked to have seen if we could have done things just a little bit quicker and been able to get on the reuse agenda just a bit earlier."

Harley is a member of the government's CIO Council - and this reuse-of-services mindset is clearly now shared by CIOs across government.

"In the past, if you didn't develop it yourself it wasn't worth having. That was the old mindset. Now the mindset is 'is there one of these around? If there is I'll use it, thanks very much. It'll save me time'," he said.

"I want to get to a place where I can satisfy ministerial ambitions for policy change in months rather than years. Years is a long time to get things done and it is difficult and I know we're not in a greenfield site but if we can exploit some of these technologies and reuse what's already been done such that we can deliver these things in months would be fantastic," Harley added.

Asked whether he thinks government can achieve a 90 per cent IT project success rate, and how it might do so, Harley tells silicon.com it's a "good challenge" but ultimately believes success is possible. He says the introduction of a Joint Statement of Intent with suppliers is proving quite helpful in terms of ensuring there are no misunderstandings on what should be delivered and by when. Harley also believes proper scope management is also key to avoiding project 'feature creep' which can also cause delays.

As well as being in charge of the DWP's £6bn, five-year business process modernisation programme - including the launch of services such as the Internet Job Bank and Employer Direct Online - Harley has been steering an internal IT transformation programme, funded through a realignment of the Department's contracts with BT and EDS, and aimed at both refreshing IT and reducing spend.

According to Harley, the latter transformation at least will be finished next year, even if wider Departmental services modernisation will inevitably continue - a new welfare reform bill and the pensions reform agenda will both require their supporting structure of IT in time, keeping the CIO busy for years to come.

"In terms of the IT transformation we're just about there," he said. Next year will see the completion of the rollout of the DWP's network infrastructure to all pension centres, the rollout of contact centre telephony to the department's benefit centres and move into a brand new datacentre in the North East.

According to the DWP, the IT transformation programme has helped to reduce its IT spend from £1,071m in 2004–05 to £991m in 2007–08, and it estimates this will drop to £718m by 2010–11, a reduction of more than 30 per cent.

As part of the tech transformation, Harley made the decision to consolidate IT resources, creating a single central corporate IT department consisting of "a couple of thousand" staff to serve all the Department's various agencies - such as the pensions & disability agency, and the Job Centre Plus agency - rather than having separate functions for each.

"By pooling the resource you've got much more efficiency," he added.

Click here to read page 2 of the interview...