New approach urged for government IT

A new report into government IT failures has warned that previous inquiries may have embedded problems by focusing on inappropriate ‘best practice’ instead of looking for alternative approaches.

The report, from the Institute for Government, says “existing ‘best practice’ project models do not deal with the fundamental issues at the heart of government IT.”

It also argues that: “By implementing these same, flawed project techniques in an increasingly rigid fashion, these traditional solutions can act to exacerbate the problems further.”

Instead, it calls for a new that focuses on using government’s huge buying power to get better deals for what it calls ‘platform’ technologies – such as server capacity and PCs – while encouraging departments to adopt ‘agile’ methodologies to deliver systems to meet the particular challenges they face.

Within this set up, the report says that the Government CIO should take charge of the overall IT strategy for government and decide on the right balance between platform and agile approaches.

Departments would take responsibility for “particular aspects of the platform in which they have expertise” while looking to create agile champions and centres for excellence to support projects.

The Institute for Government believes this would strike a balance between the centralised and decentralised approaches that government has veered between over the past few decades.

Andrew Adonis, Director of the Institute for Government said: “The billions spent on cancelled IT projects, such as ID cards and National Programme for IT in the NHS, demonstrate precisely why we need a much more flexible approach to government IT.

“If a new approach to IT in government is not now put into practice, this will risk further hemorrhaging of public money. This report shows there is a better way that is more flexible and allows for the fact that government priorities continuously shift.”

The report cites the national programme as one ‘symptom of failure’ in government IT; the tendency for projects to run late and for departments to struggle to keep suppliers on board or hold them to their original delivery requirements as a result.

It cites NHS Connecting for Health’s "struggle" to replace Fujitsu as local service provider for the South and the re-negotiation of CSC’s contract to deliver Lorenzo to the North, Midlands and East of England as specifics.

It lists other symptoms of government IT failure as paying wildly different prices for basic items, incompatible systems across and within departments, the high cost of small changes built into complex contracts and the lack of involvement of users.

It says that traditional management models that focus on collecting requirements, turning them into technical specifications, and then working through design, build and test phases may cause some of these problems; by creating massive, ‘gold plated’ projects that cannot adapt quickly to technological or policy change.

‘The solution’, it asserts, is to move to a combination of ‘platform’ and ‘agile’ solutions.

Government would make savings by buying ‘commoditised’ technology that can nevertheless interoperate using common standards, while running shorter, more modular and more ‘iterative’ projects to deliver on specific demands.

The Institute for Government set up an Improving Government IT Taskforce led by Sir Ian Magee, one of its fellows and a senior civil servant, to consider government IT and produce the report: ‘System Error – fixing the flaws in government IT’.