Government IT projects have hit problems in the past, but this must not detract from the savings technology can make
In December, the government published Smarter Government: putting the front line first, which includes a foreword by the prime minister that stresses the opportunities flowing from rapid advances in technology.
It includes plans for streamlining the civil service, providing greater access to public data, harnessing the power of comparative data and improving back-office and procurement processes. In total, it claims these proposals will make billions of pounds of extra savings each year, over and above the billions already identified in the 2009 Pre-Budget Report and the Operational Efficiency Programme.
Unfortunately, since its launch the report has received limited coverage and interest. Part of the problem is that it is too late. This is the type of document that the Brown government should have produced in its first 100 days to follow up and add flesh to the work on transformational government.
It is also a bit of a hotchpotch of ideas that have been brought together to justify the savings that are planned. Plus much of the detail is a rehashing of old ideas and things that are already happening.
It trumpets, for example, the Tell Us Once project, so that citizens need notify government only once about any birth or death. I first came across this project in 2001 when it was being piloted in local government. By 2004, it became one of the national projects promoted by the old Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. In 2006/07, it was picked up as a good idea and promoted by Sir David Varney.
It will be very interesting to see how long it takes before every birth and death, or change of address, is notified to ‘government’ once and shared across all public service bodies.
This example also highlights two other important issues. First, attempts by government to promote cross-departmental IT-based transformation have often been thwarted by a lack of power and commitment by the centre to make projects work as well as competing priorities in departments and agencies. If we can’t implement a fairly basic information sharing project like Tell Us Once within reasonable time, what are the implications for the sophisticated planning and performance systems needed for Total Place?
Secondly, it highlights the lack of confidence that exists in government’s ability to complete large ICT projects. This is not surprising given the number of high profile and expensive failures.
According to the Public Accounts Committee, the latest problem project is the £7.1bn Defence Information Infrastructure programme, which was intended to provide a single information system for the army, navy, airforce and central Ministry of Defence command. It is now 18 months late and £182m over budget.
Other high-profile failures include: the Rural Payment’s Agency system, which delayed the payment of £1.5bn of subsidies to British farmers; the Department for Transport’s shared services centre project, which will cost £81m to complete instead of making planned savings of £57m; and the NHS’s National Programme for IT, which is likely to cost more than five times its original budget.
Regardless of the difficulties, it is clear that focusing on smarter government and better use of technology will be vital across the public services in the coming months and years. However, what we must do is put in place better arrangements for evaluating, procuring and completing ICT-enabled projects.
The people that understand the problems the projects are solving must be given responsibility for them. And they must be broken down into smaller, more manageable projects with much shorter timescales. We also need procurement processes that foster innovation and encourage competition, rather than unwieldy mega projects, and then join up organisations and services through the use of agreed standards and protocols.
We also need to be careful that we don’t shoot the messengers because we fear the message – we do need smarter government.
John Thornton is an independent adviser and writer, the executive director of e-ssential Resources and a member of the CIPFA IT Panel
