It projects in banks are often similar with failure and massive overspend. Both banks and government have huge amounts of money to spend and fall back on and personally I think it is due to both having higher management/politicians that don't want to know the nitty gritty and want to palm off responsibility to some external so called expert company. The management/politicians can never then be blamed as they can always state "Well we did hire professionals" It is the same with auditors, how many of the big firms totally screwed up on the financial crisis but are still in business and being used. It because higher management want someone else to take the blame.
With IT projects often politicians don't understand that it is the IT systems that actually provides the service, not some promise they make. They think the computer system is just some easy admin service like air conditioning and forget that it is the key component in offering and running a department or service.
Personally I think there is no excuse now for so many failed IT projects in government as so many have happened that the civil service should have sorted itself out and have better ways of doing things. Its not like the systems they are developing are cutting edge. Some like the NHS are very complicated but thats because they are so behind with the times and are going from nothing to trying to sprint with no other systems in between. They really need a 10 to 20 yr plan on how to bring the NHS upto the IT standards of big business and just admit that it will take and long time and money and that they need to do it in increments. Thats how every other business has done it. You can't go from nothing to sprinting in one go. Just look at Apple with its maps, bloody awful and still no where near as detailed or as good as Google. Even the might of Apple have learned you have to do it in increments and slowly.
We need an IT dept in the Civil Service. Bring the skills and expertise in-house. It doesn't need every resource, but certainly a core.
We need an IT dept in the Civil Service. Bring the skills and expertise in-house. It doesn't need every resource, but certainly a core.
Supposedly that's what the NHS BSA and NPfIT were set up to do. BSA ended up being outsourced to Crapita and NPfIT, well, they were an utter gob-smacking disaster area that imploded in on themselves. The most useless bunch of half-wits I've ever encountered (for the technical: they virtualized EVERYTHING onto 1 ESX box).
If the aim of N3 was to prevent progress in digital healthcare, job done 🙂
(for the technical: they virtualized EVERYTHING onto 1 ESX box).
I do hope they used SATA DAS, and set the reservations so that when it did al fall over only 1 VM could restart.
Proper job, like.
Met Office built an entirely new HQ in a different part of the country.
Fitted it out with a mahoosive new computer, migrated it's IT systems from old place to new place without missing a beat and no downtime. On time, in budget, completely smooth switchover.
It didn't make the news though.
Yes but the Met Office know what they want from a computer system having been using one since the late 50's. They have highly skilled people who understand their models and the best hardware on which to run them, IT projects in other government areas are nothing like that at all. Same as I bet GCHQ don't have crappy IT project failures either.
I bet GCHQ don't have crappy IT project failures either.
Really? I bet they have.
Has there ever been a successful government IT project?
Depending on how you define success you could remove the word government from the question.
The reality is most IT projects are initiatives either driven by techies trying to impose their order on things with no understanding of customer needs or are poorly defined customer requirements which the customer expects IT will miraculously solve when in reality the problem is nothing to do with IT systems but say people, or management or processes, or politics...
The reality is most IT projects are initiatives either driven by techies trying to impose their order on things with no understanding of customer needs or are poorly defined customer requirements which the customer expects IT will miraculously solve when in reality the problem is nothing to do with IT systems but say people, or management or processes, or politics...
And here is IME the nub of the matter...
