By Tom Espiner, 18 May 2007 09:08
NEWS
Seven in 10 government IT projects have failed, according to the chief information officer of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Speaking at the Government IT Summit this week, Joe Harley called for projects to be completed at a lower cost to the taxpayer and said the government's aim is to reduce the number of project failures to just one in 10.
He said: "Today, only 30 per cent of government IT projects and programmes are successful. We want 90 per cent by 2010/11. We want to achieve a 20 per cent overall reduction on IT spend in government, including reducing the total cost of a government laptop by 40 per cent [in the same timescale]."
Harley said the criteria for judging the success of a project included whether it was delivered on time, on budget and to the quality promised. While private sector IT projects had a similar failure rate, government IT projects needed to be more efficient both in terms of cost and delivery, he said.
Harley added: "The government spends £14bn per year on IT in the UK. It's not sustainable as a government to continue to spend at these levels. We need to up the quality while reducing the spend."
One government project that has been heavily criticised in terms of missed deadlines and inflated costs is the troubled NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), which is overseen by Connecting for Health (CfH).
Andy Burn, head of information management and technology planning for CfH, said, while the project has achieved some successes, taken as a whole, it has failed so far. "The programme still has three wheels still on. It's not in hand in some respects but it is in others. At a local level, progress has been made over the years. At an organisational level, less [progress has been made]. The challenge is joining up services - we've been struggling with that for quite some time."
Burn added it would take a lot of work to put NPfIT back on track. "Inevitably, with the size of the programme, we're bound to be up against the wall. For the next decade, not for the next year."
Tom Espiner writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
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1. anonymous
If the failure rate is the same in the private sector - does the government have a magic wand to wave over each project to remove all the real-world issues?
The article points at technology being the problem - from experience this is only indirectly to do with issues on the project...
2. anonymous
What a laugh. The CIO for the biggest government department complaining about IT costs. Mmmmmm....
Lets have a quick look at his department shall we. A certain Texan company provide all database and server support and if the implementation project isn't done by them they hold it up by up to 2 years with technical reviews and questions arriving just as things are going to be signed off. Most tech projects in the department have to run a gammut of criticism at the technical level but nobody ever thinks about training the users properly because the culture is so technically backward that they feel they shouldn't bother.
It sounds to me as if the Texans contract must be coming up for renewal or a new significant government IT job is up for grabs because, based on track record, this CIO has nothing to offer in terms of a fix.
3. misceng
Failure starts at the top. Having seen government IT from the inside I found that the real problem was that the administrators who were in control of the money dictated the requirement. Experts were "On tap not on top" and since administrators did not understand the technicalities the project started on the wrong path. The programming was isolated from the user so the result bore no relationship to the actual day to day need. Getting the private sector involved only worsened the situation since no matter how good their response to the project they were delivering what was demanded not what the users required.
4. Sarah
In short, as a tax payer, I want to know why the Public Audit Office are not doing something about this.
5. anonymous
The problem is public sector project are wound-up in complex regulations e.g. procurement, and open to public and political scrutiny. Then gets its ridiculed by the 'told you so' private sector, who did not win the contract in the first place.
6. anonymous
Having worked repeated 70 hour weeks for most of a year to stop a public sector project failing I would say that the main problem we saw was the hiring of contractors based on their tailor rather than their ability to do the job.
A handful of the contractors (luckily) were worth the money but there's nothing more frustrating for permies that being made to watch people earn 4 times as much while you do their work for them.
We don't work for our managers - we work for the customer despite our managers.
7. Anil
HI,
Some of it is outsourced where totally inexperianced individuals(Fresh out of college) handle it and we all know what is the result of such projects. it is a waste of money . The companies who handle this are Greedy , they dont want to pay for Experiance (Contractors or experianced perm staff) and waste tax payers money.