So, basically...
So, we've learnt that cutting government IT will save us basically nothing?
IOD: Slash UK.gov IT, save public cash
A report by the Institute of Directors and the TaxPayers' Alliance says that cutting government IT projects could slash millions from public spending. Proposals include abolishing Building Schools for the Future, ContactPoint, the NHS National Programme for IT and ID cards. Becta, the technology organisation for the education …
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Monday 14th September 2009 14:24 GMT dunncha
Just cancel all Government Sponsored IT Contracts
Do these changes make any difference to us. They were brought into save us money and make us safer!.
NHS IT Backbone. Does it make my families life better no? Because my daughters records are still passed around as a wallet full of notes.
ID Database or any other database. Will this help my family? No because even if I did have a ID card I would still need a CRB before I could do certain jobs and if the CRB wasn't enough then........finally I would just use my Nectar card and get points.
On-Line Taxation. Will this help my family? No I still get letters telling me I haven't provided all the information they require so I still have to phone them to give them the information they require. Does it cut down on fraud. No most fraud is done with the taxmans knowledge.
Immigration Database: Epic fail!
CCTV. Does this help my family? No because when my daughter got mugged the image wasn't clear enough to secure a prosecution or even an ID.
I'm sure others will think of more. We are told these systems are essential. But essential for who? not me and my friends. I cannot think of one occasion that any government IT Project provided a benefit. When I call any Government department I still have to go through all the questions all over again.
Give me a great big cancelled stamp and I will sort it out in a 7 days.
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Monday 14th September 2009 14:24 GMT Jimmy Floyd
Culture Clash
Co-incidental timing? On the front page of today's FT is a note that the TUC warns against cutting public spending. I wonder if the two are linked?
It isn't that surprising, of course. A socialist trade union and a conservative club are hardly likely to form the best of political bed-fellows...
(...but I know which I would rather trust with economics)
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Monday 14th September 2009 15:12 GMT Alfonso Vespucci
This looks riddled with errors
BSF is a £60 Billion project, most of it not IT. I think you should add at least 3 zeros to the £2.3m (depending on how quickly it's winding down). Likewise the NHS IT figure looks like it should be a b istead of a m. I would also respectfully suggest that current annual spend on consultants is a bit more than £2.2m. Otherwise very good. Not.
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Monday 14th September 2009 15:12 GMT John Smith 19
10s of millions only
We're in the hole for c£800 billion.
However Building Schools for the Future is a *monster* project. That is probably worth billions. But is it actually refreshing existing infrastructure or bunging Tony & Gordons chums the right to do a load of PPP work lumbering local authorities with schools that will start falling apart after said LA's have finished paying for them.
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Monday 14th September 2009 19:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
How much does it cost.....
to install all the CCTV and have it minitored 24/7 and,,,, having driven down the motorway, how much does it cos these new average speed check cameras. They look pretty substantial pieces of kit to me? Buying, installing and operating these things must be huge and their cost is never recovered. Other countries manage without them.
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Monday 14th September 2009 22:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yeh-but, No-but
You see the IoD is more used to running companies or organisations with usually a precise remit and no (legal) consideration beyond the precise specifics.
On the other hand running a country means one perhaps needs take a larger view - a bigger picture.
Therein lies the rub.
MPs would be daft to think they are the directors of the UK with all of us as employees.
Equally directors would be daft to take largesse beyond scope of an organisations constitution.
Also directors have a duty and responsibility to maximise returns to shareholders whereas MPs seem hell bent on robbing the living daylights out of us.
Perhaps that is where the analogy sort of makes no sense?
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Tuesday 15th September 2009 04:02 GMT Martin Nicholls
Anybody...
That thinks BSF is going nowhere doesn't know what they're talking about. Likewise anybody that thinks that the NHS IT program isn't worthwhile.
The issue here is not that the programs should be cut, it's that the people who put the contracts together should have been long since fired and should never be able to negotiate contracts in any field ever again.
The IT contractors involved in some of these programs start with a budget 10x the size it needs to be, with a overly-long delivery schedual, then take 10 times longer than agreed and keep comming back for more cash and are never punished. We can also bet that if they threaten to go bust they'll be bailed-out too.
These systems need schedual punishments written into the contracts (every day you go over you pay the taxpayer 500k etc) and any extra costs should be made to be bourne by the contractor. This is the only reasonable way to make them think about under-staffing the projects or undercutting other contractors and ladling the real cost on the back-end. It also happens to be what happens in private business (well, the good ones anyways).
Some of the projects were worthless from day one also, they can go right out the window.
Overall the idea is right, just the implimentation is wrong, the NHS can't spend the next 80 years in the stone age passing paper records around, it also makes medical research REALLY hard to find space for and costs a fortune to store 60+ million people's worth of medical notes (with multiple copies of each - GP, local hospital, specialist at another hospital etc). That's a LOT of trees, and they become very disjointed.
"Because my daughters records are still passed around as a wallet full of notes" - Indeed, hence the issue. It's not the *idea* :)
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Tuesday 15th September 2009 09:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Anybody..
Well, done, Government IT is generally very good, and vary secure, you get to hear about it's mistakes because we live in a democracy with a Public Accounts Committee and a National Audit Office, neither of whom are slow with criticism when things go wrong. And long may it be so. But remember you never hear of major commercial companies having IT problems, because it's not in their interests to publicise it. Their stock price would bomb, and the directors couldn't let that happen. Commercial IT is generally cheaper than government IT because companies don't have open procurement.
The IT majors when they bid for work can win as little as 1 in 5 of the projects they bid for. A 40M IT programme can cost each bidder in the short list anything up to 10% of the value of the contract, and they have to recover the costs not only for the bids they win, but also for the ones they loose, and a run of bad luck in government contracts will rapidly put the IT supplier out of business. But the poor old IT suppliers bid costs are nothing compared to the governments, where the bid costs often reach 30% of the overall project budget. An OJEC for say 150m will split roughly to thirds split between bid costs, doing the project and managing the project and paying for change control.
Government department hire procurement teams from an IT supplier that isn't bidding, and generally once they have scoped the requirements and analysed the bids, ***ger off, meaning that the incoming supplier has no contact with the people who wrote the requirements, which are usually wrong, because they are a uniform set that the bidders can cost against, and come up with a set of bids that can accurately be assessed against each other fairly. Virtually every bid I have worked on, and probably every other IT supplier has the same, there is a WTF moment when, you read the requirements, read the enabling legislation and realise that what they are asking for just won't work. When you go back to the government, they say, oh don't worry about it we'll fix it later, without asking the question, how much will it cost, because we usually know.
Most issues in government IT have nothing to do with IT suppliers, nor I have to say the civil servants who need the systems, and everything to do with poor procurement and enabling legislation, neither of which have anything to do with political colour, but a lot to do with political ego. And if you really want to predict a disaster, look at the ego of the person driving the project, it pretty much follows the bigger the ego, the bigger the fiasco. Why, because big egos won't admit they are wrong, and won't change direction when all the evidence presented says this is the wrong thing to do. Anyone who says otherwise is fired.
Refreshingly, I'm currently working on something where the IT vendors are dealing directly with the delivery people during the procurement, the whole thing will be success and you'll never hear about it.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
