17 November 2006
Government IT projects have been blighted by inappropriate ministerial involvement and inexperience, the National Audit Office has said.
Departments have also neglected to check whether their final IT systems do what they were intended to do, which means that 'there's no way of knowing if the project… was value for money or not', an NAO spokesman said.
In the report Delivering successful IT-enabled business change, published on November 17, the NAO found that although the number of civil servants with project management specialisms had almost doubled since 2004 to 2,300, this was still low compared with the size of the civil service as a whole.
That meant that half of the 'senior responsible officers' appointed to take overall responsibility for major IT change programmes were doing so for the first time, and a similar percentage dedicated less than 20% of their time to that task.
The watchdog reported poor involvement of ministers, and noted that: 'There is a risk that without clear and regular communication, programmes fall out of alignment with ministerial objectives or that ministers are not fully informed about emerging risks to delivery.'
Further evidence of a lack of communication between ministers and civil servants emerged when 'top management' announced goals and timetables that were 'aspirational rather than realistic, [which] create a negative profile that absorbs management time and additional costs to correct'.
But Richard Granger, director general of NHS IT, speaking at the National Outsourcing Association's summit on November 14, said the IT service sector itself was not perfect.
Many companies dedicated more effort to sales and marketing than to delivery, he said, and the sector was often reluctant to bear the costs of reworking and overruns.
Granger himself came under fire in the autumn after Accenture, the prime contractor in the Department of Health's Connecting for Health programme, resigned after the department refused to renegotiate the contract.
But Granger defended his approach: 'I'd know I had the model wrong if I didn't have a queue of people to take the work off [them]. And I'd know I had the pricing wrong if anyone taking that work would only do it for a greater consideration.' But that had not happened, he said.
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