The following report appeared a few days ago.
MPs blast government IT failures
28 July 2011 Lyn Whitfield
The Commons’ public administration committee has concluded that the government’s lack of IT skills and over-reliance on an “oligopoly” of large contractors is a “recipe for rip-offs.”
In a report that echoes the findings of successive spending watchdog investigations into government IT, the committee says that the “overall record of developing and implementing new IT systems is appalling” despite an “obscene” amount of public spending.
Although it did not take evidence from the Department of Health, the committee’s verdict that “IT procurement has too often resulted in late, over budget IT systems that are not fit for purpose” sounds very like the latest National Audit Office verdict on the National Programme for IT in the NHS.
In its third report on the project, which focused on detailed care record systems, the NAO concluded that successive contract negotiations had delivered less functionality to fewer trusts for hardly any less money; so the programme had not delivered value for money and was unlikely to do so.
Committee chair Bernard Jenkin said: “The government has said that it is overly reliant on an ‘oligopoly’ of suppliers; some of our witnesses went further and described the situation as a ‘cartel’.
“Whatever we call the situation, it has led to an inexcusable situation that sees government waste an obscene amount of public money.”
The PASC acknowledges that while successive governments have failed at large IT projects, they have also tried to find out what keeps going wrong. Its report says the NAO found 30 major cross-government policies, reviews and strategies of IT from 2000 to 2010.
It also finds that most of these reviews identified common problems; such as projects being: too big; open to only a limited range of suppliers; duplicating work that had already been done elsewhere; not interoperating with other systems; being poorly managed; and failing to engage users.
The PASC also accepts that the present government has tried to address these problems; for example by: “creating a presumption against projects having a lifetime value of more than £100m”; creating an asset register and cross-public sector app store; promoting open source software and open standards; and trying to hold ministers and senior responsible owners to account.
The Cabinet Office, under its minister Francis Maude, has been leading on these efforts, and is known to be taking an active interest in the NPfIT local service provider contract that still has to be decided for the North, Midlands and East of England, where CSC has missed a number of deadlines to deliver Lorenzo to trusts.
However, the PASC says that it is still not clear that the government has “grasped the fundamental causes of failure or simply listed its systems.”
More here:
http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/EHI/7058/mps-blast-government-it-failures
The real key paragraph is this one.
“It also finds that most of these reviews identified common problems; such as projects being: too big; open to only a limited range of suppliers; duplicating work that had already been done elsewhere; not interoperating with other systems; being poorly managed; and failing to engage users.”
Now, thinking of the PCEHR program.
- Too Big - Tick
- Open to Limited Suppliers - Tick
- Duplicating Work Already Done Elsewhere - Partly
- Not Interoperable - Think Wave 1 and 2 Projects
- Poorly Managed - Think IHI service and NEHTA’s implementation capabilities
- Failing to Engage Users - Public and Docs really don’t know what is going on.
There is little doubt we are setting ourselves up to fail. Especially with no real decent scale piloting and doing things in a politically set rush!
How sad is this when we could have done so much better for the money?
David.
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