By Nick Heath, 9 January 2008 17:37
NEWS
Spiralling costs of a £500m IT system to manage UK offenders have forced the government to scale it back.
Ambitious plans by the National Offender Management Service to fully unite prison and probation records have been scrapped in favour of a pared-down option after costs soared from an original estimate of £234m to £512m.
C-Nomis was to have brought together more than 200 prison and probation service databases to allow more than 80,000 criminal justice staff to share up-to-date profiles of offenders.
A version of the C-Nomis system - now known as Nomis (National Offender Management Information Systems) - will be deployed in 130 prisons across England and Wales but will no longer be used by the probation service, whose systems will be upgraded to two alternatives.
A new mechanism of "data share" will split information between the prison and probation service, with probation having read access only.
It is the latest casualty in a string of failed government IT projects, estimated to have cost nearly £2bn since 2000.
Public sector ICT body Socitm spoke out in the wake of the incident and condemned the government's track record on big IT projects as "embarrassing".
It follows the revelation this week from a parliamentary committee that an IT system to underpin nine new fire control centres is expected to be £70m over budget.
Socitm VP Steve Hopson told silicon.com: "I would describe it as embarrassing, it is not good for the image of the profession which is unfairly criticised because of a few high profile failures.
"The difficulty with these government projects is that they are vast and the expectations are not always realistic."
He said such projects needed to be more frequently reviewed to ensure all parties were agreed on the project aims and ensure tighter controls on spending.
Prisons minister, David Hanson, said in a statement: "I am committed to continuing the successful implementation of the offender management model and am confident that national offender management service information technology will allow staff in both the prison and probation service to support crucial offender management."
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. Roger Huffadine
Bring together 200 databases -!*@**!! - and someone who spends my taxes believed that this was a viable project?
Come on - gi's a job - I'll work for 10% of the money I save by making sense of these ridiculous proposals - that's 10% of the proposal value not the projected overrun.
2. anonymous
Maybe it's time the government looked at who it was placing these contracts with. It may be no surprise the same company name keeps cropping up time & time again with Government funded projects all of which are late & over budget ...
Any "normal" business would soon come to realise that if they struggle to deliver on one project, how can they manage several. But this government seems to thinks that it's a good idea to keep pumping tax-payers money into a company with a record of IT-systems failures.
3. Richard Davies
Someone is signing off on these 'unreal expectations' though and some IT company is taking the money and developing a system it knows it will not be able to deliver!?!?
Seems like bad requirements analysis combined with massive scope creep, bad project management and an IT company that knows this but is still prepared to take the money and proceed with the ill-fated project(s).
I think some IT companies see the government coming a mile off because you don't really see this in the private sector!!!
Shame on the IT companies for doing it and shame on the government for allowing it to happen.
4. Jeremy Wickins
I'll undercut Roger - I'll do it for 7.5% of the savings!! What the hell is going on? This is corruption, pure and simple - palm-greasing, directorships for politicians - it is worse than Italy! If we had a real democracy, there would be a genuinely independent enquiry of the procurement process, and then the results published so that public vote of confidence in the government could be held. (Oh, sorry: I'm forgetting that real democracy doesn't exist, and once a politician, one is effectively immune from the results of one's decisions - and don't get me started on civil servants ...)
5. Chris Goodman
I can see absolutely no need for this centralised IT system and certainly no benefit that warrants such expenditure.
It might be considered nice (for who ??) for administrators in prisons and the Justice Ministry to be able to access individual records but with just a very little forward planning this can well be obviated.
It appears to be a data base and IT system being introduced just for the sake of it.
6. Michael Wilkes
Large, complex integration efforts require a different approach than a classic software system.
We understand this at the gut level in other walks of life... hence expressions like "eating the elephant one bite at a time."
Breaking a large system into smaller phases, then proving that the essential technical problems can be solved by doing a pilot project... this is how Mt. Everest is scaled. Plant for the summit by planning to survive the climb of each 100 ft.